Nothing But Blue Skies

Let's get the context out of the way first:

If you're redneck enough to like professional wrestling (of which I have been a fan on and off for thirty-one years), you're familiar with World Wrestling Entertainment's flagship cable TV program, Monday Night Raw.  WW[E] has been involved in trendy Hollywoodesque "rock the vote" type community servicing since at least the 2000 cycle, when Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson spoke at both major parties' nominating conventions.  Last cycle the three remaining Democrats (de jure and de facto) in the presidential race made cameos on Raw in order to make their pitches to young voters.  All three of them came across as really, REALLY out of place, but I guess Ba-ROCK didn't ACT as out of place as The Empress and Darth Queeg did.  For my druthers, I could have done without the segment where their impersonators did that bit in the ring - unless, that is, the candidates themselves had been willing to work it, which would have set ratings records.  Bring in a Bush impersonator to do a run in and clobber all three of them with chairshots and it would have set rating records.

I only bring any of that up because of the probably-inevitable but still amazingly hypocritical line of attack the DSCC is using against Connecticut Republican senatorial nominee and former WW[E] CEO Linda McMahon:

On Tuesday, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Eric Schultz called WWE programming “violent, sexually explicit material that glorified the exploitation of women, and the mentally disabled.” Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan accused the GOP of nominating “a candidate who kicks men in the crotch, thinks of scenes of necrophilia as ‘entertainment,’ and runs an operation where women are forced to bark like dogs,” referring to sketches that appeared in WWE programming during McMahon’s tenure as CEO.

Y'know, I could have sworn Vince finished lampooning the Parents Television Council with the "Right To Censor" angle clear back in 2001.  I could also have sworn that the PTC was a center-right, socially conservative group whose anti-WW[E] rhetoric is what Eric Schultz's boilerplate criticism of the recepticle of Vince's "genetic jackhammer" most resembles.  And I definitely could swear that the conventional wisdom in this cycle is that social/moral issues are taking a back seat to the economy in the top of voters' minds.

Well, Linda McMahon helped turn World Wrestling Entertainment, like it or not, into a multi-billion dollar entertainment empire.  "Hanoi Dick" Blumenthal, by contrast, has never spent a day in the private sector and his best claim to fame is putting private sector companies out of business.  Which may help explain why she's pulled to within single digits of The Liar.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as Chuck Todd does to dub Mrs. McMahon "the Democrats' worst nightmare," if only because she's only one of THREE capable and accomplished CEOs of multibillion dollar companies making, shall we say, "hardcore" runs at lofty elective office (Meg Whitman, late of EBay, for California governor and Carly Fiorina, late of Hewlett-Packard, against Babsy Boxer).  But she is bottomlessly self-funded, she has a track record of private sector business success, she's never been a major on-air character in WW[E] programming, and, well, she's a McMahon.  And the McMahons are known for doing whatever it takes to win.  Just ask WCW.

If Blumenthal keeps up his string of fantasist gaffes, and all his campaign and allies can come up with is silly L. Brent Bozell impressions, The Wave just might start further east than anybody ever dreamed.

***Besides, at least the "violent, sexually explicit material glorifying the exploitation of women is, you know, material, fiction, dramatization....not real.  Unlike Florida Donk senatorial hopeful Jeff Greene and his version of the S.S. Monkey Business:

[J]ust as Greene was gaining momentum against U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek in a race for the Democratic nomination, Tyson went and told Sports Illustrated about that summer when he spent so much time with Greene. Tyson, who was best man at Greene’s 2007 wedding, makes that period of his life sound more like the Love Boat:

“I was in St. Tropez, in the South of France. In Ibiza, Spain. I was in Monte Carlo. I was in the Ukraine, Russia, all those places, for three months. From Russia I went to Lisbon, Portgual, from Portugal I went to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I met this drug dealer, right? And he sees that I like getting high, and he wants to be my buddy, right? This guy goes and gets me a big rock of cocaine. So pretty soon I got a party going on. I got everything: I got these rugby players. I got these naked girls, I got all these … everything’s going on in the room. Plus I also had this girl with me that I picked up in Romania. But then [the dealer he met in Amsterdam] saw how much of a mess I was. He came in and kicked everybody out of my room! All the nude people, all the people having sex. He said, ‘I feel so bad I ever gave him that stuff,’ ” Tyson said in an interviewed published in July…

No, Greene said, he didn’t go to Amsterdam with Tyson, who was only on board about a month. No, he didn’t see any drug-taking or take any drugs himself.

“I don’t know what Mike Tyson did when I was not with him, but Summerwind has a zero tolerance for drugs or any illegal activity,” Greene told the St. Petersburg Times, noting that he has paid for drug rehab for Tyson.

You can already see the wee little problem with this cobalt bombshell.  When your killer dirt on The Man Who Got Rich Off The Democrat Financial Logic Bomb is single sourced by The Man Who Eats Ears, you'd need to upgrade your foundation several levels up to sand to even be within shouting distance of building your case on solid ground.

The reason why the Tyson story is so sentational - aside from "all the nude people running around" - is because the conventional wisdom has embraced the notion that the only way Marco Rubio can hold off "Sorry Charlie" Crist is if the SO-appropriately named Kendrick Meek is the third man in this triple-threat match, since he would presumeably hold on to the bulk of the black vote, denying Crist enough Donk defectors to go with indies and RINOs to go over the top.  I bet you didn't know the GOP hired Iron Mike as the twenty-first century version of Chuck Colson, didja?

Well, there's also a wee little problem with this conventional wisdom, as there seems to be with ALL conventional wisdoms - it's crap and always was:

Republican Marco Rubio has nudged ahead of independent Charlie Crist in Florida’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race in a hypothetical three-way matchup with Democrat Kendrick Meek, according to a Mason-Dixon poll released Saturday.

Rubio led Crist in the poll 38% to 33%, with 18% for Meek and 11% undecided. …

Crist’s fate depends on whether he attracts large numbers of Democratic voters in the general election, the poll found. The results indicate that Meek is gaining support among Democrats, which could draw votes away from Crist and give Rubio an advantage.

Rasmussen has had Rubio ahead in a three-way with Crist and Meek all along.  Now just two days ago both he and Mason-Dixon are showing Rubio and Crist in a statistical tie with Jeff Greene as the token Donk, and as J-Ger points out,

If Jeff Greene wins the primary, he’ll probably immediately go to work tearing down Crist in an expensive ad campaign. It’s his lone shot: drive down Crist’s numbers and try to win head-to-head against Rubio.

And Captain Summerwind currently....trails Representative Meek in the Donk primary by fourteen points.

Did we mention that Senator-in-waiting Rubio hasn't run a TV ad in three months?

The old British expression "too clever by half" comes to mind as at least a decent place-holder for the honor of Sorry Charlie's political epitaph.