Right Wing Nut House

I am always trying to be helpful to our friends on the other side, giving them the benefit of my considerable experience and wisdom in matters both personal and political. For instance (and this is a freebee); never eat lobster at a restaurant where the beasts are in a tank swimming around and you get to pick your own dinner. My reasoning is elementary; thinking about the poor creature you’ve just selected for the culinary guillotine being lowered into a boiling pot of water, screaming silent screams of agony while its meat slowly cooks in its own fat will take away your appetite pronto.

Unless you casually mention those facts to your date in which case it will be her appetite that goes south and you get to eat the lobster anyway. Or watch her facial expressions - especially after you tell her the part about the crustacean cooking in its own fat - for some rippingly amusing efforts on her part to keep from upchucking the escargot.

And yes, it’s true. I ripped the legs off grasshoppers when I was a kid.

But as you can see, I grew up to be a normal, sadistic conservative, always taking pleasure in the discomfiture and discombobulation of my political foes. I hope I will be forgiven for this minor flaw in my character in my next life (where I devoutly hope I don’t come back as a lobster) because in the here and now, I revel in it.

Of late, I have been blessed in being allowed to positively wallow in lefty angst and hysteria. The Obama campaign and their defenders have finally reached the point of no return in their efforts to smear John McCain - no return to sanity or decency.

I still think McCain is going to get slaughtered. But there is little doubt it won’t be because of any superior tactics or moral high ground claimed by the Obama campaign. The Chicago politician has proved to the world that he can get down in the gutter and root around with the worst of them. And he’s doing it with the active encouragement of the liberal netroots who are so terrified of Obama being “swiftboated” by the right that they have determined that flinging feces at McCain like little monkeys in the zoo will prove to the voter their candidate’s ability to go beyond partisanship and enter the shining new world of the political assassin and hatchet man.

To wit, there are a couple of nutroot attacks that either prove a feeling of desperation because their candidate has been screwing up royally the last month or they are misdirecting their anger at Obama for being such a doltish wimp. Either way, the conspiracy theories about McCain’s appearance at Saddleback and the provenance of the “cross in the sand” story are revealing of a hysterical bunch of smear merchants who saw their man get clobbered at a forum on religion and are scared that once again, the Great Prize is slipping through their fingers as they seem to have latched on to another candidate with feet of clay.

First up is the pitiful, head shaking meme that moved through the leftosphere yesterday like an outbreak of dysentery at Woodstock VII; the notion that McCain “cheated” at the Saddleback forum because he was not in the “Cone of Silence” that moderator Rick Warren set up to so that McCain wouldn’t hear the questions he was asking Obama.

I have only seen brief clips of Saddleback because frankly, the idea of watching two men who want to be president of the United States try to outdo each other in proving how holy they are is not exactly my cup of tea. Both men’s position on abortion bother me. Both have decided to pander to Christians; McCain can’t win without them and Obama can blow McCain out if he wins enough of them. And those who base their vote on the difference between the two in such matters are one reason politics in America is so screwed up.

No matter. Moderator Rick Warren’s “Cone of Silence” remark was evidently misplaced. John McCain had better things to do than sit in a green room for an hour awaiting his turn to walk into the Coliseum and face the lions. He was, in fact, in his car on his way to the venue when Obama was on stage. This has elicited a communal “Aha!” from the left who believe McCain did so well because he was able to crib answers to Warren’s questions since he failed the Maxwell Smart test.

Apparently, some lefties actually believed there was a real “Cone of Silence” just like on Maxwell Smart. Others stated flat out that McCain “cheated:”

I must admit that listening to McCain answer Pastor Rick Warren’s questions so quickly and glibly Saturday night at the Saddleback Faith Forum made me wonder if he somehow knew them in advance. He was so confident, so concise. But I put the thought aside as unduly paranoid — that is until Sunday afternoon. I was routinely checking my favorite election website fivethirtyeight.com and the webmaster, Nate Silver, referred to a piece in Daily Kos about the whereabouts of John McCain for the first thirty minutes of Senator Obama’s interview with Rick Warren. Was he in a cone of silence? Apparently not.

Daily Kos blogger Furiousxxgeorge wrote at 3:27 pm Pacific time the following blog:

Pastor Warren, the host of last night’s forum was just on CNN. In an interview with Rick Sanchez the pastor admitted McCain was not even at the Church for the first half hour of the event. This admission comes as a surprise to those of us who watched the event and were told many times that McCain was at the Church and in isolation.CNN says they talked to McCain’s camp and they said no one in his camp was listening. The honor system, are you kidding me?I think it is pretty clear at this point McCain did indeed know the questions in advance.

Well I don’t know about you but that cinches it for me. A Daily Kos blogger named Furiousxxgeorge says McCain cheated and who am I to disagree with such a reliable, level headed, non partisan source?

Byron York shoots back. Unfortunately for the Kossak, he has some facts at his disposal:

A few points. First of all, it appears that some commentators believe there was an actual “Get Smart”-style “cone of silence” at Saddleback. There wasn’t. Pastor Rick Warren was making a little joke when he used that phrase. But he was assuring the crowd that McCain was not hearing any of the questioning of Barack Obama.

Next, McCain, like Obama, knew the first two questions that would be asked of him — the “three wisest people” question and the “greatest moral failure” questions. Both men knew exactly what was coming at the start of the appearance. This morning I talked to A. Larry Ross, who is the media representative for the Saddleback Church, and he told me that Warren “gave both candidates the first two questions because he didn’t want them to be nervous…so they would be at ease.” Ross says that in separate phone calls with the McCain and Obama, Warren also went through the four general categories of questions and said things like, “I’ll probably ask you a question on this, or on that,” but gave no specific wording.

In addition, according to Ross, Obama knew a third specific question that Warren would ask — the one about a “president’s emergency plan for adoption.” “[Warren] felt that since that was basically asking for a commitment, he felt that it was fair to tell them in advance that he was going to ask them that,” Ross told me. So Warren told Obama, and planned to tell McCain when McCain arrived at Saddleback, but wasn’t able to because of other distractions. So according to what Ross told me, Obama actually knew one more question in advance than did McCain.

Are you effing kidding me? Obama had some of the questions in advance and still stunk up the joint? I didn’t have to see the program to know that. It’s what the Obama camp told Andrea Mitchell of NBC:

MS. ANDREA MITCHELL: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, there was the crisp, immediate, forceful response by John McCain, clearly in a comfort zone because he was with his base. And Barack Obama, taking a risk in going there but seeing an opportunity. And a much more nuanced approach. The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because that — what they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.

Obama’s “nuance” was apparently to duck, bob, and weave like a middleweight while Warren tried to pin him down on issues like abortion. Claiming it was “above his paygrade” may have been clever sounding but failed utterly to convince anyone that he is the only sitting senator who voted against giving life saving treatment to babies born alive as the result of an abortion.

With a position like that, I’d duck the question too.

Be that as it may, it is apparent that Obama had not only questions in advance but an excellent idea of what the range of topics would be as well. It is equally apparent that Obama either didn’t prepare adequately enough or in order not to sound like the devil incarnate, he tried to mask his true beliefs with a lot of doubletalk. End result; a clear McCain win by all accounts (even, as I show above, the Obama campaign itself).

But this is just unacceptable in some lefty quarters. And the Obama campaign, whining as it has constantly throughout the primaries about this, that, or the other thing, is showing a decided lack of sportsmanship about the whole thing; you lost, Barry - deal with it.

But they can’t. And Edmund Wright at American Thinker puts things in a perspective that even a lefty should be able to understand:

Monday, he emerged as the political “child-man,” launching a tirade in New Mexico that was almost surreal in it’s tone. The performance made Harry Reid’s whiny “oil is making us sick” speech seem almost Rambo-esque. It is simply amazing when you think about it, but the Democrat nominee is trying to win the right to face the Russians, the Iranians, Bin Laden and a plethora of complicated and tough domestic issues by claiming the Republicans are too “mean” to be elected.

This is presidential politics by way of the elementary school classroom. If 12 year olds could vote, Obama would certainly win in a landslide. Anyone who thinks a clever campaign line is “the Republicans…they’re so mean…what are we going to do” is hardly up to the task that he is asking for.

I can see it now. “Putin…he’s so mean…what are we going to do? Abudinajhad…he’s so mean…what are we going to do….four dollar gas….it’s so mean….what are we going to do.” These are not issues that you can make go away with flowery speeches and loose editing by the NBC family of networks.

That could very well be why the new Quinnipiac Poll shows Americans prefer McCain to Obama by an astonishing 2-1 margin when it comes to dealing with our newfound Russia problem.

You would think that one embarrassing line of attack that proved to be utterly ridiculous would be enough for one day. But there must be something in the air or perhaps there was a full moon because, not content to show themselves incredibly sore losers, the left decided to attack McCain by the simple, inelegant smear of calling into question a key moment in his spiritual life.

I blogged briefly about this yesterday but that was before one of McCain’s fellow POW’s confirmed that yes indeed, John McCain told him a story about a North Vietnamese guard drawing a cross in the sand on Christmas day.

What makes this attack so riotously dumb is that there is absolutely no way to “prove” a negative - that short of a letter emerging where McCain is yucking it up about putting one over on the yokels regarding his cross in the sand story, there is no way any lefty critic is going to prove McCain did not experience the event as he tells it.

Now the left is fond of saying the right is “smearing” Obama when we call into question his meager record, his lack of experience, his associations with radicals whose views are so antithetical to the mainstream that questioning him about his past becomes just another part of the vetting process for president.

But, for instructional purposes, I would say to my lefty brethren, “This is the very definition of a smear: A charge made with no proof that attacks the candidate’s character and person.”

John Kerry was smeared by the Swift Boat vets who, in the end, had only their eyewitness testimony as proof that Kerry is a weasel (we knew that already but backing up their charges is something entirely different). This is proof of a sort that can be questioned. When you’re talking about charging someone who served his country with faking his wounds, I go by the old Carl Sagan adage about UFO’s: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The vets had 30 year old memories and a bone to pick with Lickspittle Kerry for his own smearing of the American military in Viet Nam. I leave it to the reader but in my mind, it may have raised questions about Kerry but it hardly constituted proof.

The left doesn’t even have this excuse in the case of McCain’s cross in the sand. There are no eyewitnesses with a different story they can point to. There is no documentation they can print. There is no proof of any sort whatsoever that what John McCain says about the incident isn’t the God’s honest truth.

What they have is the thinnest reed of coincidence involving a similar story related by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But that hasn’t stopped our liberal friends. One example brought to you by the “In your face and like it” smear comes to us via TT Boy:

Now I don’t know if this really happened to John McCain or not. He may think it happened, I mean, c’mon he’s ninety-one and he sometimes mixes up his experiences from the Vietnam war with something that happened to him during the Spanish-American war. It happens.

The important thing is that the rubes parishioners at Rick Warren’s House of Tithing church cooed appreciatively because these are the kinds of stories that reinforce their faith much like sightings of the Virgin Mary in the gravy pan at Hometown Buffet. Take it from me ( a Catholic regardless of the restraining order), true faith is a powerful and mysterious thing that is as hard to find as, say, the clitoris. I mean there is a lot of groping and fumbling around and false starts until finally a voice whispers in your ear, “Yeah. That’s it…or at least close enough for government work”.

Stay classy, guy.

Incredibly, Andy Sullivan was roused to a fever pitch and actually posted numerous times (starting with this one) about “questions” regarding the story. Excitable Andy - always willing to accuse others of smearing Obama - can’t quite bring himself to make the psychic connection here and see himself denigrating and smearing a war hero. Two former POW’s have now come out and said McCain told them the story back when and Andy still beats the dead horse, hoping he can rouse the beast through sheer repetitive blows.

Perhaps Andy should take the baseball bat to his own noggin and knock some sense into himself. He is the laughingstock of the right at the moment and is only digging a deeper hole every time he mentions the incident. Perhaps Allah has the right slant to silence the left about this ridiculous charge:

Bob Owens googled around to see if he could corroborate McCain’s story and stumbled upon a similar incident involving former POW (and GOP senator) Jeremiah Denton. The dumbest part of all of this — aside from the fact that the nutroots is pushing it into the mainstream media, where it’ll redound to McCain’s advantage and dirty St. Barack’s hands by association — is that if he was going to make up stories to prove his devotion while in prison, surely he could do better than this. I remember some lefty (at TNR, I think) noting quite rightly after McCain’s Christmas ad came out that the specifics of it really are more a testament to his captor’s faith and humanity than to McCain’s. If Maverick wanted to dazzle believers with evidence of his own grace under pressure, he’s got material to work with. But then, this is a guy whose son was stationed in Iraq and yet who almost never mentions that fact on the trail even though it gives him moral cover in his push for a sustained troop presence. Anyway, rock on, nutroots.

To have this gift of two memes showing the left in all its glorious nuttiness and hysterical hand wringing about absolutely nothing puts a smile on this cowboy’s face. John McCain is more than likely to be thrashed by Obama come November. But as long as we have liberals to kick around and make sport of their fundamentally warped view of reality, I will not despair.