The Dow's plunged to 8,500 (wasn't it at 13,000 earlier this year?), the credit markets are freezing up, and Krauthammer wants to talk about Ayers and Rezko and Wright.
My basic take on Krauthammer has been that, unlike many of the WaPo op-ed writers, he's really a pretty smart guy; it's just that he's bought into a wildly different set of assumptions about reality. If you're writing from a world where the sky is green, the water orange, and the trees are purple, you're going to approach things in a different way than if you're a resident of this reality.
But it's hard to envision the alternate universe where Ayers and Rezko and Wright tell us a great deal about Obama, but Mccain's associations (e.g. the flock of lobbyists running his campaign) and Palin's (e.g. crazy anti-witch preacher) tells us nothing about them. Even in good times, this would be sheer political hackery.
But it's not good times. We're in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis unprecedented in my 50+ years. We can let Krauthammer decide, as the hurricane rages, that Obama would hang the pictures all wrong on the living room walls. Too bad the hurricane won't blow Chuckles right off of the nation's op-ed pages.
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I keep hoping that an Obama win will cause the retirement of a number of reliable righty flacks.
Why the Wheelchair General is still squatting on valuable WaPo editorial turf while their brand tanks is one of those mysteries I cannot fathom. His shameful and dishonest performances on FauxNews alone should be reason enough to fire him.
There is a great Jesse Kornbluth column in Huffington Post
aimed at Joe Leiberman:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/a-yom-kippur-letter-to-jo_b_133262.html
"I often think about Kristallnacht, that terrible night in Germany when it became unmistakably clear what the Nazis intended for the Jews. Almost a hundred Jews murdered, tens of thousands deported, windows smashed, businesses seized -- and hundreds of synagogues burned. Quite the "November surprise," if you will. But even after this horrific orgy of violence in 1938, there were many German Jews who didn't get it, who thought they were safe, who thought this was where it ended.
Now we know better. We say "Never again." But look around you, gentlemen. History does repeat, and in this case, with spooky echoes of Germany's darkest decade. A bad economy. A search for someone who can be dehumanized and blamed. The cries for "justice". And then....?
How would we recognize Kristallnacht if it happened today?
My fear: It's on the horizon, and coming closer every day.
Today "The Other" is Barack Obama. At a McCain-Palin rally the other day, there was a cry from a yahoo in the crowd: "Off with his head!" John McCain and Sarah Palin have not condemned that man. Indeed, they promise to ratchet up their "questions" about Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. At this point, it seems, they'd find nothing upsetting if the audiences at their rallies showed up with torches and pitchforks."
Krauthammer should have a rabbi with some cojones..I've heard Krauthammer cussed out his rabbi for calling for decent treatment for the Palestinians...
His column, and indeed, the whole right wing noise machine, will, as they determine McCain is going to lose, do everything they can to delegitimize Obama. (I remember the "don't blame me I voted for Bush" stickers.) It's all they got.
And it will get worse; I expect Charlie K and his ilk to do what they can to hurt the next president.
I'm a lot less worried about this prospect than you are, Mr. Bill. They're rapidly running out of 'others' who the majority will abide the intolerance of. 2004 was probably the last big hurrah for conservatives running against teh gay, for instance.
And once Obama is President, what's going to happen? He'll be up there on teevee anytime he wants to be, looking quite normal to most people.
And this ain't the 1990s, when the other side could savage Clinton over talk radio and through the network of wingnut foundations, and meet no real pushback. Nowadays, talk radio is for geezers, and we've leapfrogged them to the Internet, which they suck at because it's not a top-down medium.
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