“Mad about The One. The US media have been captivated by Obama, at the expense of their curiosity and scepticism.”
This is the title of an article by Harold Evans in The Guardian on November 1, 2008. He resorts to the bias he decries in his one-sided column. I have reproduced it below in its entirety, along with my annotations {…} . Phrases that I comment upon are in boldface.
It's fitting that the cynicism "vote early and vote often" is commonly attributed to Chicago's Democratic boss, mayor Richard Daley, who famously voted the graveyards in 1960 to help put John Kennedy in the White House. In this 2008 race, it's the American media that have voted very early and often. They long ago elected the star graduate of Chicago's Democratic machine, Barack Obama. {Obama is a hardly a “graduate“ of the machine. What about Harvard Law, Columbia, etc.?}
I am not talking of editorials in newspapers, though Obama has the preponderance of the endorsements over John McCain. Obama certainly deserves the credit for recruiting impressive advisers and running a more efficient campaign machine than any one in the US's political history.
What's troubling to anyone old-fashioned enough to care about standards in journalism is the news coverage in mainstream media. Forget the old notions of objectivity, fairness, thoroughness, and so on. The nastiest rumours on both sides haven't been published, but the coverage has been slavishly on the side of "the one". {“Slavish”? Evans’s description.}
John McCain has been running a character assassination campaign against Barack Obama. He's been playing a con game to try to shift around Bill Ayers and Barack Obama to try to somehow associate Obama with Ayer's militant anti-war activities during the Vietnam War (which happened when Obama was a kid), just because Obama, along with countless respectable citizens, both Democrats and Republicans, served on the board of directors of a non-profit organization that Ayers, now a respected Professor of Education, happened also to be on.
John McCain has been playing a shell and pea game trying to make people associate Obama with certain bad apples in an organization called ACORN who were trying to make false voter registrations. The truth is that ACORN is a bipartisan get-out-the-vote organization and they were the ones who blew the whistle on their these bad apples as soon as they found out they were doing it. What that means is that all they want to do is just register as many people to vote as they can, but they leave the decisions up to those people. The problem is that some of the people they hired to get the vote out (and, as you can imagine they hire thousands of people), want to cheat to make money, so they'd fill out phony voter registration forms. This goes totally against what ACORN is trying to do. This link explains it:
http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=17855
It's true that the Obama supports ACORN, because, as a good, honest, upstanding citizen who supports Democracy, he wants everyone who's eligible to vote to be registered and vote, regarldess of whether they vote for him, for McCain, for Ralph Nader, or for someone else. That's Democracy at it's finest. He and ACORN are both blameless in this regretable act by a few bad apples.
But, McCain didn't stop his smear games there. He's authorized robocalls and mailings to people all over America saying nasty, hateful things about Barack Obama. These robocalls and mailings try to make him out to be a terrorist or claim that he's a Muslim. The truth is that Obama's a Christian. The truth is that Barack Obama's an upstanding citizen who cares about protecting America from terrorists.
What you can do.
Contact eveyone you know and tell them this. Stop dishonest character assassination attempts this elections season. Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers (you may even be able to do this online, just go to google.com, search for your newspaper's name and you may be surprised to find that they're online and you can send a letter to the editor over the internet right now). Do whatever you can to get the word out about this dishonesty from the McCain camp.
One reason I'm voting for Obama is because I think he's simply more honest than McCain. McCain just seems like an oily con artist to me.
If you'd like to donate to my grassroots campaign for Barack Obama, click the link below:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/ivanrichmond
Hi, everyone!
Just a short notice: I am a German citizen (as I have said quite often) and I have tried several times to donate to the Barack Obama campaign. It is not possible to do that with a German credit card! It just isn't possible.
So, everyone who states that there were donations from foreign credit cards - not true!
Much less would I believe that a card from an "Adolf Hitler" was accepted. This last claim is final proof to me that the accusations are completely baseless!
That's all for now
Bye
Want to know what Carl 'Saruman' Rove of Many Colors, Bush's former campaign advisor and propaganda sorceror is advising McCain to do? Read his article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122471862591760559.html
We've got to know what the opposition is planning. Sounds like Rove's advice is more smears and more reframing of Obama's tax plan from a conservative perspective.
Fortunately, our language framing wizard, George 'Gandalf' Lakoff the White has an outline for strategy for the Obama campaign. It's a bit old (just before the elections), but still looks good. View it here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/01-0
If you'd like to donate to my grassroots campaign for Obama, click on the link below. This is a real close race and we need all the help we can get. You can make a difference. Even $5 will help.
“Confessions of a Phone Solicitor” is the title of Gail Collins’ column in today’s New York Times. Here are some excerpts.
[A] telemarketer named Ted Zoromski quit his job this week over John McCain’s message. Zoromski was prepared to interrupt people during their dinner hours to encourage them to vote Republican. But when he got the script saying “you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans,” he packed it in.“Even though I was paid to do it, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Zoromski told WKOW-TV.
This story … struck me because I once worked as a telemarketer, and it is an occupation so soul-numbing that it is hard to imagine that anything could make it worse. I woke up people on the overnight shift who had just managed to fall asleep for the first time in six days. Sometimes, when there was clearly nobody at home, I would just let the phone ring and ring in order to avoid having to call anybody else. …
So truly, if you can come up with something that would send a telemarketer over the edge, you have really overachieved on the offensiveness front.
She then goes on to give a vivid description of all the vile mud-slinging being done by McCain, Palin, et al. My issue is with the first part of the article. Here is the comment I posted.
Once again Collins has missed the mark. Telemarketers make nuisance calls. That's what advertising is all about. It is not unethical for them to do their work. No one told Collins to let the phone keep ringing when she was a phone solicitor. Ted Zoromski quit his job because he was asked to deliver a dishonest and hateful message. Now that Collins is a Times columnist, after having been a Times editor, she feels free to trash those in her earlier line of work. This is true elitism.
Collins plays fast and loose with the facts and often fails to reason properly. This is a lot more harmful than disturbing people at dinner. The Times has a Doctor Jekyll-Mr. Hyde combo (Dowd-Collins). Maureen's brilliance is matched by Gail's dalliance. Too bad more of your readers don't catch on to this. Perhaps it is because Collins’ column causes so much ringing in their ears.
Getting back to the main point of her article, here is the front page and an inside page of a recent RNC mailer.
I found a great article about the Progressive view on taxation and how best to frame that view to the public:
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/progressive-taxation-some-hidden-truths.html
We may want to use these ideas in counteracting McCain's smears, like calling Obama's tax plan "socialist" or "welfare".
McCain is now saying that Obama's tax policy is "Socialist". Of course, we know that's poppy cock, but the problem is it's a frame and should not be underestimated. To understand how frame's work, read UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff's article here:
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/howtorespond.html
The idea behind describing Obama's tax policy this way, I think, is that conservatives place strong importance on discpline. If someone succeeds, they think it's because they were disciplined. Disciplined, and therefore successful people, they think, deserve to be rewarded. They think of people who are struggling to make it as lazy and undisciplined. To describe Obama's tax plan as McCain does makes it sound like a free gift to the undisciplined. We need to fight this frame by reframing it. Here are my suggestions.
Charles Keating, Morris Udall, Scoop Jackson, Barry Goldwater, Billy Mitchell, Emiliano Zapata and Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe, probably, there are more. These are the ones that I remember from his speeches and his second book. It is a pretty contrived public relations list. He says he admires people that he thinks are like what he would like for us to believe he is like. Morris Udall and Teddy Roosevelt were both men who loved the out doors and made real efforts to preserve them for the future. What had Senator McCain done on that score? Nothing. Udall also worked hard to improve the standard of living, health and education of the American Indians. What has Senator McCain done on that score? Nothing, but he has arranged for the American Indians to become the new center for the gambling business in the United States. Scoop Jackson, Barry Goldwater and Billy Mitchell are champions of the air force and extremely committed to war, no matter where, no matter when. And Barry Goldwater wanted to nuke everyone preemptively. So Senator McCain could have been telling the truth here. He liked Charles Keating well enough to take a lot of money from him, but that is not really heroic, especially when the money was stolen from the people who deposited it in his bank. Emiliano Zapata is a really weird choice on this list because he was a champion of the native people's right to own land. Senator McCain is a champion of the native people's right to own casinos, but that is not really the same thing. However, the main point of this for me is to show that Senator McCain doesn't say that his hero list includes George Bush and Karl Rove. And Senator McCain has been demonstrating that he likes these guys best.
Senator McCain is running an extremely negative, fear mongering campaign, just like George Bush and Karl Rove. This sort of talk tends to distort the polling information because people are ashamed to say that they believe what is obviously a smear. So we have to keep working to both counter the negative stuff, and get people out to vote. McCain supporters are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states and whipping up hysteria over ACORN. These are standards of the Bush Rove campaign to keep people from voting. Here in Texas they are circulating misleading flyers about the voting process. Their aim is to suppress voter turnout, so we have to keep working to help people go vote. McCain smears are targeted to dominate the real news for a week or two. The press keeps repeating the smear and then adds some small disclaimer at the end to say that it is not true. So we have to keep working to talk directly to the people to counteract the false information and get the people to go vote. We know from the history of this McCain-Bush campaigning style that the popular vote shifts radically in the final days of the race. People get disgusted with the negativity and decide they don't want anything to do with politics. Some people get angry. Some people get scared. So we have to keep working to spread the positive messages we have been delivering the whole time, and get the people to go vote. If we do all this, keep working and get the people to go vote, we can get the kind of landslide that will give us a huge mandate. But, we have to keep on working. It is not long, compared to how long we have been out here already, and it is easier now that we can see that the Obama positive idea actually does counter the McCain-Bush negativity. Yes We Can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdNgMKPV9xQ
I have augmented my web site regarding GOP smear tactics, voter fraud and caging with a related youtube report. The name of the report is SmearWatch.
The place to go on smearwatch is the playlist:
<A href="http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=SmearWatch">SmearWatch Playlists.</A>
Have you heard the latest smear? Now, McCain's criticizing us for having raised "too much" money. See here:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081019/ap_on_el_pr/mccainCan you believe that guy? I mean, in the past few elections, it's always been the Republicans who have raised way more money. I seem to recall that Bush raised $300,000 in 2000, 3 times what Gore raised, all because he had some of the wealthiest voters imaginable. Now, we have this grassroots effort to raise money. If you're like me you've been donating $20, maybe as little as $5 at a time, when you can afford it, and it's not been easy in this economy. But, I for one keep donating because I really care about these elections. I'm really tired of seeing Bush tear down this country, rip up our Constitution and attempt rape on Lady Liberty. I'm livid! I want a president who will respect our Constitutionand actually do what's best for the people for once. What does McCain think we should do, just not donate? I'm sure he'd like that.
But, what's going on here is framing at it's nastiest. Most Americans vote based on character, rather than on policies. McCain's frame is that Obama is dishonest. We need to reframe this. For more on framing, see framing guru and UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff's article here:
We're really close and we can win this. But, we have to fight the smears. Palin has been running around to swing states talking about this whole ACORN smear. The fact of the matter is that ACORN itself is a legitimate voter registration organization and it's only certain members of it who are under investigation for false voter registration. This isn't actually voter fraud. In order to commit voter fraud, one has to actually cast a vote more than once. Of course Obama and our campaign support voter registration. So, naturally this Obama campaign gave money to ACORN, thinking that money would go to legitimate voter registration. But, Obama and our campaign are totally unconnected to the falsified voter registration of ACORN. The whole thing's a dirty smear and we have to fight it.
In order to do this, I think we need to come up with some sort of short, to the pont phrase that makes these facts clear. I'm not sure how to do that, but I'm not a speach writer. If I think of something, I'll let you all know. %-)
McCain keeps hammering away at all their poppy cock about Ayers. Ayers did some fairly nasty stuff, it's true, but Obama's only connection to him is that he served on the same board with him, as well as with plenty of pillars of the community: Republicans, Democrats, executives and university heads. It's guilt by association and we have to stand up to the smear.
Again, I don't know what words we'd use exactly, but as I've said, I'm not an ad author.
McCain, Palin and their foul surrogates are on TV spouting lies and distortions that are beyond the pale. I just heard on Hard Ball some far right congressperson, Bockman, from Minnesota spout the most nasty rhetoric I've heard about Obama and Democrats, in the same vein as Palin and McCain do in their stump speeches.
It's time that Obama'a campaign start to put out the names of the people that McCain associated with over the past 100 years. The junkets McCain has been on, not only the Keating Five, Palin's corrupt behavior in Alaska and her total lack of ethics. There's a lot more about both of these people that has not been looked at and needs to be aired!
Exclusive use of the high road got Democrats like Kerry no where. There has to be some return fire to counter the Ultra Negative Blitz that Karl Rove and his proteges have launched.
This whole smear campaign is geared to sew doubt in people's minds, so that once in the voting booth they will once again settle for the devil they know. The Republicans and McCain are out there trying, and in some cases succeeding, in deceiving middle and working class Americans in to thinking that the Republican Party somehow represents their concerns.
The Republicans and McCain/Palin will say and do anything so that they and their neocon friends can continue to rape this country and turn it into some notion they have of what this country should be, a place ruled by the few.
But Ayers' views on education, though certainly reform-oriented and left-of-center, are not considered anywhere near as radical as his Vietnam-era views on war. And even if they were, there was a long list of individuals involved with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge whose positions provided them far more authority over its direction than Ayers' advisory role gave him.
Let's look at a few, starting with the funder. Annenberg was a lifelong Republican and former ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Richard Nixon. His widow, Leonore, has endorsed McCain. Kurtz might just as plausibly have accused Obama and the foundation of "translating Annenberg's conservatism into practice."
Among the other board members who served with Obama were: Stanley Ikenberry, former president of the University of Illinois; Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University and assistant secretary of labor in the Nixon administration; Scott Smith, then publisher of the Chicago Tribune; venture capitalist Edward Bottum; John McCarter, president of the Field Museum; Patricia Albjerg Graham, former dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Journalism, and a host of other mainstream folks.
In short, this was a mainstream foundation funded by a mainstream, Republican business leader and led by an overwhelmingly mainstream, civic-minded group of individuals. Ayers' involvement in its inception and on an advisory committee do not make it radical – nor does the funding of programs involving the United Nations and African-American studies.
Every day I watch and compare the differences between the campaigns of my candidate of choice, Barack Obama and John McCain. Every day I find the McCain campaign more distasteful, negative, ugly and full of lies and misrepresentations than it was on the day before. With all that is going on in America and in the world, and knowing that our country needs to pull together in order to solve some of the challenges we are facing, I find it hard to believe that anyone would vote for the McCain/Palin ticket. There are stark differences between the two campaigns regarding honesty, substance, organization and long-term plans for the future of our country. The McCain/Palin ticket is asking us to believe that they would bring change to America out of one side of their mouths, while they play the same old dirty games republicans use each election out of the other side.With all that we are facing as a country, does McCain really believe that ANYONE will want to work with or for him or his people to solve the challenges in America after he has created and deepened such ugly divisions between the American people by using such negative and divisive language and tactics? Do McCain and Palin really believe that they will gain the cooperation of the democrats after slinging so much mud and cow patties? Will they recognize the vile and totally split country they will have created with their negative crap if they succeed in scaring Americans into voting for them over voting for real hope and change?Imagine our country under a McCain/Palin presidency. The McCain/Palin ticket is uninspiring, presents no hope for the future and offers Americans nothing towards working together to form a more perfect union. If they win this election, we will be so torn apart, disillusioned, mistrustful of our elected leaders and determined not to cooperate, that our country will continue to loose its values and importance in the eyes of the people at home and in the world. I pray that the people of America will reject the McCain/Palin politics of fear and smear, and will choose hope in order to build real change for America’s future with fresh ideas and determination coming from the bottom up! This is our time – it is our moment to make America a better country!
Hi Everyone!
Check out this absolutely hilarious "smear campaign" video spoof about John McCain.
It has a very different tone but it speaks its own truth. Please send it especially to women who are undecided, but feel free to send to anyone. PASS IT ON!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go4ENRKY6fw
David Scheim wrote an article in the Washington Post (August 28) exploring the origins of Obama's first name and making use of linguisitic, historical, and archeological evidence. it should prove of interest to anyone trying to combat the smears that often start by impugning his name. It also shows that Barack comes from Baruch (meaning "blessed" in Hebrew) rather than Barak (which means lightning in the same language). its url is:http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/08/barack_thy_name_is_biblical.htmlor:http://tinyurl.com/5q2zm5It's well researched, with enough facts about Obama's name to impress scholars, scpetics, and those of many faiths and pilitical persuasions!
Baruch traslated, of course, means "Benedict." Barack, in becoming president would be following in the footsteps of other presdents with biblical names: Zachary Taylor, Benjamin Harrison, and Abrahan Lincoln.
Prior to last night's debates in which Barack Obama was the clear victor, Cindy told reporters earlier that day that Obama has "waged the dirtiest campaign in American history". This coming at the onset of McCain's new strategy to stop talking about the issues, and focus on Swift Boat-style tactics to defame Obama and try to make him seem like some kind of un-American radical. Cindy is giving a response founded on emotion, not logic. She's upset that Obama is pulling away in the polls and on the Electoral map. Obama is widely considered the "nice guy" that wants to be above the bipartisan smear tactics and fear-mongering that Republicans seem to own a patent on. But, he has learned from the Kerry campaign that we should strike back when they strike at us. Calling Obama "dirty" is a stretch, but calling it the "dirtiest" in "American history" is an illogical form of desperation, and just more smearing from the McCains to say the least.
Welcome to The Twilight Zone folks. Where all forms of reality & logic has been suspended in this political parrallel universe, brought to you by the Republican Party.
Obama's "The Subject" ad (in response to John McCain's smear tactics)
