From “Nugent Goes Nuts” to “Bam Bites Dog”: The Phoney War of 2012

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/04/obama-romney-phoney-war.html

From “Nugent Goes Nuts” to “Bam Bites Dog”: The Phoney War of 2012
Posted by John Cassidy

snip//

The flap over “Bam bites dog” is somewhat different, and, in a way, more consequential. It originated in a column on the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, by Sean Medlock, a blogger who writes under the pseudonym Jim Treacher. In a feat of intrepid reporting, Treacher pulled a passage from Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” about spending time with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, in Indonesia:

With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

From the G.O.P.’s perspective, reminding people of Obama’s cosmopolitan family history serves two purposes. In the immediate sense, it provides a riposte to Romney’s own shaggy-dog story: the infamous twelve-hour journey of his Irish setter, Seamus, on the roof rack of a family vehicle. “Obama would never put a dog on top of a car,” Treacher chortled. “Dries out the meat.”

But there’s also a bigger, less explicit message here, and it’s one that the Republicans and their surrogates have been alluding to for months: Obama isn’t like most Americans—he’s different, foreign, weird, a Europe-loving crypto-socialist, and perhaps even a closet Muslim. Despicable as it is, this whispering campaign is based on some sound political logic. With Obama’s unfavorability ratings already in the mid-forties, the G.O.P.’s best hope of defeating Obama is to drive them up further and make the election a referendum about him.

Nobody said wars, even Phoney Wars, were pretty or casualty-free. On October 14, 1939, a German U-boat quietly entered the British naval base at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, and sank the battleship H.M.S. Royal Oak, killing more than eight hundred sailors. So far this year, none of the Republican or Democratic special ops have inflicted much lasting damage, but keep your eyes open. It was in the spring of 1988 that George W. Bush’s negative research team happened upon the story of how Willie Horton raped a woman and committed an armed robbery after getting out of jail on a weekend furlough, and it was in April, 2004, that the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry began.

The Phoney War probably won’t decide the outcome of the election, but it isn’t wholly without consequence.

[Kalidurga]

1. Everytime Rmoney brings this up lets talk about his favorite dog eating fund raiser.

I forget his name, sure google has it somewhere. But, they the Rmoney's partied with a man who killed a dog for fun and at it. There were four other guys and their friend claims he didn't do it, but if he did it was because he was drunk. Grrrrrr seriously, I wish this was made up.