By Brad Reed, AlterNet
Posted November 8, 2008
... At first, the Ashley Todd saga seemed like the perfect way to shift the election momentum back to McCain. Here, after all, was a young white woman who had been robbed and assaulted by a crazed black Obama supporter who went so far as to mutilate her face when he learned she was working for McCain. Matt Drudge blared Todd's "shock" story at the top of his home page and showed a picture of the poor young conservative with a black eye and a backward "B" carved into her face. Some of the dimmer right-wing bloggers such as Red State's Erick Erickson jumped all over the story and proclaimed that the media were to blame for Todd's alleged assault because they had "cooked up tales about Republican verbal violence" at McCain rallies. Obama also took his share of the blame because he had urged his supporters to get in opponents' faces and aggressively defend their positions and beliefs ...
In the 1970s, Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a fringe lefty outfit that become notorious for unsuccessfully using terrorism to achieve its political ends. By the 1990s, Ayers had become a professor at the University of Chicago and a powerful player in the Chicago political scene. Obama first met Ayers back when then-Illinois State Sen. Alice Palmer invited him to a gathering at Ayers' house. In the years that followed, Obama and Ayers would sporadically serve together on nonprofit charity and education products and ... that's pretty much it ...
In a campaign filled with goofy stunts, McCain's announcement that he was "suspending" his campaign in order to help craft a Wall Street bailout bill was perhaps the goofiest. After Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Congress that they needed $700 billion to buy up the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were threatening to deep-six the economy, McCain dramatically announced that he was temporarily halting his presidential campaign to deal with the crisis. The idea behind the stunt was to show that McCain was a mavericky bipartisan consensus builder who would bring both parties together to pass mavericky bipartisan legislation that would save the asses of extremely rich people ...
Palin's problems began when she stopped reading from a script and started talking with reporters. Palin had trouble answering hard-hitting questions such as what newspapers and magazines she read ("All of them!") and whether she could name a Supreme Court case that she had ever disagreed with. Even more worrisome was her claim that living in close proximity to Russia gave her invaluable foreign policy experience because "as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there." And who could forget Palin's assertion that the government's $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan would "help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy." Also, the bailout was proof that "we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing" and that "reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americas" ...
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106184/the_desperate_right's_five_biggest_flops_of_the_2008_election/?page=entire
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