One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

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Never underestimate the ability of the Right to stoke its victim complex. Headline at Pajamas Media:

Obama Supporter Assaults Female McCain Volunteer in New York

As the media fumes over nonexistent hate at Palin speeches, it ignores leftists who go berserk on city streets.

Oleg Atbashian writes,

While the Democrat-leaning media continues to scare undecided voters with bedtime stories about some mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen, here is a real district attorney’s complaint documenting an unprovoked assault by an enraged Democrat against a McCain volunteer in midtown Manhattan: “Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”

I make no excuses for the assailant, and I sincerely hope he is punished to the full extent of the law.

BTW, here are some of the “mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen.”

The distinction between angry McCain supporters and the one assailant in New York, beside numbers, is in the word incite. The Palin-McCain campaign is inciting rage. It’s stoking rage as hard as it can stoke. Veep candidate Palin insinuated that entire parts of America are anti-American.

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

The Obama-Biden campaign is not inciting rage. There are enraged Obama supporters, but the Obama campaign is not demonizing McCain as un-American or a traitor or someone otherwise outside the mainstream of American politics.

See, righties, that’s why one of these things is not like the other.

For example:

This woman is not some random whackjob off the streets like the New York assailant. She’s an elected whackjob in the U.S. Congress who is speaking on behalf of the McCain Administration. She’s ready to reconstitute the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Rep. Bachmann, btw, has had some of her own “guilt by association” problems. Maybe she’s anti-American too. Click here to donate to the Dem running against her.

I’m sure if one looked hard enough one could equally crazy Obama supporters. But in Congress? or in a paid position with the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party? Not so likely.

Yesterday I linked to a blog post that accused “the Left” of totalitarianism because the news media had the nerve to publish unflattering stories about Joe the Plumber. Apparently someone reminded the blogger of the Right’s rabid hyena attacks on the parents of SCHIP poster child Graeme Frost. Not the same thing, the blogger argues. The Frosts were acting as spokespersons for the Democratic Party. All Joe did was ask a question.

Well, no. Nobody gave a bleep about Joe until John McCain made him the centerpiece of his election campaign. It was McCain, not the question, that made Joe a news item. If Joe decides the media attention has been detrimental, I hope he sues McCain and the GOP out of its socks. And I think a case could be made that using a private citizen like that without the citizen’s permission ought to be criminal.

However, it appears the Joe the Plumber ruse is coming back to bite McCain. After explaining why Joe the Plumber is not, in fact, Joe, or a plumber, Joe Queenan writes (emphasis added),

There is nothing wrong with being as phony as a three-dollar bill. It is, in fact, a rich American tradition. But there is something unnerving about a supposedly sophisticated political organisation that trumpets the dodgy virtues of grassroots phonies when millions of authentic working-class people could have handled the mythological chores perfectly well. All across America, there are plumbers named Joe and Jim and Jack and Mike and Dan and Dave and Ed and Fred whom the McCain campaign could have recruited to be their mascot.

In my own family, there was Joe the truck driver, Joe the postman, Bill the typewriter salesman, and Johnny the jack-of-all trades. Right here in my own neighborhood, I can point to Tony the deliveryman, Vinny the postman, Charley the cook, Tony the token collector. Any one of these guys qualifies as a real-life working class hero. Instead of them, McCain’s people went out and corralled themselves a 24-carat phony. What’s more, they found themselves a phony who doesn’t even pay his taxes on time. This strongly suggests that nobody in the McCain camp has ever met a working-class person before; they think anybody with a shaved head and a hoody must be “authentic”.

Bingo.

12 thoughts on “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other”

  1. I’ve seen this story reposted on numerous “conservative” blogs, but what I haven’t seen put forth is any proof that this man is either a Democrat or an Obama supporter.

    None of the “first hand” exchange being reported between the assailant and the victim give any indication of the attacker’s political leanings — except for the fact that he became enraged at the sight of some McCain signs. This alone, however, does not make the attacker a de facto Obama supporter or even a Democrat. The upset man might support Obama, but this information was not reported anywhere. It could be that the man simply hates McCain or political demonstrations in general.

    Of course the rabid Right has trumpeted “Obama Supporter Attacks McCain Supporter” headlines as a way to stoke the fires of division.I guess it sounds better than “Man Attacks Woman with Signpole” or the truth.

    Yes, a deranged man allegedly attacked a “little old lady” who is supporting McCain, but this does not categorically inform the man’s political ties whatsoever, except in the dreams of kooks.

  2. Maxwell — good point, especially in New York. We do have our share of, um, psychiatrically challenged people wandering the streets here.

  3. There’s so much wrong with that Pajamas story, I hardly know where to begin.

    First, anyone who calls the well-documented (and filmed) racial hatred at Palin rallies “nonexistent,” is a disgusting liar.

    Second, this story sounds very much like one I heard earlier this week, involving a man and woman, both in their mid-70s, who came to blows over party differences. It got started with one grabbing the candidate sign of the other, and breaking the stick, before they started hitting each other. That sounds an awful lot like Pajamas’ apocryphal tale.

    Third, where’s the documentation? Does CBS have video? No? OK then. I should just believe it, because the same people who still support the worst president ever say so. Ummmm… no.

  4. Well, at least Americans are no longer apathetic when it comes to elections. They’re STILL yelling “commies?” I notice it’s no longer “go back to Russia” like it was in the ’70-’80’s. Canada? Kenya?

    It really is true that people overcome their unhappiness either by behaving as aggressively as possible or by clinging to a fixed moral (or political) code. No denying that Americans are pissed. Now if that anger can be directed toward who deserve it, things may just get better.

  5. Not only does the McCain campaign not know how to recognize an honest working class hero, but they hadn’t even thought about trying until someone told them about Joe launching his “zinger” at Obama on the rope line. To them, it was a story just too attractive to resist, that a ‘regular guy’ was confronting Obama. They probably thought they’d been handed a golden opportunity in the midst of their thrashing around looking for a strategy.

    It never occurred to them that “Joe the not-actually-a-plumber” wasn’t earnestly trying to get a real answer from Obama, just trying to take a verbal poke at the guy to express his basic anti-government ‘thing’, and he using any pretext handy to do it – in this case the tax proposal.

    Did anyone from the campaign even call Joe before the debate? Did they even get one of the interns who knows how to use that Google thing to look him up?

    They aren’t just losing because their policy positions suck. They are also losing because they are too stupid and/or lazy to run a campaign, much less a goverment.

  7. Felicity, I was recently told to move to Russia by a security guard at my local courthouse after I grumled about an elderly woman forced to walk through a metal detector several times and having the fork in my lunch box conficated because it could be used as a weapon. He looked right me and said in a thick spanish accent, “if you don’t like it, move to Russia.”
    We’re surrounded by assholes and the country is CTD……..

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