The phony, non-existent “African Press International” responsible for the Michelle Obama interview hoax is at it again, claiming that it is going to air the tape of the fictitious interview (despite failing on repeated promises to do so earlier) and also claims that Obama’s campaign has offered the ersatz press agency an imaginary bribe in order not to air the non-existent tape of its never-happened interview, fittingly on FauxNews.

Needless to say, the wingnuts at Macsmind are impressed and all atwitter with anticipation:

This won’t seem to die, but here we go. Remember that African news site that stated Michelle Obama called them to cry “racism” in reference to the detractors of Obama? Well they say now the agreement with Fox News has been reached and the tapes will play any day now.

I would just counsel these poor saps to remember the immortal words of George. W. Bush:

Immediately afterwords, Larry Johnson is going to air the “whitey” video on O’Reilly and Confederate Yankee is going to produce a copy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Foreign Islamic Birth on Hannity & Colmes.

FauxNews reports that “Joe the Plumber” is branching out from hypothetical acquisitions of theoretical companies and into political theory for the theoretically impaired:

Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber,” on Tuesday twice agreed with a claim from an audience member at a John McCain rally that “a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for the death to Israel.”

Wurzelbacher was hitting the campaign trail on behalf of McCain for the first time, joining former Rep. Rob Portman on a GOP bus tour through Ohio.

“I’m honestly scared for America,” Wurzelbacher said.

He later said Obama would end the democracy that the U.S. military had defended during wars.

“I love America. I hope it remains a democracy, not a socialist society. … If you look at spreading the wealth, that’s honestly right out of Karl Marx’s mouth,” Wurzelbacher said.
“No one can debate that. That’s not my opinion. That’s fact.”

The plumber guy agrees with some idiot in a crowd somewhere one a stupid proposition about which neither are well informed. And how is that newsworthy?

Joe’s qualifications to discourse on Political Theory are no doubt even weaker than his right to contract plumbing construction without a license or his ability buy a business without any money.

Plus, he’s too fucking stupid to distinguish opinion from fact.

Joe the Plumber is waaaaaay past his 15-minutes-of-fame sell by date.

Per Ben Smith at Politico:

Florida Governor Charlie Crist, to the shock and dismay of Florida Republicans, just moved to extend early voting hours, a move likely to widen the Democrats’ lead under a program on which the Obama campaign has intensely focused.

“He just blew Florida for John McCain,” one plugged in Florida Republican just told me.

Needless to say, McCain cannot win without Florida, one of several critical (for him) states where he is trailing and where early voting appears to favor Obama.

From The Buzz, a blog of the Tampa Bay Times:

Waits of up to four hours have been reported in precincts in heavily-Democratic Broward County.

Stuff like that will take the maverickicity right out of ya.

Shorter DoughyP from today’s LA Times spoor:

Assuming he’s elected, Barack Obama’s presidency will be historically insignificant and devoid of innovation and social change, just like Franklin Roosevelt’s.

Verbatim DoughyP:

Save for his skin color, Obama doesn’t represent anything novel.

You have to hand it to Jonah, it takes some kind of talent to craft a sentence that resonates stupidity so deeply.

At this point, the message from the GOP and its lackwit wingnut minions like Jonah is hopelessly confused. McCain, Palin and its media worms are trying to paint Obama as a wild-eyed revolutionary class warrior cross between Hughie Newton and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and here the Pantload is saying he’s really no different from FDR. Which probably sounds pretty damn good to most Americans after 8 years of George W. Bush.

Per Talking Points Memo:

John McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established — and even told reporters outright that the “B” carved into the victim’s cheek stood for “Barack,” according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the “B” stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

This is a new low in scumbaggery, for an already scummy McCain campaign. When did making up bullshit and trying to blame a fabricated racial attack on your political opponent become Mavericky?

And just yesterday, McCain accused Obama of saying anything to get elected.

That’s the headline, folks.

Per the Associated Press: McCain says Obama will ’say anything’ to win

Republican John McCain, taking a cross-state bus tour aimed at keeping vote-rich Florida from swinging to the Democrats, on Thursday accused rival Barack Obama of saying “anything to get elected.”

You mean like making crazy statements about ACORN stealing the vote for the GOP and McCain palling around with terrorists? Like claiming his clueless Vice President Candidate who doesn’t know what the Vice President does or what constitutes the Bush Doctrine is ready to be President? Like suspending his campaign to save the world and claiming credit for passing a finance bill that doesn’t pass, only to later claim he killed it? Like telling Dave Letterman he has to cancel his appearance to return immediately to Washington, then going to an interview with Katie Couric — which Letterman can see via internal feed?

What next? Maybe McCain can accuse Obama of being a rich elitist with 8 mansions and a beer heiress wife? Or complain about how Obama grimaces and grunts while he’s speaking during a debate? Or rudely refers to his opponent as “that one!”

Or maybe McCain will call just Obama short, old, and ill-tempered.

Anything can happen once a candidate crosses the rubicon of batshit-crazy.

Conservative Blogger Jon Swift ties all the best of Right Blogostan in a neat little bundle.

The Washington Post reports intelligence sources are citing terrorist-affiliated websites that indicate that Al Qaeda is rooting for John McCain, because they view him as likely to continue Bush’s policies which have proved so costly and damaging US prestige and interests:

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market’s downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America’s economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

~~~

“The idea in the jihadist forums is that McCain would be a faithful ’son of Bush’ — someone they see as a jingoist and a war hawk,” Raisman said. “They think that, to succeed in a war of attrition, they need a leader in Washington like McCain.”

And Spencer Ackerman reports this has McCain’s people freaked out and they responded with their typical lack of candor or character by attacking the messenger:

I just got off a conference call held by the McCain campaign to deny that Al Qaeda, contrary to reports in the AP and the Washington Post, is rooting for their man. To describe the call as panicked would be an understatement.

Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director who publicly connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks without any evidence in 2001, and senior foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann spent more time whining about the Washington Post’s standards of fairness than on the logic of why Al Qaeda might prefer Sen. John McCain. “An amazing piece of journalism, and I use journalism in quotation marks,” Scheunemann said, going on to list barely approving quotes of Sen. Barack Obama from Hamas, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, which he said he wasn’t going “to characterize.” Woolsey, for his part, peered into the mind of what he called “one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog” and determined that he was “clearly trying to damage John McCain” and “not speaking from his heart.”

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any discussion about why Al Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq and a bellicose U.S. all across the Muslim world to radicalize Muslims to its terrorist cause and drain the U.S. of its financial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bankruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason why, as the CIA eventually concluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 by releasing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic continuity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Scheunemann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”

Repeatedly, our own intelligence reports have indicated that our presence in Iraq has proved beneficial to al Qaeda recruiting, fund-raising, and raised its profile in the Islamic world. Why wouldn’t they prefer McCain, the candidate who vows to remain in Iraq forever?

As polling shows McCain falling farther behind and his campaign’s message floating farther and farther off any track which resonates with the American Public, Wingnuttia is awash in cognitive dissonance. Wizbang:

The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition. I wrote earlier about the fact that of the major polling groups handling national and state polls, all of them are based deep in pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative territories.

~~~

What I think is happening, is this - the polls’ headquarters were based deep in liberal territory, where the assumption was that Obama’s candidacy would actually create a groundswell of pro-democrat voters unseen in the country since 1932. That McCain is more experienced with the key issues than Obama was ignored, that the historical significance of the debates shows that the effects appear several weeks later was also ignored. That the economy could be as reasonably blamed on the democrat-controlled Congress as on the republican President was never considered. That character would be a salient factor in the decisions of voters was rejected out of hand.

The polls are wrong. Make your own mind up, because your vote will matter.

From the Wikipedia entry for When Prophecy Fails, the classic study of emerging cognitive dissonance in a UFO cult where its belief system grew stronger even as massive evidence of the failure of the cult’s belief system and all it’s predictions accumulated.

Festinger stated that five conditions must be met, if someone is to become more fervent in a belief even after its disconfirmation:

* A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.

* The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.

* The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.

* Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.

* The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.

* The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

The Batshit Crazy Right has had 8 years to indulge in the various fantasies of Republican neoconservatism: a) ushering in pro-Western democracy in Iraq via military intervention, b) defeating al Qaeda decisively by expanding military conflicts in the Middle East, c) making America’s economy prosper beyond our wildest dreams through deregulation coupled with tax breaks for top income levels, d) the unbridled triumph of American militarism and neo-colonialism abroad, and e) the decisive capture of power by a permanent majority of radical social conservatives in American national politics.

None of the above things have occurred or are even remotely likely to occur under neoconservative policies, and yet the BCR cannot admit the failure of its ideology, even amid a Tsunami — or a category 5 hurricane — of disconfirmatory evidence.

Even as the McCain campaign degenerates into fit of off-message name-calling, robo-calls and $150,000 Nieman Marcus/Saks bills for its putative middle-class hockey mom of a Vice Presidential candidate, the mounting evidence of epic failure — the growing disaster looming in polls — has to be somehow refuted by the flimsiest of arguments: if the large polling companies, even those largely funded by Republicans, would only move their offices from New York to Wasilla, the polls would all show the impending McCain victory and reaffirm the efficacy of patently disastrous Neoconservative policies.