The Republican Circular Firing Squad of Flying Attack Monkeys Commences!
Stephen Suh:
Cogitamus: Get Some Popcorn And A Comfy Chair - It's Going To Be A Great Show: The increasingly public war between a McCain faction and a Palin faction within the McCain/Palin campaign, let alone within the Republican party at large, should give hope to those of us who have been worrying about the effects the GOP's various voter suppression tactics may have this year. Clearly the top levels of the Republican party - the people who would know these things - are convinced that their efforts to deny Americans their right to vote are not going to be enough to stem the tide....
While we cannot be complacent... we can start to have fun watching Republicans finally turn their vitriol upon each other as they wage a public civil war to determine who will be the face of the GOP after this election.... Speaking about the campaign's devolution into warring factions, a Palin partisan said
Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised.... Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts.
That's USDA-inspected, Grade-A, 100% Angus delusion. It's also proof that while the dolchstosslegende may have come to us from Weimar Germany, it's purest expression is found in contemporary right wing Americans. The McCain faction isn't going down fighting, though, and they have their own stories of being stabbed in the back....
What's especially enjoyable about the Republican Civil War is that it will be fought out in the open. Not only will everyone involved in the McCain campaign viciously fight to preserve their careers at the expense of each other, each of the party's factions will wage all-out war with each other to assign responsibility for their monumental failures this year. McCain and Palin will serve as lightning rods, but the war is over much more than just the two of them.
McCain's national standing is of course destroyed.... Palin's future is much more interesting. The extremist wing of the Republican party - by that I mean those who are extremists compared to the extremism of the party as a whole - will rally around her. She'll have four years to get some coaching and do some studyingg.... However, there is a difference between having the opportunity to be coached and to study, and actually following through on it. The Palin faction has already settled on McCain's supposed unwillingness to let her intrinsic political skill come through - hindering her starburst-ability, as it were - as their explanation for Palin's unfavorable numbers and poor performances. The available evidence suggests that no one believes this more than Palin herself. It will be difficult for Palin's supporters to publicly claim that the election would have turned out differently if she had only been allowed to "be herself," while privately convincing her that she... does need to work on presenting herself as a reasonable human being.... All of this will be wasted money and time. Every dollar and minute spent attacking one another and/or painstakingly remaking Palin's public image is one less dollar, one less minute spent attacking the Constitution and American citizens' ability to live civilized, decent lives. It's about time.
Abe Greenwald of Commentary trying to reduce the Republican share of the vote in 2012 below 20%:
Commentary » Blog Archive » Thoroughly Impressive: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who was excoriated for her concern about the views of a man whose intimates include an anti-American terrorist and an anti-American pastor, is now being excoriated for daring to speak the one simple truth that could rescue liberal values from the tag-team clutches of multiculturalism and Jihad.... Palin-Bachmann 2012?...
John Moody of Fox News--the guy who tells the front men and women how to lie today:
Moment of Truth « FOX Forum « FOXNews.com: It had to happen. Less than two weeks before we vote for a new president, a white woman says a black man attacked her, then scarred her face, and says there was a political motive for it. Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old white volunteer for John McCain’s presidential campaign, says she was mugged at an ATM machine in Pittsburgh (my hometown) by a big black man. She further says he threw her down, then disfigured her by carving the letter “B” into her face with a sharp implement when he saw that she supported McCain, not Barack Obama.
Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination. That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election. If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.
If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting...
Marc Ambinder:
On Clearance, Terrorists, Palling Around And Such - Marc Ambinder: In response to this morning's post about an anti-Palin faction developing with the McCain campaign and among Republicans, Randy Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, e-mails:
Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.
And:
11 Days Out, And The Whispering Begins - Marc Ambinder: Call it a circular firing squad, or internal dissension, or simply the natural evolution of a campaign that is disappointed with how the endgame is playing out. There's a faction within the McCain campaign has begun to whisper about Gov. Sarah Palin to reporters. The faction includes staff members and advisers who consult with staff members....
This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign's message of the day in ways that damage McCain. ("palling around with terrorists" was a line that escaped HQ's vetting... Palin's criticism of the campaign for pulling out of Michigan was greeted by anger internally... Palin's expressed opinion that Rev. Wright is a legitimate issue -- which subtly knocks McCain for not raising it -- was perceived as an attempt to preemptively blame McCain's wobbliness for his loss, which would theoretically enhance Palin's standing with the base.) The complaints extend all the back to Palin's vice presidential vetting. Major disclosures, issue positions and associations did not come up, and the campaign was so overwhelmed with new information early on, it largely abandoned an effort to defend them individually. This is the claim, anyway. For the record, senior adviser Mark Salter, accurately identified everywhere as the aide who is closest to McCain, calls this scenario "bullshit."...
Even those McCain aides who harbor doubts about Palin are quick to say that there are many Palin defenders among the staff, and that there is an almost universal belief that the media has treated her most unfairly. People close to McCain say he has come to view almost every attack on Palin as unfair, although it has not escaped his attention that his campaign has lost control of her public image, and that far too many news cycles have been dominated by Palin. (Salter denies this.)
A Sunday morning quarterback still makes a persuasive argument for picking Palin. In this environment, the Republican candidate could only win if he consolidates his base and wins a majority of persuadable votes.... Though McCain at one point wanted to pick Joe Lieberman, he'd have cut a leg from the stool and replaced it with one that, aside from his party affiliation -- independent Democrat -- has no real appeal among independents anymore.... Republican delegations made it clear that they'd walk out on McCain. We still don't know why McCain decided that the risk wasn't worth taking -- that's for another Draper piece -- but we know that he suddenly shifted back to someone who had impressed him early on, someone who, at the time, could check the two boxes: excite Republicans and convert independents and persuadables.
Whether the vetting was complete or rushed, whether Palin and her advisers were completely forthcoming about her record.... again, wait for the Draper piece. The point here is that the choice was defensible. That almost every piece of information that has come out subsequent to the pick has hurt Palin can be interpreted in several ways: either the media was preordained to crush her spirit from the beginning, or the McCain campaign didn't know about them, or they've been distorted beyond any sense of the rational....
The discovery of that the RNC billed $150,000 for the purchase of clothing and accessories for the Palin family brought these submerged tensions to the surface. People close to Palin and one person who has direct knowledge of the clothing purchases say that they cannot imagine that they added up $150,000 -- there's no way, in other words, that the clothing that was bought for Palin amounted to that total. (Palin hints at the this here.) Palin herself at first did not seem happy at the prospect of being dressed in the new clothes...
And:
CNN:
CNN Political Ticker: A second McCain source tells CNN [Sarah Palin] appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign. “She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser, “she does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”
A Palin associate defended her by saying she is “not good at process questions” and that her comments on Michigan and the robo calls were answers to process questions. But this Palin source acknowledged that she clearly is trying to take more control of her own message, pointing to last week’s impromptu press conference on a Colorado tarmac....
[T]wo sources, one Palin associate and one McCain adviser defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited after she was first picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and missteps could have been a lot worse. They insisted she needed time to get briefed on issues on the national and international stage she was not familiar with and has never dealt with, and on McCain’s long record...
And:
Palin allies report rising campaign tension: Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her.... Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline. "She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions. "I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said....
Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated. "These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric.... "A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign....
[O]ther McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — "green," sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain.... Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by "Saturday Night Live" comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was "water torture," as one internal ally put it. Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object....
"The campaign as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she's completely inexperienced," said a close Palin ally outside the campaign who speaks regularly to the candidate. "Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the person said. "Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts." Palin's loyalists say she's grown particularly disenchanted with... Schmidt and Wallace, and that despite her anti-intellectual rhetoric, her closest ally among her new traveling aides is a policy adviser, former National Security Council official Steve Biegun. She's also said to be close with McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann.... When a McCain aide, speaking anonymously Friday to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, suggested that Palin's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" had "escaped HQ's vetting," it was Scheunemann who fired off an angry response that the speech was "fully vetted" and that to attack Palin for it was "bullshit."...
[RT]he final straw for Palin and her allies was the news that the campaign had reported spending $150,000 on her clothes, turning her, again, into the butt of late-night humor. "She never even set foot in these stores," the senior Republican said, noting Palin hadn't realized the cost when the clothes were brought to her in her Minnesota hotel room. "It's completely out-of-control operatives," said the close ally outside the campaign. "She has no responsibility for that. It's incredibly frustrating for us and for her"...
Kevin Drum:
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Let the Defenestrations Begin: am so looking forward to this. Is this schadenfreude? Or does that require at least a veneer of pretending that you're not really taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others? I'm not sure. But I'm looking forward to it anyway.
And you know the part I'm really looking forward to? Sarah Palin's role in all this. I expect her to rip McCain absolutely to shreds. On background, of course, but it will be no less vicious for that. Her future, such as it is, lies with the wingnut rump of the party, and she knows what her audience wants: John McCain's blood. And lots of it. They never liked him in the first place, and I expect them to be howling for his head on a platter starting at about 8:01 pm EST on November 4th...
