Queering the Deal....

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Thursday July 31, 2008 · 9:26 AM PDT

2008/07/31 · 09:26

When McCain & Co. realized that Hillary was not going to be the Democrat they would be running against but rather Barack Obama, they found themselves in a bit of a quandary. With reams and reams of oppo research on Hillary and Bill at their finger tips, taking on Hillary was going to be a slamdunk. In fact all they had to do was say "Hillary Clinton" and wavering Republicans distraught over Bush's diasterous presidency would return to the fold in droves.

But Barack was a horse of a different color, figuratively and literally. It wasn't as if the McCainiacs didn't know how to inject racism into the race; Hillary's campaign had given them the blueprint for that tactic. But McCain's braintrust saw both the inherent danger of injecting that into the general election campaign and also that it obviously wasn't exactly a winner for Hillary.

So they decided to keep the racist game plan on the down low. They would be highly selective as to where and when it could played so subtly that the dumb bastards in the media wouldn't notice. But they still needed a tried and true attack that would play to the broader conservative base and at the same time insinuate itself into minds of the overall electorate. Returning to Karl Rove's 2004 playbook that was used against John Kerry they hit paydirt....make him a queer.

Back in the 2004 campaign, Kerry proved to be his own worst enemy through a series of egregious gaffes and missteps. He handed Rove material for a series of attack ads on a silver platter. Rove's guiding principle of down and dirty politics is that too much is never enough. So they decided to throw in just a soupcon of queerness into Kerry's image. From his speaking French to that picture of him in the tight fitting wetsuit he wore while windsurfing it wasn't very hard to do. The "Kerry as queer" wasn't an election winning gambit rather it was just icing on the Rovian cake.

This time around, the Rove whiz kidz whom McCain has taken on board his Straight Talk Express (tailor-made title, eh?) are pushing the "Obama as queer" as a key element of the ad hominem attack campaign against Obama. And as usual they're as subtle as a fart in a spacesuit in doing it. McCain's robo-troops of surrogates have been taking every opportunity to inject that note of "otherness" (read: queerness) whenever they talk about Obama. So we have been treated to comments about how he dresses, what effete foods he eats, his choice of beveridges, his mannerisms, and being labled a dandy, foppish, and the best of all a "fancy lad". The saddest thing about their approach is not how truly pathetic and desperate it is but that it might actually work.

Queer-bashing, the last socially acceptable prejudice.

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