Delusions are fun

By BJ

Well, fun to mock anyway.  You do have to feel somewhat sorry for the poor buggers who believe in them.  First up is Michael Graham at the Boston Herald, who asks some very important questions:

Did you see that amazing video obtained by the Los Angeles Times of Sen. Barack Obama toasting a prominent former PLO member at an Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003? The video in which Obama gives Yasser Arafat’s frontman a warm embrace, as Bill Ayers look on?

Um, no, not that I recall.  How about you?

You haven’t seen it? Me, neither. The Los Angeles Times refuses to release it

Those bastards!  How dare they hold on to what apparently is the only extant copy of a clearly damaging videotape instead of providing it to the McCain campaign to turn into negative ads?  I bet they’re behind the inexplicable failure of Scott Johnson to produce the “Whitey” tape, too!  And while we’re at it, where is that tape of Obama sacrificing his grandfather’s goats to Allah when he returned to his birthplace in Kenya?  We demand that the media stop withholding these tapes and show Obama for the Islamofascist, terror-loving, anti-non-American pacifist commie we believe him to be!

He blathers on for a time about how much he loves journalists, even as he acknowledges he isn’t one of them, and points to a couple other conservative opinion columnists who agree with him that the media hasn’t been pushing their storyline vetting Obama as much as they think they should, he brings up the recent Pew study that Republicans are grasping at like drowning men at straws.

At the risk of violating union rules, allow me to do a bit of reporting: A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”

And how much positive coverage did the media give McCain? Fourteen percent.

Note how he cleverly adds the neutral coverage to Obama’s positive coverage while ignoring it with McCain to make the gap seem even larger than it is.  The actual number of positive coverage for Obama was 36%, which, to be fair, is more positive coverage for Obama than McCain, but as the guys at Politico put it when confronted with the very same data,

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Or as Campbell Brown roughly said last night on The Daily Show, “When one side says its raining and the other says it’s sunny, I should be able to open the door and when I see it’s sunny, saying so isn’t bias.”

Of course, back when Obama was getting harsher treatment from the media back when the Jeremiah Wright story blew up, the Republican complaint was that he was getting more coverage than McCain, it’s negativity notwithstanding.  Spin doesn’t have to be consistent, just consistently tilted in your favour.

In that I suppose calling Graham delusional is a bit harsh.  He just has his ideological blinders on, and there is at least the suspicion that he knows it.

No, for sheer delicious delusional thinking, one has to go to the folks over at Hillbuzz, who have this to say about Pennsylvania.

On November 4th, the news networks are going to be spinning and sputtering and playing catchup, but everything we see on the ground in PA is what we saw during the primaries: Obama has no shot of winning the Keystone State.

Here is specifically what we talked about tonight: never in any of our careers have any of us ever seen members of one party switching sides and voting for the other party as we see in this election with Democrats for McCain. There has never been anything like it.  Not even the “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Reagan over Carter, for the simple fact that these “Reagan Democrats” weren’t identified and labeled until AFTER the election.

No, Democrats for McCain are real, are voting for McCain right now, and are open and organized, as well as self-identifying.  Lynn Rothschild might be our poster gal, as one of the most prominent of our ranks, but it’s telling that everyone from Team Hillary that we know now works for McCain.  ALL OF US. Whether they are open about it, like we are, or are working quietly behind the scenes, we can’t think of a single person we worked with on a daily basis for Hillary who is now working on behalf of Obama.

Now, I’m sure some of you naysayers out there may feel inclined to point out that whatever their labeling, the “Reagan Democrats” were actually noted in the polling swinging towards Reagan before the election, and that for all their self-identifying and organization, no such phenomena seems to apparent in the polling this time around.  Well you of little faith, the folks at Hillbuzz have news for you!

Union members repeatedly tell all of us that they are lying to pollsters because the unions have been polling these people — and the unions will threaten people’s jobs if they don’t tow the union line. So, the people lie when asked whom they are supporting. But, the unions can’t control who they vote for on Election Day. And that’s when things are going to get interesting.

See!  Nothing to worry about.  All those polls showing McCain getting his ass handed to him are just because the union members are lying to the union pollsters!  (Since when are the polling companies run by the unions?)  Shut up inner troll!

Now, of course some of you out there might be wondering just why all of these DEMOCRATS, particularly of the unionized variety, are rushing to support a man on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from them and promises to continue the ruinous policies of the last eight years that haven’t been very kind to them, all in direct contradiction to the stated preference of the woman they claim to be the die-hard supporters of.  Well, they provide the answer:

There are two things Hillary Clinton and John McCain have in common that we’re thinking about right now: (1) both love America more than anything and truly want what’s best for the country, and not themselves and (2) Clinton has a framed photo of McCain in her office, while McCain has a similar photo of Clinton in his.

Oh.

Well.

Framed photos of each other.

Well.

How can you argue with framed photos?

Comments

[anderson]

Truly, my favourite period was when the McCain campaign denounced Obama for not traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, when he did, yowled about all the swooning media coverage he got for taking a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was funny.

[Peter G.]

Framed photos? I suppose it depends on how many dart holes each contains. I wonder if those Hillbuzz folks have enough wind in them to whistle their way through Arlington?

[Pug]

I guess Hillary never heard John's joke:

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Her father is Janet Reno".

Yuck. Guess Hillbuzz missed it, too.

[Spidergrackle]

both love America more than anything and truly want what’s best for the country, and not themselves

Must... suppress... urge to vomit...