Below The Fold

So McCain came out with this insane attack ad the other day. View it on YouTube here:

The New York Times weighed in about the controversy this morning:

The One. Moses. Epiphany. The Light Will Shine Down on You.

“Barack Obama may be The One. But is he ready to lead?” the narrator asks in the latest video by Senator John McCain’s campaign. It’s only on the Web, but watch it go viral.

The heavens part in this new Web ad, which wraps Mr. Obama’s words around the emerging meme among Republicans (and even Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she talked about the “celestial choirs“) that the presumptive Democratic nominee is the “anointed” one, and mocks him with a parting of the seas by Moses (played by the late Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments”) and that, oh, see-then-it’s gone, Obama seal, that was, uh, derided even before the word “presumptuous” came into vogue to describe him with his world tour.

And, the Obama camp comes down to the ground with this response from Hari Sevugan, one of its spokesmen: “It’s downright sad that on a day when we learned that 51,000 Americans lost their jobs, a candidate for the presidency is spending all of his time and the powerful platform he has on these sorts of juvenile antics. Senator McCain can keep telling everyone how ‘proud’ he is of these political stunts which even his Republican friends and advisors have called ‘childish’, but Barack Obama will continue talking about his plan to jumpstart our economy by giving working families $1,000 of immediate relief.”

Honestly, John McCain has been making some really bizarre (some would even say stupid) political moves recently, like having Bush fundraise for his campaign or replacing his top campaign strategists with Bushies. He should be doing everything in his power to run screaming away from every even mildly controversial Bush policy; it’s already happened on Iraq, with McCain embracing a “time horizon,” a special, totally fictitious word made up specifically for the occasion.

Then he goes and does this.

There is only one possible even mildly rational reason I can see for this: To fire up the decidedly unenthusiastic evangelical base of the Republican Party. Perhaps they feel that painting Obama as a “golden calf” so to speak will arouse the ire of the born again and turn them out to the polls in Bush-like numbers. I’m pretty sure that the media will make sure this blows up in his face hard; the hysteria already started yesterday.

Maybe this is part of some scorched-earth strategy that I don’t get. Or maybe he’s taking advice from mental patients. I dunno.

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by Tommy Brown

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.”

-Niccolo Machiavelli