Bullshit Games from the Political Establishment:
Now, the Rude Pundit would never be confused with a big-time political consultant or "analyst." For one thing, as far as he can remember, he's never sold his soul to Satan (or James Carville - the distinction can be difficult to maintain), and he's not a megalomaniac fucking with the aspirations of Americans and dicking over a major candidate just to prove some personal theory, like Mark Penn, and he hasn't actually cut open small children in order to engorge himself on their gooey viscera, like Karl Rove. Hell, he doesn't even own a suit made by any designer whose name ends in a vowel. And if he had the track record of, say, a Bob Shrum, he'd like to think he'd just be too fuckin' embarrassed to call himself an adviser because, really, "advice" is generally understood to be beneficial to the advisee. You know, if you were an architect whose buildings kept collapsing into rubble, it'd be madness to hire you. But if you're a political consultant? Some stupid motherfucker's gonna pay you and your firm a few million to fuck up their campaigns.

But, still and all, the Rude Pundit thinks that for a couple of bucks, a blotter of acid, and a threesome with Kiran Chetry and Rob Marciano, he could come up with a less bullshit list of ideas for attacking a candidate than did Mark Halperin in Time magazine this week. In laying out how John McCain can attack Barack Obama in the general election, yeah, Halperin does go down the racist dog road, with advice like "Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama" and "Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism." And Left Blogsylvania is right to be pissed by that kind of attack.

Seriously, though, is there anything in that list that doesn't scream "Obvious" as loudly as a drag queen discovering a sequined leotard that Judy Garland wore on eBay? Is there any doubt that one of the primary objectives of the Republican strategy will be to re-nigger Obama? When Halperin says, "Make an issue of Obama’s acknowledged drug use" and that McCain should "Dismiss Obama’s brief national tenure from his own lofty platform of decades in the Senate," he's just advising Republicans to make the case that electing Obama will be the ultimate in affirmative action. And by the time you get to suggestions like "Exploit Michelle Obama’s mistakes and address her controversial remarks with unrestricted censure," well, really, a relatively well-trained chimp could offer the same advice: throw shit and see what sticks.

This is what passes for advice from a major media muckety-muck. There's nothing to see here. It's like a list of bland, average sexual requests from a wife to her husband of ten years: "More oral" and "The clit's a little higher up than where your fingers have been fucking me for the last decade." Totally obvious and expected. Now, if that list says, "Let me put on a double-sided strap-on and slam your prostate until you jizz fireworks," then we're talking something new and different.

Of course, for big fun, there's always CUNT: Citizens United Not Timid, the "group" (defined as "two guys and an e-mail list") that claims it will tell us all "What Is Hillary". The fact that CUNT's founder, Roger "Don't Let Me Near a Phone" Stone, was interviewed as some kind of "expert" by AP's Nedra "Tickle My" Pickler, as well as on MSNBC, means the Rude Pundit oughta be on the BBC tomorrow.

The worst part of CUNT is not that it's sexist and degrading to Hillary Clinton. It's that it's just fuckin' stupid, like a bunch of nine-year old Catholic school boys just discovered there's a word "worse" than "pussy" and have to use it all the time now to talk about the nuns who took their chewing gum away. And then giggle.

Here's the thing about advice like Halperin's and tactics like Stone's: there's a good chance they're not gonna work anymore. And that's a subject we'll return to later.