I am surprised McCain supporters would challenge Obama's citizenship. There is also a distinct possibility that McCain is ineligible to run for president. The ambiguous meaning of "natural born" citizen could preclude McCain from being eligible. If I was a supporter of either candidate, I would leave this issue alone.

The people who bringing it up aren't genuinely trying to say he is foreign born, they are trying to take advantage of the ignorant and racist vote.

Be that as it may, it is still a foolish proposition. There are legetimate questions about McCain's eligibility. If this is the course the Republicans are going to take, I find it most disheartening. They should accept the fact that the American people no longer trust them and attempt a recovery for subsequent elections. 

I could be wrong but, I have come to suspect that the more personal (and often sleazy) attacks you see that come from outside of the campaign are a sign that the campaigns talking points are simply not working. In my opinion, although many of these attacks may border on racist or sexist themes they are (typically) not meant to be taken in that way and those over-tones are the result of these attacks comming from amatures.

In order to demonstrate my point I will refer to Canadian politics because I think it (currently) demonstrates this ... Since it was initially announced the Liberal's carbon-tax (the Green Shift) was attacked by the Conservative party as being a "Tax on everything!" which is a highly effective talking point; on forums and in blogs you constantly see conservative minded people attacking the Liberals using this as one of their arguments. In contrast the Liberals have not come up with any real argument against the Conservatives and (as a result) almost all arguments from Liberal supporters include odd claims like "The Conservatives are the Nazi party of Canada" or that "Stephan Harper is the puppet of Evengelical Christians" which often offends potential voters. 

And it works.

Yeah. Sometimes. McCain's campaign manager had this to say about the new strategy:

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don't agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter's basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate's natural supporters. [...]

It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate's political weakness.

And so it shall be.

Go obama!

He should know how to do it, he was the victim of one of the worst American smears.

I feel like eating a bagel with all this talk of smears.

So because bush smeared him its ok for him to smear obama? This time its not going to work because there are TONS of smears you can run on McCain and palin now and because americans are scared about the economy and give a shit about the issues. IMO he just opened pandora's box. Expect 527s to pound on the Keating 5, Palin's ties to the alaska secession group, God's will on the Iraq war, etc.

A Republican just sued Palin in Alaska for discussing government information with her private e-mail.


I can't wait for the next debate. Sadly Tuesday is my school until 9:30 pm night. I gotta watch some bullshit avant-garde films that are too hard to find on my own, so I can't skip it. I'll have to just get drunk on my own and mutter "maverick" to myself a couple times in the theater.