Needlenose

The barrage of bullshit that has been the Republican-corporate-psychotic wingnut counterattack against the prospect of healthcare reform has many historical echoes, from the swift-boating of John Kerry to the “partisan spit” the same villains drowned Bill Clinton’s healthcare proposal with in 1994.

But maybe there are some lessons that can be drawn from the most recent parallel — the avalanche of lies, feigned outrages, and scurrilous rumors that John McCain’s campaign unleashed on Obama in last fall’s presidential race.

You remember that, right?  “Lipstick on a pig”?  TV ads insinuating that Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergarten students?  In the end, it didn’t work, and Obama overcame an early September deficit in the polls to win the election.

Of course, some factors that helped then aren’t around now.  It’s unlikely that a major, unexpected event like the sudden economic collapse of late September will boost Obama’s political prospects now.  And he doesn’t have the advantage of running as an either-or choice against the increasingly implausible duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin.  (Whatever you may think of Obama’s first seven months, can you imagine having those two in the White House?)

But really, the main element that helped Obama survive last fall’s mudslinging was his ability to dominate the airwaves, thanks to his campaign’s enormous fundraising advantage.  Then, as now, you had random, stray fact-checks in the media that debunked the lies.  But the crucial multiplier was Team Obama’s ability to leverage those into hard-hitting ads that defined McCain far more vividly than the GOP’s smears did Obama… even as the Democratic campaign was protecting its own image with an equally heavy onslaught of positive commercials.

Is the famed “bully pulpit” of the Presidency going to be enough to replace that?  Obama’s campaign advertising enabled him to play good cop and bad cop at the same time.  We know he can still do the former; Obama has an almost limitless ability to present himself as reasonable and above the fray.  But how is his soft-spoken calm going to drown out the noise machine — and define and discredit them the way his campaign was able to do last fall?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.