Tuesday, July 29, 2008

GOP parody a flat tire


Daniel Nasaw writes the deadline:USA news blog for the Guardian , and ran an item regarding an ad produced by the Republican National Committee intended as a parody of Obama's recent speech in Berlin. The point, one would guess, is what would an Obama election ad look like if he were running in Germany rather than in the United States. We are meant to shiver with the slight yet obvious Nazi implications and indulge our Europhobia yet again. The fear card is a hand these guys cannot stop playing. The ad here.

A weak parody that lands far afield any target the would-be propagandists might have had in mind. One wonders how the fact that Obama is liked by Germans should bedistrubing to American voters. The opposite is more likely.Disgust with the war policies and subsequent disasters of the Bush Administration would cause a good many voters to be heartened with the prospect that there's a major Presidential candidate Europeans actually like,respect and are eager to cooperate with. Those of us in the States are sick of going it alone and being the bane of Civilization's existence; we're more than aware that the cowboy antics of our current group of election-hijacking thugs have made matters domestic and international a miserable mess. What's clear is that the RNC is desperate to undermine the success of the Obama trip; McCain and his surrogates dared him to go to Irag and Afghanistan with the expectation that Barack Obama's alleged naivete and inexperience would cause to make mistakes, commit gaffs and otherwise look unprepared and ill suited for the job he's running for. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the Republican Noise Machine is reduced to seeming like a nitpicking, complaining, embarrassed and whiny bunch of playground bullies who are trying to recover from a humiliating and deserved public spanking.

This would be a suitable footnote for a dictionary of famous phrases, specifically "hoist by one's petard", IE,

"To be caught in one’s own trap: “The swindler cheated himself out of most of his money, and his victims were satisfied to see him hoist by his own petard.” A “petard” was an explosive device used in medieval warfare. To be hoisted, or lifted, by a petard literally means to be blown up"

---(from Bartleby.com).

In a less literary vein, this is the equivalent of an inept robber getting shot with his own gun. That's gotta hurt.

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