Reframing Things In McCainspeak

I too read MoDo's column this morning and nearly vomited. She's worse than an ideologue: she's a permanent Devil's advocate, always playing the antagonist even when it doesn't make any sense to do so. She spent 2008 first lambasting Hillary, then mocking Obama's aura of celebrity, then shredding Palin, and finally taking potshots at Geithner. She's an entertaining writer, but she's essentially soulless.

The more key point that Chait and Yglesias make, however, is one that, sadly, hasn't really permeated the MSM barricade before: the McCain (and the general Republican) M.O. used in attacking Democratic policies. It's simple: make them sound stupid and childlike. McCain's favorite trick during the campaign was to boil an earmark down into its preschool-level etymology, and then laugh it off as typical clown games in Washington. "Three million to study bear DNA... I don't know if that's a criminal issue or a paternity issue..." is one he must have said no less than 750 times. But it was just another level of the GOP's war on science, plain and simple. Palin pulled it with fruit fly research, Jindal just fell into the same sinkhole with the volcanic monitoring idiocy. Essentially every night, Hannity and Glenn Beck go to war on silly earmarks that contain words like "preventing" or "studying."

Now, stupidity certainly isn't a game only played by Republicans, as progressive blowhard Sirota inadvertently displays fairly often. (Key line: "80% of capital gains taxes are paid by those making, on average, more than $200,000 a year (ie. the top 5% of income earners...ie. the super-rich.") But there's a difference between Nancy Pelosi blaming Republicans for TARP legislation that she helped pass and George W. Bush going all out against stem cell research. The former is just lame political posturing. The latter is political posturing with potentially really bad consequences.

With that said, let's reframe Obama's legislative accomplishments thus far in McCain's language. From Jay Newton-Small, we have:

1. Second half of TARP
2. SCHIP
3. Ledbetter Fair Pay
4. Stimulus
5. Budget
6. Housing Bill

Sent into McCain's ears and out of his mouth, we get:

1. "Your tax dollars going to pay janitors in big city Park Avenue skyscrapers."
2. "$30 billion for something called 'dying children?'"
3. "Congress just decided to give away your money to an ugly whore named Lilly."
4. "Ladies and gentlemen, I have no words. You want to know how bad this is? Joseph Stalin's great grandson just called me and said 'ROFL.'"
5. "For someone that promised hope and change, this is a fuckload of money!!!!"
6. "Eighty billion of your hard earned treasure going to fund what the Democratic-controlled Congress calls 'foreclosure prevention.' How can a foreclose prevent?"