Calling All Wingnuts

This is another of those unfortunate calls. Somebody asked me earlier today about talk radio tips. I mentioned that one of my favorite subjects to bring up when calling the wingnuts is religion and morality. How can a politician speak at Bob Jones University about Christian virtue while his campaign is out smearing a war hero’s record and personal life using the most vile rascist insinuations?

For those of you that do not know what I am talking about, here’s the story…

In the 2000 Republican primaries, McCain shocked Bush in New Hampshire by beating him soundly. That trouncing made the next important primary, South Carolina’s, do-or-die for Karl Rove and Dubya’s campaign…

Karl Rove started a smear campaign… First, he spread the rumor that McCain was mentally unfit for the presidency because of lingering effects from the time he spent being tortured as a POW… He still wakes up at night in a cold sweat with his hands around his wife’s neck, dontchya know?

Bad enough, right.

Get a load of this.

Remember that we are in SOUTH Carolina. Word quickly spread around the state that the little brown girl traveling with McCain was actually an illegitimate love child born to a black prostitute…

In reality, he had adopted a child from Bangladesh.

So yeah, I like to bring that story up whenever the discussion turns to what a “good man” the President is…

So for today’s call, i tried to set up a segue into that conversation. You’ll hear this, but for purposes of this discussion, I have to narrate the call a little.

I mentioned that I was from Cleveland and that Republicans, up and down the ticket, were in trouble with the law and ethics… That I was worried about voting for immoral people. I mean, they’d vote to protect the sanctity of marraige and to restrict abortions, but that they were not very moral.

So does it make sense to vote for immoral men in furtherance of the greater cause.

Prager’s an expert at this type of rhetoric. He set up a false choice - comparing that question to a moral, but incompetent surgeon, vs. an immoral, but extremely competent surgeon.

I tried to say that wasn’t a valid comparison (we are talking about a specific skill here, vs. hiring people to make moral choices for you), but he spoke over me. He then went on to say that he’d rather have a highly corrupt politician that is willing to protect us from terror (funny how it always comes back to that) than a particularly moral politician that is unwilling to take the steps necessary to protects us.

I didn’t get the chance to say, “Ask and you shall receive…” or to tell him that a moral politician would, by definition, protect those he is responsibloe for…

So nice try Dennis… and you probably accomplished your aim with the thousands of Cleveland voters that heard that call… but it took cheap and immoral tactics to get it done. I know it. You know it.

Damn.