As general election begins, Republicans fall into their usual banality.

Progressives and Conservatives (Regressives) handle political campaigns differently. Progressives tend to go after their opponents on the issues. For instance, on this little blog, and on many much larger blogs and progressive news websites, the focus right now is on McCain’s shameful record of neglecting veterans, as well as his propensity to change his positions on issues to sell out to the Adult Daycare wing of his party. Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t tend to attack their opponents on the issues. (Because they unconsciously know they’re on the wrong side of most of them?) Conservatives, rather, tend to focus on irrelevant paper tigers (John Edwards got an expensive hahr-cut! Barack Hoo-ssssssssssssaaaaaaaaaaaaaain Obama don’t wahr no flag pin won’t pledge uh-lee-junce wanna talk to turrurists!) without delving deeper. They also tend to find their opponents’ most pronounced strengths and assail them on their merits when they happen to slip or do something that requires an understanding of nuance to interpret: Al Gore was branded a “liar,” based on one misquoted statement and one overblown misstatement. John Kerry was branded a “traitor” for having the decency, after his time in service, to speak out against a morally reprehensible war. And now it’s time to bash Obama!

One of the Adult Daycare talking points against Obama is that he’s unpatriotic because he doesn’t wear a flag pin. This falls into both Republican smear categories. On the surface, many politicians wear flag pins. However, many of those same politicians (Republicans) fail Americans in their votes, and in their policies. For instance, in the 109th Congress, fully FIFTY Republican senators received a grade of “D” or “F” from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). Flag-pin-wearers, most. However, this also goes to their second method, for Obama is truly patriotic, as evidenced by his actions in public service. He calls Americans to a cause greater than their selfish lives, he walks his talk of supporting our veterans and our current troops, he understands that, as President, his reponsibility would be to ALL Americans, and also, to the world’s citizens, as their lives are affected by American policies, whether we’re healing the world or bombing it.

Doubt me? Any fool can research any politician’s record on government websites. Even Republican fools.

The new Adult Daycare meme on Obama is that he’s “gaffe-prone.” Now, before you spit whatever you’re drinking on your computer screen at the irony of a Republican in the year 2008 having the idiot balls to go after an opponent for the way he speaks, we should consider their arguments on their merits. Then we will tear them down and laugh at the Republican losers. We’ll take as our baseline the fact, obvious to all who do NOT require inner tubes on land, that Obama is probably the best political orator this country has seen in decades. Okay? 1. Consider. 2. Deconstruct. 3. Point. 4. Laugh. That’s the plan, let’s go. Michelle Malkin (surprise) writes:

…[W]hat about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:

* Last May, he claimed that Kansas tornadoes killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.

Okay, oops! At least he cared.

*Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”

One would have to be an utter fool to think that Obama actually doesn’t know how many states there are. He was tired. Oops.

*Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, South Dakota audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you Sioux City…I said it wrong. I’ve been in Iowa for too long. I’m sorry.”

OH NO!!! He confused the names of two very similarly-named cities in states he was in at similar times! How can we ever trust this man?? On a related note, Malkin has a newer column where she continues this tired meme by reporting that Obama accidentally called Sunrise, Florida “Sunshine.” Again, OH NO!

*Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?

It’s good to see that Michelle Malkin can slip intellectual dishonesty into any column. Anyone who understands American social and geographical culture understands that, in many ways, the Ohio river separating Illinois and Kentucky might as well be the Rio fucking Grande, and that the typical Southerner living in Kentucky has much more in common with the typical Southerner living in Arkansas than he does with the typical Illinoisan, especially considering the fact that a plurality of Illinois’s population lives in the Northeast corner of the state, in the Chicago metro area. It’s also worth noting that Kentucky comes a mere few miles from touching Arkansas, separated only by the upside-down prairie dog of Missouri. Malkin’s readers might not be very good with maps, though. Verdict: Not A Gaffe.

*Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama, he claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement:

“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”

Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole.”

Okay, so if he was speaking to the civil rights movement as a whole, it’s not a gaffe. There is no denying, however, that before the civil rights movement, which reached a milestone at the Selma march, the mixed-race relationship that produced Obama wouldn’t have been very likely. Verdict: Not Really A Gaffe.

*Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by honing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.

Good point, if we’re assuming that translators are only trained in one language. Of course, Malkin is incapable of understanding the larger point, namely that, as we’ve abandoned Afghanistan for our illegal misadventure in Iraq, the Taliban has come back, “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai’s reach as president has shrunk, the opium trade is back up, and oh yeah, al Qaeda is back at pre-9/11 levels, and oh yeah, what’s-his-name is still free. Verdict: Fuck off and do something valuable with your life, Malkin.

*Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the decades-old, multi-billion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear waste clean-up:

“Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.”

I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he’s voted on at least one defense authorization bill that addressed the “costs, schedules, and technical issues” dealing with the nation’s most contaminated nuclear waste site.

Maybe he forgot?

*Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s “Dreams from My Father:”

“Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”

Malkin doesn’t offer a citation (rarely does), so I don’t know about this. Possibly it was a different magazine? Who fucking cares?

* And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us”–cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm– and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

Mmhmm, Michelle, we’re confusing “flip-flopping” with nuance. Without even taking the time to find the full quotes (because she certainly doesn’t provide that for her readers), this writer notes that the first statement actually addresses something quite different from the second. It is true that Iran doesn’t pose any kind of serious threat to our nation. However, we do have a responsibility to confront the Iran situation in a way that will keep our people and the people of the Middle East safe, as well as work to be as effective as possible in bettering the situation of the citizens of Iran. (Hint: Economic isolation, dick-wagging, and bombs don’t help in addressing any of the above.) It’s notable here that Malkin is unwilling or mentally unable to elucidate Obama’s actual foreign-policy beliefs (beyond wisecracks about appeasement, a word whose definition she obviously does not understand). As I stated above, Republicans do not attack their opponents on the merits of their positions. They merely dip their toes long enough to find a catch-phrase that sticks, and they repeat it ad nauseam until the “conventional wisdom” buffoons are vomiting said catch-phrase on a regular basis.

Now, having considered and deconstructed this fresh bullshit, feel free to point and laugh.

These quotes from President Bush might serve as a useful prop in said pointing-and-laughing, since we are dealing with the people who stand guilty of delivering Bush to this nation and the world for the last eight years. I’m only including quotes from 2008, by the way:

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 13, 2008

“Thank you, your Holiness. Awesome speech.” –George W. Bush, to Pope Benedict, Washington, D.C., April 15, 2008

“A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what’s not on their mind.” –George W. Bush, Sochi, Russia, April 6, 2008

“And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.” –George W. Bush, to Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

“Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas? … That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

“I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be — hold hands.” –George W. Bush, on how he can contribute to the Middle East peace process, Washington, D.C., Jan. 4, 2008

Oh, what the fuck, let’s go back a full year:

“I fully understand those who say you can’t win this thing militarily. That’s exactly what the United States military says, that you can’t win this military.” –George W. Bush, on the need for political progress in Iraq, Washington, D.C., Oct. 17, 2007

“We’re also talking to different finance ministers about how we can send a message to the Iranian government that the free world is not going to tolerate the development of know-how in how to build a weapon, or at least gain the ability to make a weapon.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007

“I heard somebody say, ‘Where’s (Nelson) Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead. Because Saddam killed all the Mandelas.” –George W. Bush, on the former South African president, who is still very much alive, Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007

“The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., July 12, 2007 [not just a gaffe, but an outright fucking lie]

“I’m going to try to see if I can remember as much to make it sound like I’m smart on the subject.” –George W. Bush, answering a question about a possible flu pandemic, Cleveland, July 10, 2007

“More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way.” –George W. Bush, Martinsburg, W. Va., July 4, 2007

“I’m honored to be here with the eternal general of the United States, mi amigo Alberto Gonzales.” –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 4, 2007.

“The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear — I’m a commander guy.” –George W. Bush, who apparently is no longer “The Decider,” Washington, D.C., May 2, 2007

Let’s keep this in mind any time some Adult Daycare Republican starts talking about “gaffes” from Barack Obama or ANY Democrat, for that matter.

Sadly, No! has more.