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The other night while watching a CNN report on Ron Paul’s racist newsletter, my wife made a good observation. If you give Ron Paul the benefit of the doubt that the written-in-the-first-person and published-under-his-name racist ranting that (among many other things) refers to African-Americans as “animals” were written by other people…then is this really the kinda guy who should be President? If Ron Paul is so irresponsible that he let his quaint little newsletter “accidentally” turn into vile, right-wing extremist rag, then what does that say about how competent he’d be in overseeing something as large and complex as the executive branch of the federal government? The guy can’t even keep hate speech out of his photocopied little mailing list. On top of that, if Ron Paul turned his newsletter over to the kind of people who would write this shit, then what kinda neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists can we expect to see in a Ron Paul administration?

Once again, this is all assuming that you believe Ron Paul’s story, which I don’t.

I particularly enjoy the excruciating stupidity of the American media when it strikes its “deep expertise” pose. I’ve been reading up on astronomy, they say, and I wonder how, as president, you’d deal with the way the sun orbits around the earth.

For instance, here’s Charlie Gibson, moderating the recent Democratic debate in New Hampshire:

CHARLIE GIBSON: I want to go to another question. And it really is the central one in my mind in nuclear terrorism. The next president of the United States may have to deal with a nuclear attack on an American city. I’ve read a lot about this in recent days. The best nuclear experts in the world say there’s a 30 percent chance in the next 10 years.

One thing Gibson didn’t do when he “read a lot about this” was TO READ ANYTHING. If you feel like reading the study he’s referring to yourself (pdf), you’ll find that:

1. The question wasn’t whether there would be nuclear terrorism in a U.S. city. Rather, it was “In your opinion, what is the probability (expressed as a percentage) of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the next 10 years?” I.e., they were asked about the use of nuclear weapons anywhere by anyone, including by governments or outside the US or both.

2. The mean response was 29.2%. However, the median was lower, at 20%.

3. Among the 85 “best nuclear experts in the world” surveyed was Robert Joseph, a notorious hardliner who was on the National Security Council for four years before replacing John Bolton as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Joseph supervised the section on Iraq’s WMD in the 2003 State of the Union, and was responsible for the uranium-from-Africa claim.

Others inhabit the Bush administration’s Dr. Strangelove-flavored penumbra. There’s Richard Allen, who’s on the Defense Advisory Board; Frank Carlucci, of the Carlyle Group and Project for a New American Century; and James Woolsey, Patrick Clawson, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Fred Ikle, all well-known for their role with PNAC and similar places.

GIBSON: Really, the central question in my mind is feet. I’ve been reading a lot about feet in recent days. And the best experts in the world say people each have nine feet. What would you do about this as president?

AND: On the same general subject, Sam Husseini makes a much more important point.

Democrats are actually in turmoil because they are terrified that their candidate will be a black or a woman, and they believe that racist and sexist Republicans will launch racist and/or sexist attacks accordingly, but you see the real closet racists and sexists are the Democrats themselves. Oh, and also, Hillary Clinton stole the election last night, with dead people voting and bribery and stuff.

…it’s like August says. From a policy perspective, she’s not my first choice, or second, or to be honest even third. But part of me would love to see her win, purely out of spite, just to drive the rightwing nutjobs insane.

From DownWithTyranny:

It appears that Senator Obama is striking a chord with his appeal to “post-partisanship.” Who wouldn’t like to see an end to the vicious, violent partisanship of our times? (I’ll tell you who: the ignorance-worshipping sociopaths of the Far-to-the-Nth-Degree Right who created that violent partisanship–utterly deliberately, I believe, for the express purpose of taking over the government and imposing their wingnut sociopathology on the rest of the country. Which come to think of it, they’ve done.)

It sounds lovely. Who doesn’t like to feel good? My problem with most “feel good” movements is that they aren’t based on anything real to feel good about.

It’s hard to see how Senator Obama’s stratospheric soar above partisanship can work. It’s based on the assumption that the reason we haven’t all gotten together and worked all this stuff out together in a spirit of harmony is because nobody ever thought of it. Does anyone really believe this?

Apparently so. But while there are certainly narrow issues–important ones, but narrow ones–where such compromises might be thrashed out in a dialogue unpolluted by the demagoguery of the Far Right, there aren’t all that many such issues, and hardly any of the really crucial issues qualify.

More here. And a related cartoon here.

The right wing noise machine has been relatively easy on Obama lately, in an apparent enemy-of-my-enemy calculus. But if Obama comes strong out of New Hampshire, these clips from Robert Greenwald (once you get past the O’Reilly recap) are probably just a small foreshadowing of what lies ahead. We can expect to hear a lot more about madrassas over the next few months. (Not to mention a lot of “Osama-I-mean-Obama-snicker-snicker” and, as Atrios has noted, a whole lot of very thinly-vieled racism …)