[Rhodes22-list] POLITICAL: Another Class Act from the GOP

[Ben Cittadino]

Gail Collins had the following column in the NYTimes today.  It struck a
chord with me.  My Obama sign was stolen from my yard (not a particularly
brave act as you can barely see my house from the road).
I took it as a "sign" that Jesus wants me to keep talking politics, at least
until after this election.  If I can convince one "lurker" on this forum to
vote for Obama, or at least give the guy a chance, it will be adequate
revenge for the theft of my "freedom of speech" by one of Sarah's Real
Americans.


"October 23, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Confessions of a Phone Solicitor 
By GAIL COLLINS
Word comes from Madison, Wis., that a telemarketer named Ted Zoromski quit
his job this week over John McCain’s message.

Zoromski was prepared to interrupt people during their dinner hours to
encourage them to vote Republican. But when he got the script saying “you
need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist
Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a
judge’s home and killed Americans,” he packed it in.

“Even though I was paid to do it, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Zoromski told
WKOW-TV. 

This story, relayed via Mike Allen on Politico.com, struck me because I once
worked as a telemarketer, and it is an occupation so soul-numbing that it is
hard to imagine that anything could make it worse. I woke up people on the
overnight shift who had just managed to fall asleep for the first time in
six days. Sometimes, when there was clearly nobody at home, I would just let
the phone ring and ring in order to avoid having to call anybody else. Once
after about 30 rings, I heard the breathless voice of a man who had climbed
down off the roof in hopes that this was the critical business call he had
been waiting for all year, the one that was going to change his life
forever. Imagine his joy when he discovered that it was, instead, an
exciting opportunity to purchase an entire packet of portrait photographs of
his loved ones at a special discount price.

So truly, if you can come up with something that would send a telemarketer
over the edge, you have really overachieved on the offensiveness front.

For a while, John McCain and Sarah Palin were so over-the-top about Barack
Obama that people in the crowds started yelling death threats — sometimes
while simultaneously begging McCain to “take the gloves off.” The idea of
what they were hoping to see in a post-glove era scared everybody so much
that the campaign tamped things down.

Opening for a McCain rally in North Carolina last weekend, Representative
Robin Hayes said he wanted “to keep the crowd as respectful as possible.”

In order to pursue that goal as efficiently as possible, Hayes then
announced that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and
achieve and believe in God.” This was an especially unfortunate turn of
phrase given the fact that he had begun his remarks by saying he wanted to
“make sure we don’t say something stupid.”

All this was a direct outgrowth of Sarah Palin’s own comments in North
Carolina, in which she praised the “pro-America” areas of the country. But
Hayes had clearly been absent for the day in scurrilous campaign school when
they explain that you aren’t supposed to specifically name the anti-American
parts.

Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota was
launching into the Obama/terrorist spin when she suggested that the news
media should investigate “the views of the people in Congress and find out:
Are they pro-America or anti-America.” So far, the only person who’s felt
the impact of her call to reinvent McCarthyism for a post-Communist planet
has been her opponent, a hitherto totally ignored Democrat named Elwyn
Tinklenberg, who was stunned to discover in the following days that he had
received close to $1 million in donations. 

When reporters first began covering political speeches in the 19th century,
politicians were so appalled at the idea that somebody planned to write down
what they said that they would stop speaking if a reporter showed up along
the campaign route. Today, in the post-macaca era, you’d figure that
politicians would be so sensitive to the perpetual presence of recording
devices that they’d censor their comments even while muttering to themselves
when taking a shower. Not to mention comments made right after they have
been made up, offered coffee in the MSNBC green room, had a technician
install three different recording devices under their clothing and given a
seat in front of a large camera.

But the tone of this campaign has given some of the Republican faithful,
even those who are members of Congress, the impression that questioning the
patriotism of large groups of the population is now O.K.

Right now, all the polls predict that in less than two weeks, Barack Obama
is going to be elected president. The McCain campaign disputes this. Large
numbers of Obama supporters are also in doubt, possibly because they keep
getting e-mails from their relatives in Toledo revealing that Obama has gone
to Hawaii not to visit his ailing grandmother, but to destroy evidence that
he is not actually an American citizen.

For John McCain, the best question now is not whether he’s going to lose,
but what kind of a country he’d wind up with if he won after a campaign even
a telemarketer can’t love. "

Ben C.

  
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