I love how the right wing is too stupid to realize they took away the “poor little lady” shield last night by turning her into Hatchet Woman, and how much this will bite her in the ass when she has to debate Biden.

Caren-

They can try to go there, but that dog won’t hunt anymore.

I’m looking forward to being able to watch the 21st Century version of Bentsen-Quayle, since I was a toddler during the original.

By the first week of October “sexist” will be about as stale as 9iu1ian1 talking about 9/11 or McCain talking about his POW experience.

I love this.  Obama can’t compare himself to McCain and make it work so now he has to try and compare himself to Palin the VP pick.  If Palin is such a no win situation for Republicans then why even give her the dignity of mere mention.  I’ll tell you why, you’re scared.  You’ve made up enough BS about Palin to fill Mile High Stadium and it’s not working.  People aren’t listening.  The only hope you have now is to try and convince people that Obama is some how more experienced than Palin.

McCain/Palin 08’

Hey, you managed to spell her name right that time!  Good job!

Palin is sounding more like Bush all the time:  the Alaska National Guard is dangerously short on personnel, specifically pilots.

How is Alaska supposed to be the first line of defense against the Russkies if they don’t even have enough pilots to fly their planes?  Hmm?

“I’ll tell you why, you’re scared.”

See, the Republicans have played the fear card that they assume anyone on the verge of peeing their pants is doing because they’re scared.  Actually, in this case it’s laughter.

Jesse, I think I have an answer for your question last night of why they keep using McCain’s middle initial—they’re trying to dog-whistle associate him with George W. Bush for the faithful who love Bush, while keeping their distance from the perspective of everyone else.

Case in point: Kenton Ngo (a great young Virginia blogger) happened to be watching C-SPAN during last night’s roll call, and reports that the Tennessee delegation cast its votes for “George S. McCain”.

Why is the right trying so hard to convince themselves that we’re so panicked?

Actually, in this case it’s laughter.

No, it’s rage.  The gloves are off this time around.  These ratfuckers represent an existential threat to the American Dream not seen so blatantly since WWII.  I don’t care anymore about being nice, I want Obama and Biden to verbally skin both those ratfuckers alive.

Really?  Republicans aren’t panicked?

Better tell Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), who just called Barack and Michelle Obama uppity.  After all, we wouldn’t want it to get out that Republicans are so afraid they’re going to lose to a couple of negroes that they have to drop the dog whistle and start using the outright racist attacks.

(swiped from Atrios, from whence all entertaining tidbits flow)

I love the internet. It has so many numbers. To wit:

# of votes for Palin, ‘06 Alaska gubernatorial race: 114,697 (48.3% of all votes cast)

# of votes for Biden, ‘02 Delaware senatorial race: 135,170 (58% of all votes cast)

It’s Joe Biden, for the win!

Where the uppity wind comes rushing down the plain!

Hey, you managed to spell her name right that time!  Good job!

Yes, but he still hasn’t learned where the apostrophe goes. B- for Jason.

The reason George Bush is President right now is because he somehow connected with rural voters.  When he beat Gore he took W VA and Tenn, whereGore should have trounced him, except that he ignored these voters and took them for granted.  Palin spoke directly to these voters.  She doesn’t care what posters here think of her.  She’s not on the ticket to woo you.  When she debates Biden she will say “America be strong and defend yourself whatever it takes” and he will say “Talk to bad guys”.  Who do you think will connect with these voters when she says that? This is a lowball emotional play to counter Obamas emotional, illogical followers.  Tons of folks want Obama for every reason from the fact that he is black to the fact that he is not GWB.  Those were the criers in the audience on TV when he and Biden spoke at the convention and the asshats that broke stuff in my homewtown this week and punished working Minnesotans because they have no control over their emotinal frustration.  Palin counters by appealing to rural and religious voters insulted by Obama and left out by McCain.  Neither group is respectable - both chase shiny things dangled in front of them.

Obama also got more votes than McCain did in the Oklahoma primary. 

The whole “my state is bigger/better than yours” brou ha ha that the Republicans keep repeating is really absurd.  Like the crazy governor of Hawaii last night, who said Alaska is the biggest state in the country, and you can fill it with hundreds of Delawares.  Aside from the fact that Hawaii is just barely larger than Delaware, and Alaska has fewer people.  If they want to play that game, Illinois has the 5th largest population, and Arizona has the 16th, so Obama wins. 

If Palin is VP, she will be VP of San Francisco, and Massachusetts, and urban “communities.”  I don’t understand how disparaging entire regions of the country will ingratiate her to the voters.

“Uppity”.  Armies of comment-trolls.  “WON’T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE DOWN SYNDROME BABIES.”

Drill, baby, drill.

Somebody’s panicked as Hell, but it sure isn’t the left.  Or the center.

When he beat Gore he took W VA and Tenn, whereGore should have trounced him, except that he ignored these voters and took them for granted.

Sorry, I forget, who was it that won the popular vote in 2000?  Hint:  it wasn’t Bush, dummy.  And Gore didn’t lose because of a rural state, unless you’re under the impression that Miama, Ft. Lauderdale, St. Petersberg, and Orlando are actually small rural towns.

I do agree with you about the goddamn anarkiddies in Minneapolis, though.  Not only were they assholes who caused property damage, they caused a lot of problems for people who were trying to peacefully protest but got caught up in police sweeps because some jerkwads who don’t believe in the political process decided that throwing bottles and setting garbage cans on fire was a great idea.

You need to stop fighting and let Dr T’s trollish pablum take all the pain (of thought) away…

And here I thought he was offering me some nice soma ...

Hey Dr T, go look up the percentage of Americans who live in non-urban areas.

Hint: It is very small.

Dr T, did you just call Obama’s supporters emotional and illogical in the same post where you praised Bush/Palin for employing oversimplified black/white rhetoric to connect with voters?  That’s some pot and kettle style shit, my friends.

I’d like to see Dr T actually take a wild guess. Just a wild guess as to what % of Americans live in areas that aren’t urban, and then show him the real number.

Jesse, it’s the Chewbacca Defense.

Ben D.,
The whole Rural Vs. Urban voter block can be a little slippery. I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on how it works and why it is significant/insignificant. Here’s a link to get us started with a rural vs. urban stat set:
http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu/RuDis/DescribeFigure2.htm
They describe the split at 21% - 79% at that link.
Do you think the stats are different?

now he has to try and compare himself to Palin the VP pick. 

By picking Palin as his running mate only McCain set the experience bar to be President very low. (He is keenly aware that like his father and grandfather, he might croak at any time, so Sarah must be ready from Inauguration Day.) It’s true she was a mayor, but her town of 5469 (2000 census) was scarcely larger than my high school. And Mr. Winterbottom was scarcely Presidential material. Furher, a year and a half in the Governor’s Office does not outrank Obama’s time in the Senate.

Staty-

Sounds about right, though I thought it was a little smaller. I guess my point is the way Republicans talk you would think the country is 50/50, or even 60 rural 40 urban. I think people are more in love with the idea of rural America than the reality, and like to THINK they are rural even if they’re just suburban.

B.D-
Yes. There is a disconnection of the actual census numbers “rural” to the “voting rural” folks. This is routinely and expertly exploited by the Repubs. Candidates fail at this in election year by assuming the census stats reflect what people self identify as, though that is by no means an irrational belief.
So while one’s heart is in San Francisco, their snowmobile can be parked in Wasilla along with their vote.

Dr T:

This is a lowball emotional play to counter Obamas emotional, illogical followers. Tons of folks want Obama for every reason from the fact that he is black to the fact that he is not GWB.

Dude, seriously. If you have to lie to get your point across, you don’t have a point. Your complete lack of shame and self-awareness is not its own justification.

” I guess my point is the way Republicans talk you would think the country is 50/50, or even 60 rural 40 urban. “

That’s it?  The way they were shoving that red/blue county map in our face, I thought it was more like 90/10.

I laugh at how they the red/blue map to misrepresent a nearly even election, because it really goes to show that they still think certain people are 3/5 of a person, or in this case quite less.

Argh.  It’s driving me nuts that I can’t remember the title of a very famous book written in the late 1800s that was all about how Americans mythologized the West even though most of them had never been there and would never go there.  It’s one of the seminal works in American popular culture studies, and yet I vaguely recall it was written by a Frenchman.

I do think that a lot of the romanticization of rural life is tied into our romanticization of the Old West and the frontier.  A lot of red states used to be part of the fabled West—Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas, etc.

Mnem, you don’t mean Alexis DeTocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” right?…

Nope, definitely not.  It was specifically about the Wild West in American culture and it was written right around the turn to the 20th century.

I may have an excerpt at home in one of my old cinema readers if I can find it ....

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Significance of the Frontier in American History?

The way they were shoving that red/blue county map in our face, I thought it was more like 90/10.

I bet that map would look very different if they blotted out the large swaths of uninhabited land.

I think people are more in love with the idea of rural America than the reality, and like to THINK they are rural even if they’re just suburban.

I’d make a further distinction between suburbanites (people who can reach the nearest city centre in reasonable time by public transit) and exurbanites (who can only make the same journey by car). The problem is less about exurbanites thinking they’re rural than that they’re exurbanites—full stop.

I mean, here they are, at least an hour’s increasingly expensive drive away from both work and anything more culturally interesting than a visit to the movie theatre at the local mall. When they’re not in the car or at jobs straight out of Office Space, they’re living the equivalent of small-town lives minus Main Street.

And that’s a problem because they’re bitter and spiteful (probably more so than real rural dwellers) and because, unlike Dr T’s mythical rural voter majority, there are a lot of them—maybe 30% added to the 20% rural dwellers.

Fortunately, not of them will be attracted by Palin’s extreme Xtian fantasism and are too comfortable in their ticky-tacky boxes to romanticise rural life.

Continuing on the Weeds metaphor, for ever bitter fundie Majestic there’s a just plain bitter Agrestic.

Mnemosyne,

Except for the French part, I’d agree with Daniel that’s it sounds like Turner, who proclaimed to general agreement the frontier was closing. I did some quick Googles, but anything even slightly promising about French follow-on work was locked up behind the academic journal paywalls.

On the whole urban vs rural thing…

We should not forget that we were listening to a speech directed toward an elite audience of Republican party faithful.  The words are clear dog-whistle code to them:

urban = black
rural = white

It’s as simple as that.  Always has been.  It’s just a little more subtle, a little more nuanced now.

jamie:

It’s as simple as that. Always has been. It’s just a little more subtle, a little more nuanced now.

Not really.

keshmeshi—I always liked the versions that used shades of purple, heights for population, or were adjusted in shape according to population:

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Significance of the Frontier in American History?

Hmmm .... quite possibly.  I kept thinking the author’s first name was Francis, so it could be that it was Frederick instead.  I was too lazy to look for my cinema reader last night. 

I get the general point, but going by the figures on Palin’s wikipedia page, your statement is not technically true. But I suck at math, so I could be wrong.