by Damozel | Huh. The McCain campaign's doing great in the "real" Virginia (the part that isn't going for Obama), in pro-America America where the real Americans live, and---doubtless---among the "real" Americans who would be happy living in an America where the media takes up Michele Bachman's invitation to determine which members of Congress are Americans as opposed to anti-Americans.
I thought that all this was just the result of the fact that certain members of the GOP are a bit insensitive to nuance, rattled by the polls, and a bit inclined at this point to resort to dog whistles to see what comes running. Karen Tumulty wrote at Swampland:
There is now a pattern emerging from the McCain campaign and its surrogates. Instead of trying to persuade Americans who aren't in their camp (the sign of a campaign that thinks it can win), they are trying to de-legitimize them (the sign of a campaign that thinks it can't).
E.g., McCain's brother referring to Virginia's northern counties as "Communist country." Communist. Really?
Speaking at an event in support of his brother in Loudoun County, Joe McCain said, "I've lived here for at least 10 years and before that about every third duty I was in either Arlington or Alexandria, up in communist country," according to a Washington Post reporter who was there. Joe McCain, who like his brother is a veteran of the Vietnam war, then apologized, but he drew laughter from the GOP faithful at the event.
Just an aside, there are a lot of Joes involved in this campaign, aren't there? Joe Biden, Joe McCain, Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber, and---as channeled earlier today by Michele Bachman---Joe McCarthy. I think we should also count Joe Lieberman, who McCain would allegedly rather have had than Palin (and I bet the GOP now wishes they'd let him).
Think Progress notes that McCain has a house located in the non-American, or "Communist," part of Virginia and located his campaign headquarters there. Steve Benen:
Hmm. Virginia is a key swing state, with 13 electoral votes, and recent polling showing Obama with a modest lead. The state's two most populous counties -- Fairfax and Prince William Counties -- are both in northern Virginia.
And the McCain campaign keeps insulting them.
If there's a clever angle to this strategy, it's hiding well.
At the RBC, Mark Kleiman says:
My God, it must hurt to lose an election based on areas that don't even exist! Nate Silver provides a less metaphysical interpretation: the "real America," defined as places Sarah Palin has been speaking, is much whiter than the unreal statistical America those bureaucrats in the Census Bureau dreamed up.
Princess Sparkle Pony speaks for this middle-aged small-town gal---and I don't even live in a real city; just in a somewhat larger town than the town I grew up in.
What I keep getting from these rallies is We are the stupid and we're better than you.God, it's all so galling. "She's reg'lar folk." WhatEVER. I mean, I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and I'm not proud to be ignorant because I'm not ignorant. I worked really hard, studied hard, had shit jobs for over a decade... and that makes me... what? An East Coast Liberal Elitist? I'm middle class, just like they are. Sarah Palin says these are the "real Americans." All the rest of us are, what, holograms? Not Americans? Get an education and talk in complete sentences with words longer than two syllables and you're un-American? Move to the city and you're un-American?
McCain's real America is redder: as in "state" and in "necks."
Via Memeorandum, Marc Ambinder has a different theory, one which I'm sure will be of interest to specialists.
For decades, theoretical physicists have sought to unify the theory of gravity with standard particle model of physics. So far, no dice. The dominant but by no means proven theory is popularly referred to as Superstring theory, or M theory, or some variant. No need to go into the details here. Crucially, though, some of the leading variants of string theory presuppose a universe of ten spacial dimensions plus time.
We cannot rule out the possibility that Palin, Bachmann and Pftoenhauer -- let's call them PBP for short -- are somehow about to perceive these extra dimensions, and that there is something fundamental about their physical constitutions that makes such perceptions unavailable to most everyone else....[T]he new dimensions in the PBP conjecture are huge -- as large as entire counties. Think of our familiar space as consisting of three dimensions -- X, Y, Z. Let's call these new dimensions G,O, and P. It's very very hard to even think about the possibility of more dimensions; our brains don't seem to be wired for it. Perhaps P,B,P have evolved an astonishing new capacity.
Now, in order to "see" a new dimension, we'd have to come up with some coherent theory of how our eyes process the photons. Some physicists are working on a theory that holds that, in certain conditions -- perhaps times of great national peril -- the speed of light is not constant. It is possible that P,B,P have, in their retinas, special photoreceptors that are capable of translating projections from extra dimensions into familiar, three-dimensional objects.
If you think that's special, then think about this. Pfotenhauer said that she lives in a place called Oakton, Va. Oakton is located in Fairfax County. Pfotenhauer implied that the country was part of "real America" because it was open to the possibility of electing John McCain. Here's the problem: Fairfax County, like its neighbors, are in the process of turning colors. (We can detect this with a special version of a mass spectrometer called a "ballot box.")
So what Pfotenhauer, by locating "real America" in the middle of an expansion of "unreal America" -- has given us more evidence yet that "unreal America" is expanding. Perhaps unreal America is a like a bubble in Alan Guth's Inflationary Universe Hypothesis, one that, when it envelopes "real America" will tear apart. (That would explain the fear in the voices of P,B and P.)
In any event, all of this must be exciting for cosmologists and physicists everywhere. (Marc Ambinder)
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