More details have now come to light about the disturbing and disgusting hoax Ashley Todd perpetrated upon America on Thursday and Friday.
Most disturbing are new facts that the McSame campaign did indeed push this story on the media in an effort to harm Obama.
A spokesman for the McCain campaign gave reporters an inflammatory version of Thursday’s hoax story about a McCain volunteer being attacked by a man who carved a “B” into her face, Pittsburgh’s KDKA reported.
Long before any facts about the Ashley Todd case had been established, McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign communications director told reporters the alleged attacker had told the woman, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
The Drudge Report featured a teased story about the incident before any details about it were released. That caused KDKA reporters to contact the spokesman, confirmed as Peter Feldman.
Feldman’s presumptuous claims are “significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time,” an election blog at Talking Points Memo reported.
The story could deal a sharp blow to the McCain campaign, which might be seen as having pushed an incendiary story that had no basis in fact and that nearly blew up into a “national incident,” said Pittsburgh Police Assistant Chief Maurita Bryant, reported KWTX News.
Obama’s campaign has already privately accused the McCain camp of promoting a racially-charged version of the story.
Let’s honestly talk about what this means. Despite Pittsburgh cops (and any rational, intelligent human being’s reasonable assumption for that matter) believing that the reversely drawn B on her cheek was an obvious sign of a self-inflicted wound and a hoax, and having strong reason to doubt her story, the McSame camp attributed one of Ashley Todd’s completely fabricated quotes to the media in an effort to score damage against Barack Obama and try to scare the crap out of (or seriously anger) white people across America.
Let’s think about what might have happened if Ashley Todd hadn’t confessed until, say, after Election Day, and she had been a slightly more intelligent liar. You would have had a nationalized incident that would have racially divided this country 11 days before the election. You would have massive manhunt in western PA, northern WV, eastern Ohio. It would be the top story in the news: White female McSame supporter attacked by black male Obama supporter! There would SURELY be reprisals against black folk in the area.
We’d stop talking about the issues, of course. We’d be talking about race. This would be the game changer McSame would have needed in PA and OH to win those states, and we’d have Ashley’s face on McSame ads across the country. This election would no longer be about the economy, or Iraq, or any of the issues.
It would be an election solely about race. You don’t think it would happen? McSame would make it happen. Joe the Plumber would give way to Ashley the Campaign Worker, I guarantee it. Obama’s poll numbers would drop like a stone, it would be Obama’s Willie Horton moment writ large, and there’s a fair chance that it would have cost Obama the election.
But maybe that was the goddamn point. Maybe this was an effort to cost Obama Pennsylvania and Ohio, possibly North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida too. The McSame campaign’s Pennsylvania folks were more than eager to pin this all on the phantom black man.
In a real sense, America got lucky. It got lucky because there were so many holes in Ashley Todd’s story she had no choice but to recant her story after only 48 hours. If she had been craftier, it’s possible that right now we’d be watching the end of Barack Obama’s presidential run, and watch a wave of righteous indignation based on a total lie sweep McSame into office, in a worst case scenario.
Here’s the most chilling part.
This time we got lucky.
There will be other times. You can count on that. I’ve given McSame the benefit of the doubt because he has served his country. He did suffer for serving his country. He did survive multiple bouts with cancer. But the sick, disgusting story of Ashley Todd, and what it could have meant to this country, what it could have done to throw race relations in this country back fifty, a hundred years, this is the direct result of the honorless, race-baiting, lowest common denominator, win at all costs strategy that has come from the top of the McSame/Palin campaign. It has come from the top of the GOP.
This is what the Republican Party has been reduced to now, a cariacture of sleaze, corruption, and pure hatred. My nightmares feature folks who look like me, getting lynched, in America, in 2008, because of Ashley Todd. It very well could have been the case. We came razor close to an all-out race war in this country.
It’s a race war that was ignited by John Sidney McSame III in order to win at any cost. It almost caught fire and obliterated the country. That’s what this man and his running mate have descended into in the last month of the campaign…a campaign so vile and manipulative it convinced one of his supporters to try to injure herself and pass herself off as a martyr in order to destroy Barack Obama, race relations, and African-Americans in this country.
Repugnant, hideous, vile, angry, and hateful doesn’t begin to describe it. But it is all laid at the feet of this man and the party he represents, and honor he sacrificed to try to win the Presidency.
America was saved this time because Ashley Todd is a terrible liar. Think about that. Think about how the country got to that point…and who took it there.
Then work to make sure we never get to this point again.
Ashley Todd’s America…John McSame’s America…is not my America. My America is a much, much better place.
