it's interesting to watch what rightwingers have been saying since election day. before november 4th it made sense for them to misrepresent obama's positions because they were trying to win over voters. so when they would claim that people who earn less than $250k would get a tax increase under his tax plan, or that obama is for a government takeover of the health care industry or advocates universal health coverage mandates, or that obama is for confiscating everyone's firearms, or that obama was for an unrealistic teleport every soldier out of iraq the day he entered office policy, or that obama advocated attacking pakistan and surrendering to iran, or that obama would squelch rightwing speech by restoring the "fairness doctrine", et cetera, it looked to me like these were all attempts to mislead people so that they would vote for mccain.
but now the election is over. there's no need to repeat those lines anymore if your purpose is to stop obama from getting someone's vote. and yet the lines live on. it's almost like they weren't trying to misinform other people these last few months, but rather they were misinformed themselves. the post-election persistence of the health care and iraq lines are particularly surprising. obama's opposition to health insurance mandates got a fair amount of coverage during the campaign, particularly last winter and spring. it was one of the biggest policy differences between him and hillary clinton in the primary. i obama's 18 month iraq withdrawal timetable has been in the public eye for just as long if not longer.
it's basically the same thing with the continued emphasis on obama's middle name. sure, one week ago you could maybe think that saying "hussein" would scare people away from voting for him. but now that the election is over, it's become bigotry without a point. i guess that's what happens when you live in the alternate reality of talk radio and fox news for this long. it's not an electoral strategy after all. they really can't tell what obama stands for and they really do think his middle name has actual significance.
