Does WISGOP know who their candidate is?

by folkbum

In the past two days, I have received four mailers from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Mailers are not cheap, which means the WISGOP is investing a pretty significant amount of money to get me and my generally Democratic neighbors in this zip code to vote against Barack Obama. Whether this is the best use of their money now, instead of, say, heavily targeting a few of the closest State Assembly races where they are liable to lose seats and control of that body, is not for me to say. I don't give them my money, so I don't particularly care how they spend it.

But note that I said they wanted me to vote against Barack Obama. I did a quick tally of some word frequency from these four mailers. See if you notice what I noticed:

34 Obama
9 Rezko
9 Gun/ Firearm/ Arms
8 Special Interest/ Political Favor/ and variants
7 Lead/ Leading / Led/ Leadership (to suggest Obama doesn't lead)
2 McCain

If I just count the three mailers I got today, most of these would be about the same, except the McCain number would fall to zero. In fact, yesterday's mailer, the only one to mention McCain, does so only on the inside of the mailer and does so with the inclusion of a number of flat falsehoods about the Republican candidate. Falsehoods like, "Led the effort for a bi-partisan agreement to address the Wall Street Meltdown" (the truth being, of course, that he was simply grandstanding and in the important meetings he didn't say a single intelligent thing about the problem). Even if it were true, the public is none too keen on the bailout that resulted. There are more problems with the way they describe McCain, but I'll stop there.

In addition, it's obvious that the photos of Obama have clearly had their brightness adjusted to make his skin look darker in almost every single photo on these four mailers. (There are seven pictures of Obama--the undarkened one is a fuzzy shot of Tony Rezko's face with the back of Obama's head--and one picture of McCain, soft-focus, and backlit in such a way as to give him a bright white aura.) They're full of distortions about Obama's record, too, such as the reference to this AP story ominously titled "Obama fundraiser, convicted of fraud, spills beans." The story is clear that Obama is not one of the spilled beans: "But based on the known facts, charges so far and testimony at Rezko's trial, there's no indication there'll be a so-called 'October surprise' that could hurt the Democratic presidential nominee--even though Rezko says prosecutors are pressing him for dirt about Obama."

Pretty sad sampling from WISGOP, isn't it? Four direct mail pieces, all focused entirely or almost entirely on the other party's candidate, all full of half-truths, distortions (of fact and photos), and outright lies. Is this what the GOP is reduced to in the state of its birth? Shameful.