Desperate to be the victim

look, I promise I'll stop writing about the US Election soon, but there was just one more thing I wanted to talk about. Democrats have been saying (for as long as I can remember) that Republicans play dirty. Every election is 'the dirtiest campaign ever' and it's always those mean old Republicans that are responsible. Well, it seems to me that a lot of people are actively looking for evidence of that dirt, and finding it whether it's really there or not.

Look at Melissa McEwan in the Guardian today:

As I settle in for a night with the talking heads of America's Cable News Land, on the second day of the GOP convention, Keith Olbermann is asking Tom Brokaw why Fred Thompson has replaced Rudy Giuliani as tonight's keynote speaker. Brokaw says that John McCain struggles in the South more than a typical Republican candidate, and, particularly in states with big African-American populations, the Democratic party is having massive voter drives.

It is an evocative reminder that election day will be ugly, that the GOP will engage in voter suppression in hotly contested states, that we will see, as we have during the last two presidential elections, footage of black voters in prohibitively long voting lines in Cleveland, St Louis, Jacksonville…

In what way are those two paragraphs connected? Fred Thompson is a southerner, and more popular with heartland Republicans than Rudy Giuliani - who is a New Yorker, and a pro-lifer. McCain is more comfortable among the north-easterners than he is among southerners. Therefore it's a good idea to balance the bill, and get some southerners giving speeches. What does any of this have to do with voter suppression? Nothing at all.

If McCain does defy gravity and beat Obama, I shudder at the prospect of hearing how racist Republicans stole Obama's birthright on repeat for the next four years.