Well, it's finally happened. We've been leading up to this for months and everyone assumed it had to occur sooner or later, and now it has: We've reached the very bottom of the barrel.
Just a little while ago, police in Pittsburgh confirmed that a 20-year-old McCain campaign volunteer named Ashley Todd -- a white girl from Texas -- confessed to making up a shocking story about being beaten by a supporter of Barack Obama. Todd had originally claimed that while canvassing Pittsburgh, a place she volunteered to travel to in support of John McCain, she was confronted at a bank ATM by (wait for it) a tall black man who noticed the McCain '08 bumper sticker on her car and, as such, proceeded to beat the hell out of her -- even going so far as to cut an ugly "B" into her cheek.
Needless to say, every right wing mouthpiece in the country immediately jumped on the story, salivating at the prospect of a possible game-changer of such monumental proportions less than two weeks before election day. Fox News Executive Vice President John Moody even wrote that, if proven true, the item had the potential to make undecideds across the country revisit their support for Barack Obama.
It looked like a dream come true for the GOP faithful.
Unfortunately for them, Ashley Todd is a fucking retard.
First of all, there were reportedly holes in her story you could drive a truck through. Secondly, she neglected to consider the fact that bank ATMs almost always come equipped with surveillance cameras that can easily be checked (which is one of the first things police did; Todd was nowhere to be found). Finally, and most amusingly, the "B" carved into her face was, in fact, backward -- which meant either that police needed to be on the lookout for a tall, black dyslexic man, or Todd cut the damn thing into her own face in front of a mirror.
As it turns out, the latter of the two possibilities is the correct one. Ashley Todd, criminal mastermind, now admits that she mutilated herself.
The whole thing would be hilarious if it weren't so staggeringly horrifying.
So this is it.
This is what it's come to.
This is what the most extreme faction of McCain and Palin's supporters are capable of in a desperate 11th hour attempt to ensure that Barack Obama gets nowhere near the White House: the most despicable kind of race-baiting. These are the people praying for John McCain and Sarah Palin to win -- the people who will literally do anything, even mutilate themselves, to make it happen. They're vicious, evil fuckers who are too goddamned stupid to see the irony of pulling off a vile hoax in the hope of making the other guy's supporters look dangerous and batshit crazy.
The worst part, though?
That, I swear to God, McCain and Palin actually bear some responsibility for this crap.
They've spent the past month fomenting unspeakable hatred and ignorance, inciting violence by refusing to denounce the vitriolic rhetoric of their most mindless acolytes, and insidiously casting their opponent not simply in adversarial terms but as a mysterious figure who consorts with terrorists and whose election could bring about the end of America as we know it.
Saying this kind of garbage to a bunch of easily suggestible, self-styled patriots with the collective IQ of a herd of cattle is like yelling fire in a crowded theater.
McCain and Palin have been proclaiming the clear and present danger involved in Barack Obama's quest for the White House in terms subtle and unambiguous for weeks; they can't really be shocked that somebody would actually take the matter into his or her own hands. They talked and young, impressionable and galactically stupid Ashley Todd listened -- it's that simple.
By the way, Fox News's John Moody, in that post I mentioned earlier, went on to say that if Todd's claims were eventually proven false -- if the whole thing turned out to be, in fact, a hoax -- that "Senator McCain's quest for the presidency (will be) over, forever linked to race-baiting."
For what may be the very first time, I really hope Fox News is right.
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