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oday, the Obama campaign will roll out its most aggressive attack strategy against McCain - and it’s got a lot of potential and momentum behind it, so watch out.

According to Politico, the new “multimedia” effort - read TV, Internet and talking heads - will focus on events from long, long ago, the Keating Five S&L scandal from 1989-1991. The intent is to blame the current financial crisis on McCain and his S&L buddies, which is political dirty work at its dirtiest.

McCain was the least dirty of the five, which came very close to being called the Keating Four; last minute machinations alone lumped McCain with the others. His involvement in support of constituent Charles Keating was brief, shallow and ineffective. His repenting has gone on for the 17 years since, with his refusal to play the political games favored by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.

But explaining all that will be difficult for McCain, whose messaging this far in the campaign has been about as effective as a three-legged thoroughbred. McCain does have a message strategy available to him that will work for him - comparing himself to Obama; something like:

I’ve been open about this and have said a thousand times that I regret that I signed my name to one letter for Charlie Keating. I regretted it when I did it and I still do today. It was the worst mistake of my career, but from that moment on, I turned against political favoritism and earmarking. Keating went to jail, and I’m glad he did.

I’m comfortable admitting all this because it changed me into a better man, a crusader against corruption. My opponent admits nothing about relationship with Tony Rezko, who took bribes and wielded influence, or about Bill Ayres, who says he wishes he had planted more bombs in his efforts to destroy America. My opponent took over $100,000 from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in just three years, and has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies like Lehman and Goldman Sachs.

Why won’t Obama talk about all that? Could it be because he hasn’t changed? That he’s just an old-school politician in a nice new suit?

Meanwhile, the McCain camp is stepping up its character messaging on Obama, with Palin’s comments over the weekend accusing him of “palling around with terrorists” like Bill Ayres. She told Bill Kristol:

Palin also made clear that she was eager for the McCain-Palin campaign to be more aggressive in helping the American people understand “who the real Barack Obama is.” Part of who Obama is, she said, has to do with his past associations, such as with the former bomber Bill Ayers. Palin had raised the topic of Ayers Saturday on the campaign trail, and she maintained to me that Obama, who’s minimized his relationship with Ayers, “hasn’t been wholly truthful” about this.

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

That’s well and good, but it shouldn’t stop with Ayres and Wright. Rezko, the New Party and other radical and racist fellow travelers should all be brought up: A litany of what makes Obama “not like the rest of us.”

The GOP campaign has got to start putting its attacks in context, to disallow the racists at AP and elsewhere in the MSM from mischaracterizing legitimate challenges to Obama’s judgment and associations with racial attacks. Words are important; “palling around” does not accurately characterize the Obama/Ayres association, and it should be replaced with “long friendship” or even “birds of a feather.”

So the GOP needs to step up and improve its campaign about Obama’s radical associations by clearly making it about his character and judgment, and nothing to do with his race. But more important, they have to begin talking about Obama’s financial ties to corruption and greed on Wall Street, and his failure to do anything more than write one letter.

After all, all McCain did for Charlie Keating was write one letter, and that’s all Obama has done to call out the culture of destructive greed on Wall Street.

Sunday Scan items are published as each is completed; most recent at the top, so be sure to click through if you see the “continue reading” note at the bottom of the post. This note will be removed after the last item is posted, so if you’re reading this, please come back for more.

Palin Packs ‘Em In

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ere’s the report from Shawn Steele (fomrer Cal. GOP chair) from last night’s Sarah Palin event in SoCal:

Not since Ronald Reagan’s final campaign rally at Orange County’s Mile Square Park on the eve of the 1984 election, have thousands of Californian Republicans gathered. Neither Bush could do it. None of last year’s Republican presidential candidates could fill the Home Depot Tennis Center.

The Center has 13,000 court side seats. All those seats plus the suites were filled to capacity. Still thousands more were slowly streaming into the stadium quickly filled up the court yard. Thousands more found standing room around the rim of the stadium. Over 20,000 people were there to celebrate, shout and scream.

SNL can continue to poke fun at Palin, but real people get her and want to get close to her. If you have any doubts what she’s done to the ticket, check out who introduced her:

Shelly Mandell, the current President of Los Angeles National Organization for Women [NOW] — in the Republican OC suite several of us were scratching our heads— introduced Sarah Palin. It was an awkward introduction. . Mandell, stated she didn’t agree with Sarah on everything, that she is a democrat, that she Mandell supported the failed Equal Rights Amendment campaign but the crowd exercised tolerance. Ms. Mandell will get a lot of angry calls from the hard left, but she embraced the moment and stood with Sarah Palin.

The OC Register also covered the event:

“Electrifying,” “genuine” and “inspiring” were a few of the adjectives that Orange County voters used to describe Sarah Palin after her rally at the Home Depot Center in Carson on Saturday.

The lead of the LA Times story was a bit different:

You can’t say she didn’t warn them.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation with a now-famous joke about lipstick being the only difference between a certain dog breed and a hockey mom. On Saturday, the Republican vice presidential nominee unleashed her inner pit bull, accusing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of being someone who would “pal around with terrorists.”

The reporter let us know that in her opinion (yes, yes, it was a news story, I know) Palin’s new tone was “abrasive.” That’s a fine alternative for “truthful,” isn’t it?

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he radical left has found its answer to Rev. Wright’s ranting, anti-American, anti-Jew sermons, the sermons Obama listened to for twenty years, but denies ever hearing. (Did he sleep in the pews or did he lie?)

The morally trashed left lucked out because their video shows Sarah Palin being prayed for, so we know she was there; no question about it. And to the leftists, the prayer of the guest speaker at her former Wasilla Community Church, Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee, sounds just as threatening as Wright’s sounded to us:

He wants grace and favor for Sarah Palin. He wants God’s presence felt in politics, in education, in government. He wants the 10 Commandments to be taught in school again, rather than Buddhism and Islam. The horror! He wants politicians who love God to be elected to office. The shame! He wants government officials, even presidents and Secretaries of State, to be believers. Secularist apostasy!

And he prays all this in the name of Jesus, as Palin’s pastors have their hands on her shoulders. It’s funky charismatic Christianity on display, ripe for hip, metro ridicule.

Here’s the long version of the prayer with the warm-up and handy subtexts decrying the foulness of it all:

And here’s a shorter version, which starts with the hands-on prayer, after the warm-up. It’s called “Sarah Palin, Thomas Muthee and witchcraft.”

What you’re seeing here may not happen in a Methodist or Episcopalian church every Sunday - heck, it doesn’t happen in most evangelical churches every Sunday. This was a visiting pastor from Kenya, where there is a very robust and charismatic Christianity, a type of Christianity lived by millions of Christians around the world, including our own charismatics, like my very good lifetime friend Peter.

One would think the rules of political correctness would protect these folks. Think again.

Muthee, at the end of his prayer, prays for protection for Sarah Palin against witchcraft. The actual words are garbled, but it immediately follows a prayer for protection from “the enemy,” Satan, so it is a biblical prayer of protection against those - the radical American Left comes to mind - who would work actively to stymie the work of God, whether it’s done in the name of Satan or enlightened secularism. But it’s that mention of witchcraft that gives the Left it’s hook.

You all remember Mark Morford, author of an entry in this year’s Most Ridiculous Story competition, Is Obama an Enlightened Being? In that story, Morford is very comfortable with tying spirituality to the president … as long as it’s his kind of spirituality.

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don’t understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. …

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare.

So it’s OK to have Lightworkers in politics, but it is definitely not OK to have God in politics. That’s Worford’s new beef, as expressed in his column yesterday, Witches Begone! Sarah Palin was de-witched by nutball pastor? What a shame.

Did you see the infamous grainy YouTube video? Did you read the disquieting little sidebar story about Muthee and his now-infamous witch huntin’ treks down to Kenya, like that time he stormed into a village and formed an angry mob to drive out an old woman by the name of “Mama Jane” who was supposedly causing illness and traffic accidents and really crappy Wi-Fi connections at the local Starbucks? Charming.

Have you read, furthermore, about Palin’s adorable Pentecostal church where Muthee preached, where they like to speak in tongues and lick the skins of serpents and watch NASCAR while shooting moose from the backs of animatronic dinosaurs adorned with “Jesus is My Co-Pilot” bumper stickers? (Note: possible slight exaggeration. But not by much.) It’s all sorts of Disney-on-acid fun. [Hey, Morford, just for fun, why do you try to write this kind of demeaning "possible slight exaggeration" about what goes on in your local mosque. C'mon, Morf! I dare you!]

As for Palin, turns out Muthee laid on some hands, delivered a garbled serpents n’ brimstone prayer designed not merely to help her leap from Mayor of Nowheresville to perky gubernatorial fireplug, only to later become, thanks to McCain’s appalling judgment, the most insulting caricature of female empowerment in modern history who, as the VP debate painfully revealed, still knows not a single substantive thing about American domestic or foreign policy, but also to protect her from that same silly/terrifying witchcraft I imagined in my youth.

This is what passes for witticism in San Francisco. Attack religion, unless it’s your hip, New Age religion. Attack any woman who strays from the narrow path of feminist orthodoxy, and do it all in a sneering tone that ridicules all the rest of America.

Morford’s a punk, a little man in a dirty city, easy to dismiss as meaningless. Then there’s Keith Olbermann, who pronounces, “This is starting to sound startling enough to be terrifying.” He also says of Muthee, “He makes Father Flannigan of Boy’s Town look like Jeremiah Wright.” Here’s the clip, which ridicules a lot of standard evangelical beliefs, and which Olbermann tries mightily to make Muthee into a modern-day Salem-creator and spiritual good buddy of Palin:

Mock, mock, mock. Maybe we Christians look silly when we pray against evil. But does Olbermann mock the death penalty foes when they’re praying outside the prison for God to stop the execution? Of course not! Those are his Christians, to be praised. Does he mock the anti-war Christians who pray at the munitions plants and Army induction centers? Of course not; they are above reproach.

But when the same belief in prayer is applied to a Republican, oh my! We see the vile hypocrisy of the American Left in all it’s glory.

By the way, even as Olbermann dresses it up, Muthee’s witch-hunting is hardly the stuff of Salem legend. He offered the spiritualist an out: leave town, or we’ll pray against you. She stayed. They prayed. Then the police - not the church - raided her shop and shot a snake - not her - and she left town.

Let us pray. God, save us from them and all they would do to our country.

Hat-tip: Marshall

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ood old Yankee know-how has been on display in Waziristan lately, as drone-fired missiles are slamming into rat-filled hovels. The latest report claims 20 “militants” - al-Qaeda and taliban terrorists - were killed.

A fine thing indeed, but what’s with this paragraph?

One attack in Mohammadkhel village about 28 miles west of Miran Shah, the region’s main town, killed about 19 people, most of them alleged militants but also including about a half-dozen foreigners, the officials said, citing agents in the field.

You mean the foreigners weren’t also terrorists? Were they perhaps European tourists on an eco-tour? Hollywood stars and Parisian fashion models on a round-the-world Smug Quest?

More likely they were jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Euro-Muslims on the only real kind of tour that reaches those parts, jihad madrassa tours. A half-dozen foreigners? A half dozen more dead terrorists, most likely.

Since this is evidence of stepped-up efforts to win the war in Afghanistan by taking  out the terrorist dregs that dragged that sorry butts back to the mountains after we took out most of their compadres in Iraq, one would think that Barack “The Kabul Kid” Obama will be singing the praises of the attack.  Bets anyone?  Anyone think he’ll actually praise a successful military action?

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write a lot about messaging because if words matter, the right words matter a lot.  This short film captures the essence of how just the right turn of a phrase can make a huge difference in how people respond to the message.  It’s almost six minutes long, but do watch it; it’s well worth it.

hat-tip: Jim

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can’t remember the last time I won a Watcher’s Council competition for best blog entry of the week; it’s been quite a while, but the champ is back (for a week anyway), as my entry, McCain’s Needed New Messaging Strategy pretty much ruled, with three votes.

Coming in second with 1 1/3 votes was Wolf Howling’s A Doddering Fool.  If you haven’t been reading his coverage of the melt-down, you might as well start with this piece on Chris Dodd, which includes a massive bibliography of his earlier pieces.

My nominee for non-Council entry, American Thinker’s Barack Obama and the Theory of Manufactured Crisis also won.  I led off last week’s Sunday Scan with an item drawn from this piece. Blog friend Okie on the Lamb also wrote about it here.

See all the write-ups, and the Watcher’s nifty TW3 (that was the week that was) at WatcherOfWeasels.org.

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aomi Wolf’s Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps won the inaugural year competition, becoming Cheat-Seeking Missiles most ridiculous story of 2007. Now she’s back with another horror fantasy on the Bush-Cheney-Rove Cabal, The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, The Muse Of The Coming Police State.

Wolf lives in a perpetual nightmare. On Dennis Prager’s show yesterday, she was complaining about being on the TSA watch list. This from a woman who just penned a book called Give Me Liberty: A Handbook For American Revolutionaries. She wants to foment revolution, and she can’t understand why she’s on a watch list. With that introduction to her acuity, let’s take a look at why Wolf looks at Sarah Palin and sees Evita Peron.

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don’t have freedom.

There’s a small flaw in her thinking here: Soviet Russia didn’t exactly offer up a multi-party election, and if anyone had such an idea, the KGB would quell it quickly. And they were better at appearances than the rest of the world’s dictators and gangs of thugs. Our elections still mean something.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites (”the heart of America is on display”) and realized Bush’s speechwriters were writing her — not McCain’s — speeches. I heard her tell George Bush’s lies — not McCain’s — to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners — this is Rove-Cheney’s enthusiastic S and M, not McCain’s, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit –but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

How many Clintonistas are on the Obama campaign? Never mind. The reference to supporting torture? I believe it’s this, from Palin’s convention speech:

“Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America; he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

The left has been trying to redefine torture so it includes just about everything, and with this, they’ve done it. Not read your rights? TORTURE!!

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ho won the debate? That’s an easy one: Joe Biden beat Barack Obama. The contrast between Biden’s command of issues and willingness to speak his mind and Obama’s cool mutterings underscored that the man at the top of the ticket does not have the experience to be president.

Beyond that, Palin stood up well enough - although I was screaming messages she was missing at the screen (same goes for McCain).  And with her good performance, the campaign can move on.

“Probably the biggest cliche about the vice presidency is that it’s a heartbeat away … everybody’s waiting to see what would happen if the worst did happen.”  Gwen Ifell

Are you waiting for the newly elected president to die so you can see how the VEEP performs?

I didn’t think so.