When an outhouse-supply rag like The National Enquirer trumpets a headline like "The Most Shocking Story You Will Ever Read!", as it does in its current issue, its 7-11 readers have every right to expect something truly juicy -- hard-core proof that Elvis' ghost impregnated Katie Couric during a Satanic orgy in Dick Cheney's dungeon, at the very least. After all, the Enquirer has a reputation to maintain.
But alas, tucked in between "Mary-Kate Olsen's Drunken Binge" and Steve-O from Jackass snorting coke off some woman's thigh, "The Most Shocking Story You Will Ever Read!" -- or TMSSYWER, for short -- turns out to be a classic bait-and-switch job on a number of levels. It's the very same cynical and dehumanizing strategy that Harold Ickes is running on behalf of Hillary Clinton -- just keep drearily rehashing the non-existent "Reverend Wright scandal" and hope for the best (or the worst). And, just as the Enquirer's readership continues to plunge, so too does the future of Clinton's political campaign, in a colossal twin belly-flop. It's a marriage made in tabloid heaven.
I wrote last week about this "Obama Fathers Two-Headed Gay Terrorist Baby" strategy -- a last-ditch attempt by the sleaziest hacks in the media (and the campaign) to squeeze out a few more pitiful bucks (and votes) from the dregs of the Jeremiah Wright story. In the Enquirer's case, TMSSYWER -- delightfully subtitled "Destroy All White People!" -- turns out to be a noxious piece of journalistic three-card-monte. Too tedious and absurd to recount in detail, basically it says that Reverend Wright is admired by a Union Theological Seminary professor named James Cone, who in turn has written some incendiary black-power books -- and that Obama has "failed to speak out" about this utter non-story. It then stretches this very thin gruel even further: "Cone's chilling rhetoric finds a home in the hate speech of other radical leaders, including the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan. He has referred to Jews, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others as 'bloodsuckers'..."
Following this so far? It's Obama-to-Wright-to-Cone-to-Farrakhan -- sounds like a triple-play combo in a UN softball game. But it doesn't stop there. Once the Enquirer has hopscotched from Obama to Wright to Cone to Farrakhan, without bothering with the pesky business of making actual connections, they jump not one but two more spaces: "During a speech at Howard University -- where the Rev. Wright received his bachelor's and master's degrees -- Khalid Abdul Muhammad, then a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, lauded the actions of mass murderer Colin Ferguson. 'I love Colin Ferguson, who killed all those white folks on the Long Island train,' he said."
So -- there's your real TMSSYWER: National Enquirer links Obama to mass murderer Colin Ferguson!
By that tabloid "logic," I too have a scoop for Huffington Post readers: a TMSSYWER of my own.
"Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947 -- the very same city in which psycho-killer Richard Speck would brutally murder eight nurses...only nine years later! Some Internet posters even claim that Clinton 'spoke admiringly' about Speck -- but so far, despite the links, Clinton has refused to denounce him!"
Of course, as slime-meister Harold Ickes told Time magazine about the Reverend Wright scandal-that-isn't: "Nobody thinks that Barack Obama harbors those thoughts. But that's not the issue. The issue is what Republicans will do with them." By openly appealing to the lowest form of mob rule, Ickes has finally said what many of us have suspected for some time: that Clinton has abandoned any hope of winning on merit, and can only hope to appeal to what's lowest and most vile in the electorate.
It must drive the aptly-named Harold Ickes, and others of his Ickes-ilk, absolutely crazy that the American public has been so dignified and rational in refusing to snap at the Reverend Wright bait. It's like some terrible sudden breakdown in the Pavlov Machine! Damn! We flashed the Scary-Black-People signal, and the voters aren't barking in fear! So even after the Reverend Wright news-cycle has passed, Clinton strategists have nothing more positive or uplifting to offer than this straw-man fear of the Right-Wing Attack Machine.
Maybe they don't want to believe that Americans have become a little more tolerant and a little less fearful when it comes to race-baiting. But I'm starting to believe they have. And, if my hope is confirmed, that will truly be The Most Shocking Story That I Have Ever Read.