Black Like Him

Remember Susan Smith, the young South Carolina mother carjacked by a black man who drove off with her two sons still in the car? Remember Charles Stuart, the Boston man robbed by a black man with a “raspy voice,” who also killed his pregnant wife? Now Ashley Todd has joined their ranks as creator of yet another lurid tale involving a fictitious black male criminal. Todd doesn’t need remembering, since she has starred in several recent news cycles.

The young, white McCain volunteer decided to stage her very own dirty trick. She would fake an attack on herself by a black man, purportedly enraged that she was working for the Republican campaign. She turned up at a police station in North Carolina with a black eye and the letter “B” scratched in her cheek -- which, a McCain flack helpfully pointed out to a reporter, stood for “Barack.”

You might think that this story would have excited suspicion right from the start, especially since the “B” was scratched backwards, Todd apparently not having figured out to reverse the image in the mirror. In the photographs her stage-makeup black eye looked like it would have yielded to a damp handkerchief, and apparently did, since it had disappeared by the time of her perp walk.

Todd’s story finally unraveled when no record of her was found on the security camera at the ATM where she claimed to have been withdrawing money at the time of the attack. Before she confessed, however, Todd reportedly received sympathetic phone calls from both McCain and Palin, and a concerned note from the Obama campaign expressing the hope that the perpetrator would soon be brought to justice.

Ashley Todd is a disturbed young woman and obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Certainly her failed hoax wasn’t orchestrated by the campaign. Republicans are the party of Karl Rove, after all; they can do better. But it’s horribly depressing to witness the return appearance of this pernicious fabrication. The predatory Black Man. Him, again. He’s 6’4” and is wearing a track suit. Maybe a knit hat. He has a raspy voice. And a gun or possibly a knife. The details vary, but not by much, since the perpetrators of this particular falsehood tend to be imaginatively challenged. So it’s pretty much the same old story.

Our best hope is that the audience for it is dwindling. That would be a change I could believe in.

John McCain's Imaginary Friend

So John McCain is taking his imaginary friend campaigning with him in Florida. Candidate McCain has just kicked off a bus tour called the “’Joe the Plumber’ Keep Your Wealth Bus Tour.” Joe, being imaginary, will not actually be on the bus. The real Joe, as everyone knows by now, is not named Joe, does not have a plumbing license, and is a tax delinquent. Or he was until a sympathetic Oregon radio host raised $1,200 to pay his tax bill, Queen-for-a-Day-style.

In his famous exchange with Barack Obama, Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher fretted that his ability to buy a business would be undermined by the Obama tax plan – although in fact, an Obama administration would improve Wurzelbacher’s bottom line. Since he earns around $40,000 a year, he actually would get a bigger tax cut under Obama’s plan than under McCain’s, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. [http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/]

You’d think that these revelations would enough to make the Republican to tiptoe quietly away from their new Everyman. But wait, there’s more! As one blogger put it in a headline, “Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher related to Charles ‘the Crook’ Keating.” Oops.

It turns out that Joe is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher, son-in-law of Charles Keating of the infamous savings and loan scandal that tainted McCain’s early political career. You might think that the campaign would have done a better job vetting the man they planned to reference 22 times in the final debate. You might also think that Joe the Plumber was a Republican plant.

Either way, it makes no difference. A week later, the real Joe’s story is out there, his tax arrears, his unlicensed status, his disreputable relations. Yet Joe the Plumber has transcended these inconvenient facts and become Joe the Political Metaphor. A story in yesterday’s Miami Herald reports on a Florida polling phenomenon they call the “Joe the Plumber Effect,” which apparently has improved McCain’s standing in Florida.

For an imaginary friend, Joe seems to be working out pretty well for John McCain. Better than his imaginary enemies anyway.

McCain Hearts ACORN

The time: 2006. The place: Miami. The occasion: a rally co-sponsored by ACORN, the community advocacy organization that a Republican spokesman recently called a “quasi-criminal group.” The keynote speaker: a man who is now running for President of the United States.

He addresses the enthusiastic crowd with these words: “What makes American special is in this room tonight.” The room erupts in cheers . . . for John McCain. Yes, the same man who is now “worried” about Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN, says he needs to “explain” them. Here’s the tape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV9HX1Tjhyw

So I am worried, Sen. McCain – as recently as two years ago, you were praising the very same quasi-criminals you now deem a threat to our democracy. Can you explain?