There’s a scene in the American TV mini series, The Winds of War, where Pug Henry tells Pamala, the English woman he’s busy falling in love with, that Goering’s decision to terror bomb London, while horrible, meant he knew he’d lost the air war.  He couldn’t defeat the RAF, so he turned to bombing civilian targets as a way of breaking British moral.  So while seeing London in flames made it look like Hitler had control of the air, and was winning, in fact Pug told her, it was a sign of desperation.  It meant he knew he’d lost the battle for Britain. 

That’s the way it is with thugs.  It’s when they know they’re loosing that the fight really turns ugly.  I’m thinking about that this morning as I’m reading about John McCain shoving dirt in the face of the corporate news media.  Nobody in recent years has had such a sweetheart relationship with the press as McCain.  The alternative media has written story after story of the corporate press sucking up to McCain.  And now he’s rubbing their faces in dogshit.  What gives here?

One theory is that they just know they can get away with it.  The Republican Noise Machine has been so successful at gaming the press and demonizing democrats that the McCain camp knows it can do whatever it damn well pleases and the base won’t give a good goddamn what the press says about it.  They all get their news from FOX, and even if FOX turned against McCain the base understands that Obama is the Antichrist, is related to Osama bin Laden and/or Saddam Hussein, and anyway is a Muslim and all Muslims belong to al Qaeda and anyway Obama is the Antichrist.  John McCain can spit in Brent Hume’s face and Rupert Murdoch could endorse Obama and FOX news could run nothing but Obama campaign ads and the base will vote for McCain.  The economy could crash in flames and the base loose their homes and their life savings and they’ll vote for McCain.  Better sleep on the streets with a republican in the white house then the Antichrist.

So much, so obvious.  But what of the swing vote?  Without that swing vote the republicans can’t win, and they’re not winning that vote by playing so hard to the base.  If anything, they’re turning it away. 

Here’s my thinking: they know they’ve lost.  McCain wouldn’t be antagonising the press, he wouldn’t have picked a fundamentalist nutcase for his VP, if the party insiders knew they had a chance in hell with the swing vote.  And without the swing they loose.  So they’re goosing the base.  Again, so much, so obvious.  But look at it.  They can’t win with only the base on board.  But what they can do, is whip it up into such a hysterical fit of passion that, hopefully, the democrats won’t be able to govern at all for the next four years.

I think what we may well be seeing now, in the choice of Sarah Palin, and in McCain’s openly spitting on the press that has been faithfully sucking up to him for the past decade or so, is the start of the next four years of scorched earth fighting.  They know they’ve lost this election and they’re laying the groundword for the next four years of destroying the Obama presidency and taking back congress. They’re laying the ground work for the "McCain was stabbed in the back by the news media" propaganda they’ll be dispensing for the next four years, to keep the press cowed and submissive.  And they’re poisoning the well to prevent any shred of common ground and common purpose developing in the next four years among Americans.  They don’t want the wounds to heal…they want them open and raw. 

So by the time election night 2008 is over, the base will hate the rest of the nation so deeply, the only thing they’ll want for the next four years is blood.  Every time President Obama appears on their TV screens, they’ll see the Antichrist.  Every time a democrat opens their mouths to say anything for the next four years, the base will know they’re hearing a servant of the Antichrist.  If the democrats don’t get a big enough majority in both houses to govern, it’s going to be absolute poisonous ugly vindictive gridlock.  

What the rest of us have to know is winning the election is only the start of the fight.  If you thought Newt Gingrich’s war on congress back in the early 1990s was ugly, trust me you haven’t ugly yet.  Ask your gay and lesbian neighbors how ugly they can get.  I’ve said this before…things don’t start getting really bad until the republicans begin loosing power.  That’s when it hits the fan.