I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe

It's been quite a week in John McMaverickypants' campaign, what with his latest insulting ads.

Oh hell, here's the first:



Celebrity? Young, vacuous, slutty white women? Of course, serious Villagers like Ross Douthat don't see it that way:

That's the takeaway, so far as I can tell, from this Josh Marshall post, which starts with the dubious claim that this McCain ad - which Ramesh and John Weaver rightly call childish - is actually playing on white America's subliminal fears that Barack Obama wants to sleep with promiscuous white starlets, and proceeds to the claim that any pundit (like Milbank, say) who uses the word "presumptuous" to describe Barack Obama is just playing along with the McCain campaign's vile attempt to caricature Obama as an "uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women."

Um, no. One of Ross' commenters schools Ross:

If the McCain campaign burned a cross on Obama's lawn the usual suspects would say there was nothing racist about it and that it was just making a positive statement about Christianity and alternative energy sources.

The usual suspects swore up until the bitter end that Macaca Allen was not a racist. They lauded the despicable Jesse Helms when he croaked and insisted he was no racist.

Indeed. Many more of Ross' commenters share similar views.

Even David Gergen, hardly a Liberal pundit, gets the intent behind the McCain ad:

"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals.

As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about."

Yep. Here's the awful ad he's talking about, The One, in which Obama is presented to radical Christionists as the anti-Christ:



Jeez, how bad is this? Here's the full text of one of the Obama quotes edited out of any semblance of context:

"It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

Yeah. It's about America, not Obama. And it's Republican racism being used to disparage Obama.

In support of that argument is a commenter on the Huffpost piece about Gergen claiming race:

Gergen is from the south. Those of us that are of a certain age who grew up in the south can read between the lines. Obama elitist translated is Uppity. The two young white girls shown with him (Britney and Paris) translated is we all are afraid these black men are going to rape our women. Obama being a picky eater translated as who does he think he is someone needs to put him in his place. I am sorry that the south was ever that way. But it was and some people still feel that way and I think the message while subliminal was there.

Indeed.

Bastards.