I first became aware of the emerging Ashley Todd story yesterday afternoon, driving from workplace to workplace in Anchorage. I turned the Eddie Burke right-wing blowhard, hate-mongering AM radio program on, to see what he's up to.He was ranting about how awful this was. He'd read about it on the Drudge Report, and was yelling about how this was so typical of the things Obama supporters are doing to white women all around the country. "But the media won't report it," Eddie claimed.
That's the same Eddie Burke who quite willingly gave out the phone numbers of liberal white women over the air on his program, which got these women a lot more hate than it turns out Todd suffered from any black man.
As most people know, Todd appears to have committed a hate crime - upon herself, at least. A lot has been written about Todd in the past 36 hours, but Jane Hamsher put it succinctly, in a comment at firedoglake's Campaign Silo:She’s quite obviously mentally ill.
The real criminals are, once again, the same people who lifted Joe the Plumber into the headlines and then blamed Barack Obama for invading his privacy — the McCain campaign. They couldn’t see what just about everybody else who looked at this story, up to and including Michelle Malkin, obviously could — there was something wrong with the girl’s story. It suited their auto-smear campaign, and they ran with it, vetting it every bit as well as they did Sarah Palin. Or not-Joe the Plumber.
I listened to a bit of Burke's sleazy, vile bile again today, to see if he was apologetic. Maybe he was, but on the parts of the program I caught, he was baiting gays, feminists and Jews.
Yesterday, the McCain campaign, as if to further illustrate how desperate they are becoming, jumped on this story that didn't make sense from the beginning:
John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
and:
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."
and:
The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.
and:
The Republican candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, called Todd on Thursday afternoon to express their concern, the campaign confirmed.
I haven't seen any subsequent statements by either John McCain or Sarah Palin, which might be appropriate, seeing as how much their campaign staff poured flames on this race hate engendering hoax yesterday.
As desperate as McCain and Palin are getting, we may see this next:
images by AP, PA and Darkblack