Obama’s German trip, of course, has only fanned the flames. Blogger Melissa Clouthier, for instance, argues that a flier for Obama uses the exact same imagery from a Hitler poster–why, they’re both seen in profile, which makes the imagery “startlingly alike … when Obama is going to the very place Hitler spoke at and chose as the capital of the world under German supremacy, it’s alarming.”

The Redstate blog, meanwhile announces that “Not Since 1939 Have So Many Germans Turned Out To Hear A Politician in Berlin.”

Because remember, Nazism wasn’t about genocide, or a totalitarian state, it was all about your campaign posters and lots of people cheering for candidates.

My apologies for the lack of links but wordpress is being uncooperative today.

“The name John McCain sounds like ‘John McClain,’ the action hero played by Bruce Willis in the manly Die Hard series. ‘Barack Obama’ sounds like the kind of elitist villain John McClain has to outwit and defeat.”

I assume Aguilar is trying to be funny, but this is just one more variation on Obama being too creepy/unAmerican/secretly Muslim/non-white theme the right wing has been harping on this year, so I’m not letting it pass without comment.

And then we get: “10. McCain is endorsed by Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Obama gets support from Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and every weenie in Hollywood.”

So we should vote for McCain because he has the name of an action hero and he gets endorsements from guys who play action heroes? Does Mr. Aguilar realize McClane is a fictional character and Eastwood, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, like Bruce Willis, are actors, like like Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, not action heroes like Rambo or Dirty Harry?

I fear Republicans have been dipping into the waters of illusion (Saddam had WMDs! He was allied with al Qaida! He was behind 9/11!) to the point they really can’t tell truth from fiction any more.

Which seems yet another version of “Obama is a Muslim/Muslim lover/Islam’s candidate” theme that the right wing will harp on through the rest of the campaign.

Yes, Obama has said he’d be willing to meet with hostile foreign nations, including Muslim ones. It no more follows that he has to “explain” Islamic terrorism than George W. Bush and John McCain’s pandering to the Christian right wing means they have to “explain” Christian terrorists such as Eric Rudolph, Paul Hill and Stephen Jordi, or Bush has to “explain” his father’s support for Saddam when Saddam was actually using poison gas on his own people (remember when Bush I, as Reagan’s vice president, denounced Israel for bombing Iraq’s nuclear program?).

As I’ve said before, for some Republicans, “he’s a Muslim, sort of” is as close as they think they can come to “You can’t vote for him, he’s black!” For others, anyone who thinks Muslims deserve to be treated like human beings is by definition too “weak” to be president.

The speaker: Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wife of British banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, mistress of a 3,200 acre Rothschild family estate, member of the board of Estée Lauder and friend of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

You know, just regular folks. Unlike that elitist Obama.

But I’m somewhat bugged by NYT columnist Maureen Dowd arguing that this book is going to tell us The Truth about Laura Bush: It’s “a well-researched book that imagines what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady.”

Now imagining might seem a dubious way to get behind the facade, but to Dowd it’s the only solution because she can’t figure Bush out any other way: “You don’t get any fingerprints from Laura Bush. When you look into her eyes during an interview, you feel as if she is there somewhere, deep inside herself, miles and miles down … But there’s only one vessel that can ferry you past Laura’s moat, and that’s fiction. Ms. Sittenfeld has creatively applied her crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in the coloring book.”

Frankly, I don’t think fiction can “ferry you past Laura’s moat.” And hearing this from a fellow member of the press bugs me because it dovetails too closely with the national press’s fondness, as I’ve noted before, for seizing on some trivial detail (what’s in her iPod? How does he dress? What do they pick at the salad bar?) and proclaiming it reveals the real person (consider Dowd’s column of a few years back on why Wesley Clark wore an Afghan sweater).

And Dowd has done her share of reporting that was, to put it nicely, fictional, attributing quotes that were never uttered, for instance (Kerry never actually said “Who, among us, does not love NASCAR?” a quote that appeared in one of Dowd’s columns). So maybe it’s no wonder she doesn’t think facts are necessary to get inside someone’s head.

Of course, he didn’t say McCain wasn’t qualified, and he emphasized that McCain’s service had been heroic. And as local veteran Bud Day pointed out, it can be argued that McCain’s strength of character during his imprisonment proves his merits as a leader.

So Webb’s statement is debatable. But it’s also perfectly reasonable. Except in the Republican world where supporting the troops has no meaning except as a political ploy. Like the local vet who thought “John Murtha is a traitor … I support the troops” is a consistent, logical statement to put on the back of his truck.

I didn’t hear a huge outcry locally when Republicans suggested Sen. Max Cleland, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran, was insufficiently patriotic. Or when a Republican operative in the 2000 election said McCain might have been brainwashed by the Vietnamese into some sort of sleeper agent. Or when Day and other veterans started accusing Kerry of lying about his record (contrary to Day’s recent statements, the charges don’t all check out–though he’s right that the Kerry campaign was inept in countering them).

For that matter, the local veterans who insisted they couldn’t stomach Clinton, the “draft dodging, pot-smoking” president, have shown they’re fine with a drunk-driving, draft-dodging president who spouts right-wing talking points. Heck, they’d prefer a right-wing draft dodger over Al Gore (veteran) and Kerry (ditto).

OK, I’ll be fair: This is politics and that sort of thing is normal. Naturally, Republicans are going to be shocked, shocked and appalled at criticism of their candidates’ military records while treating Democrats as fair game. It’s the same logic by which if Bush were found having sex with a squad of cheerleaders, that would be Totally Different from when Clinton had sex with Lewinsky.

But since it is only politics, excuse me if I don’t take all their pious cries of outrage seriously.

I think this is false. Sure, it makes sense for McCain’s man to say it, because it leads directly into the usual talking points: McCain is the guy who has the most national-security cred, McCain is the tough one, McCain will keep us safe.

But the Republicans have had close to eight years to run the country. The fact we haven’t had a terrorist attack since the anthrax letters has been held up as proof that Bush is doing a wonderful job. And McCain supports most of Bush’s policies on eavesdropping, torture (despite his personal distaste for it) and the Iraq War.

So if the policies McCain supports now can’t protect us, why should we expect him to do better if elected?

Which means all suits, and any information that might have come out in court about who the president has spied on and why will never see the light of day. And if they spy some more, they don’t have to worry about ever being called to account.

Our elected officials’ attitude to this was, it seems summed up by Missouri’s Republican Senator Kit Bond: “I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.”

No. If the government isn’t right, we don’t. That’s part of being American.

Not a problem for neo-neocon, who argues “Such a tape would have indicated a victim mentality and an anger that has persisted despite all her advantages and successes in life — and, far more importantly, an attitude that would have belied her (or her husband’s, had he been the source of the quote) [!] claim to be beyond race… The reason the fake story had such legs is that Michelle Obama is on record as having said a number of things that indicate she may in fact harbor just those feelings…”

It’s a good trick for getting extra mileage out of a smear (as Roy Edroso points out): After it’s disproved, use the fact people believed it to carry on just the same as if the subject had really said it.