The inmates at America's Shittiest Website are afraid, very afraid. For America. Because America is about to elect the Black Stalin as our next president. Nordlinger:

What’s depressing, to a person like me, is that Obama has mastered the trick of coming off as perfectly moderate — even when your career and thought have been very different. Listening to Obama last night, you would have taken him to be a Sam Nunn, David Boren type. No ACORN, no Ayers, no Wright, no community-organizin’ radicalism, no nothing. He certainly knows what it takes to appeal to people in a general election. Then, once he’s in — if he gets in — he will govern as far to the left as possible.

Frightening!

Professional crackpot Mona Charen concurs: "Still, the McCain campaign has not yet done is most important job: showing the world what a true leftist Obama really is." Of course, Charen thinks that Obama enjoys tearing infants from young mothers' wombs, presumably with his bare teeth, so you'd have to wonder what she wouldn't believe about the Democratic nominee. In her defense, she cites a ridiculous Commentary article that charges, among many similarly fascinating claims, that Obama is a wild-eyed extremist because he disagrees with the Bush administration, once called Karl Rove "cynical," and believes that the Iraq war is the disastrous consequence of ideological fanaticism. Also rehearsed are the incredibly tedious Wright and Ayers smears and trivia.

There's a lot to snark about here, as the notion that Obama is a radical leftist is absurd on its face. But a more substantial observation might be that it probably has not occured to cretins like Nordlinger and Charen that one of the reasons Obama came off so well in the debate last night according to the polls is that Obama is not, in fact, an Obamafascist Commie Gangsta Gay Elitist Gangbanger Muslim Abortionist. There's just no way anyone, much less the really very mainstream Obama, could ever look in reality like the hysterically emailed and blogged-about wingnut version of him. All he needed for a win was to refrain from disclosing his plan to hand off the White House keys to Bin Laden next March.

I doubt they can notice this, though. First, they're insane. Second, this is their industry: there's pots of money and soft, cushy gigs involved in spinning horseshit fables about how Democrats are "socialists." They learned that in the Clinton administration. Third, I myself plan to be pushing Obama further to the left if he wins, and the same goes for the House and Senate leadership. Apart from the kookiness and the cupidity, their political goal is to try to intimidate the Dems from actually doing anything allegedly "leftist" but actually rational -- stuff like sensibly regulating the markets, ending the war, stopping torture, dismantling the surveillance state, and establishing a national healthcare system that doesn't suck ass, as opposed to the one we currently have.

None of this is crazy, or commie, or even especially radical, but I'm afraid that we're going to have to actually convince the Democratic party of that after the election. First things first, though, and that's the election.

The clip above is from Slap Shot, for Mr. Newman, and is completely unrelated to the post. Reggie Dunlop was, he said, his favorite role.