Posted on 03/29/2008 4:19:18 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
THRILLED by the mess the Democrats are making of their presidential nomination contest, Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio rabble-rouser, has hit upon a wizard wheeze.
He has urged Republicans to register themselves as Democrats in the key primary state of Pennsylvania, and “if they can stomach it” to cast a vote for Senator Hillary Clinton.
The aim, says Limbaugh, is to help Clinton prolong the primary race as long as possible, thereby ensuring a Democratic bloodbath at the party’s nominating convention this summer, and handing the White House to Senator John McCain, who is certain of the Republican nomination. Limbaugh has dubbed his plot “Operation Chaos”.
Pennsylvania officials have reported a surge of voter registration, with almost 15,000 new Democrats signing up in one week.
Whether or not Limbaugh’s mischief-making is responsible – “They are in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now,” he said happily – the battle for the Democratic nomination shows no sign of easing up.
Storming across Indiana on Friday, Clinton shrugged off complaints by party leaders that her increasingly bitter struggle against Senator Barack Obama is playing into Republican hands and jeopardising the Democrats’ chances of regaining the White House in November.
“There are some people who are saying, you know, we really ought to end this primary, we just ought to shut it down,” she told a crowd in Mishawaka, Indiana, which votes on May 6. Clinton’s supporters cried: “No! No!” and cheered wildly when she pledged to remain in the race.
Clinton’s refusal to back down in a contest that many Democrats believe she can no longer win followed a week of venomous insults, belligerent manoeuvring and rare intrigue as party leaders sought an early end to a mesmerising but destructive primary spectacle.
“We cannot go five more months with the kind of daily sniping that’s going on,” warned Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.
“We don’t want this to degenerate into a big fight at the convention,” added Howard Dean, the party’s chairman.
Even Obama acknowledged that the primary race resembled “a good movie that lasted about a half-hour too long”.
After a series of secret meetings and late-night conference calls with senior party officials, Dean acknowledged last week that the acrimonious rivalry had become “unhealthy” and should not be allowed to drag through the summer unresolved until the nominating convention in Denver in late August.
Yet the party remains badly divided over attempts to force an early result. Clinton aides are furious that the New York senator is being pressed to step down while votes are still being cast and the prospect of a convention upset remains. Clinton told her staff last week that she would not be “bullied” out of the race.
Behind the surge of internal feuding lies a Clinton blunder that some officials believe has fatally undermined her chances. The revelation last week that Clinton had falsely claimed to have come under sniper fire while visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady earned her national ridicule and reminded Americans of her husband’s inconsistent record on telling the truth.
Almost 1m people viewed a spoof internet video that showed old news footage of her uneventful visit, with explosions and rocket fire imposed on the film.
More damagingly, the sniper fiasco effectively negated her gains from the controversy over Obama’s association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the radical Chicago preacher who has repeatedly declared: “God damn America.”
Obama’s aides were quick to suggest that Clinton’s lapse followed a pattern of embellishment and misrepresentation. Clinton’s staff fired back that Obama had exaggerated aspects of his own past: he once claimed to be a law professor when he was really a lecturer.
“What’s going on is a food fight, personal attacks,” complained Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who recently endorsed Obama.
At the heart of the stand-off is the mathematical race to acquire the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination in a convention vote. Obama currently leads Clinton by 1,628 to 1,497, and the outcome of the vote is likely to be decided by almost 800 “superdelegates”, party officials who are not formally committed to any candidate.
Hillary’s hopes of attracting superdelegate backing appear to rest on a thumping victory in Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, and a blazing finish in Indiana, North Carolina and other smaller states that have not yet voted. With a series of victories under her belt, her aides argue she would be able to convince the superdelegates that she is best placed to take on McCain, especially in larger industrial states.
Yet the most recent opinion polls have been of little comfort to Clinton. Obama appears to have recovered from a Wright-induced slump, and last week he won another valuable endorsement, from Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, where Clinton has been running strongly.
Hillary remains ahead in Pennsylvania, but her lead among blue-collar workers has been shrinking and on Friday Obama launched a six-day bus tour blitz of the state. He has also regained his lead in North Carolina and was eight points ahead of his Democratic rival in a national Gallup tracking poll on Friday.
It was a different story against McCain, who led Obama by up to seven points in tracking polls. Democrats fear that whoever they end up choosing, they will fall further behind McCain if the Clinton-Obama slugfest continues to dominate the headlines.
Party officials acknowledged last week that unless Clinton slumps to a surprise defeat in Pennsylvania, there is little prospect of intervention until after the final primaries on June 3. One senior strategist who has been neutral in the contest said he believed that Al Gore, the former vice-presidential candidate and winner of the Nobel peace prize, was “ideally positioned” to intervene at that point to persuade one of the candidates to step down.
“If Al and a bunch of party leaders – Nancy Pelosi [speaker of the House of Representatives], Dean, a couple of senators – call a meeting of superdelegates in June and urge them to pick a winner, there will be a huge fuss for a couple of days, but then this darned mess will be over,” the strategist said.
Dean said he hoped the contest nomination would be settled by July 1, which for some Democrats feels like a very long time.
No wonder Limbaugh is laughing: last week his website was selling “Operation Chaos” T-shirts for $19.95 each.
Bare-chested, gunslinger candidates are the voters’ dream
Many Democrats dream of the day that Barack Obama will become president. Others just dream of Obama, and then publish the details online.
An unusual trio of weblogs is appealing to American voters to provide details of any dreams they have had of the leading candidates in the presidential race. A law student from Brooklyn claims on the I Dream of Barack blog that Obama appeared in one of his dreams wearing green dreadlocks and ripping off his T-shirt.
A young female student dreams that she is Michelle, Obama’s wife. An unemployed man pictures him wrestling Osama Bin Laden to the ground and biting off his ring finger.
At the I Dream of Hillary blog, a Colorado man dreams he is shooting at Clinton, who shoots back. A 60-year-old male art critic dreams of Clinton on a water bed. More than 100 dreams have been posted to each site so far this year.
There is a similar blog devoted to John McCain, the Republican candidate, but the 71-year-old Arizona senator does not seem to be much of a dreamboat.
Only seven dreams have been posted at I Dream of McCain. One imagines him at the zoo in his underwear.
“What’s going on is a food fight...” complained Bill Richardson.
El Gordo speaks from what he knows.
What WILL Rush do when hillleree is victorious over McCain?
“What WILL Rush do when hillleree is victorious over McCain?”
Likely watch his ratings go up.
Lick his self and enjoy it.
Best video edit I’ve seen of Hillary under ‘sniper fire’
The "Rush is a fool" crowd will probably be here shortly.
I realize this is the subject of much disagreement among FReepers, but I'm convinced that on this issue, at least, "Rush is right."
There's almost no way Hillary gets the nomination. But the longer she stays in, the weaker a candidate Obama will be. Anyway, if Hillary somehow does emerge with the nomination, hundreds of thousands of Democrats -- most of them "of color" -- will stay home in November.
I have that dream every night. Sometimes it's boxers, otherwise it's briefs.
Once was just a jockstrap, but I woke up screaming.
On another Operation Chaos page, Rush claims that some of the delegates at the DNC National Convention in Denver will be Operation Chaos people-—fully credentialed and able to vote for the democrat nominee for president:
Operation Chaos, Phase Three: Our Operatives Will Go to Denver
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, yesterday we had our second call like this. We’ve had callers from Texas who are foot soldiers, enlisted officers in Operation Chaos. Both of these gentlemen — one in Austin, the other from Galveston — not only voted for Hillary Clinton in the Texas primary, they went a step further.
They went back and they caucused! Operation Chaos operatives went back and caucused for Hillary Clinton. These two are just two of many. These two are now delegates to the Texas state convention. We have operatives on the inside of the Texas state convention. They are delegates for Hillary Clinton. They will be there undercover. They will be there as Operation Chaos covert operatives. But they are not the only two. I’ve heard talk (I’m sure that you have, too) that the Drive-By Media says that Operation Chaos isn’t working, which, as I said yesterday, is just great news. It’s music to my ears. If they think it’s not working, they will continue to ignore us (ha-ha) and we will be able to slither in underneath the radar making them even more vulnerable. Now, folks, there are many phases here to Operation Chaos. We’re simply here still in phase one. Phase one consists of operatives changing party registration, voting in Democrat primaries in upcoming states. This happened in Ohio and Texas in record numbers. It looks like it’ll happen in Pennsylvania in record numbers. In this case, voting for Hillary to continue the bloodletting in the Democrat Party all the way through their convention, for the chaos to continue.
Now, the second and third phases of Operation Chaos consist of exactly what you’ve heard happening in Texas: Our operatives actually are being named delegates to state party conventions. The third phase of Operation Chaos will lead to some of these delegates being sent and named as delegates to the Democrat National Convention in Denver. So Democrats out there, and you members of the Drive-By Media — you who think that Operation Chaos isn’t working and is ineffective — remember this: When we get to Denver and the Democrat National Convention and you look around and you’re a delegate, the person next to you could be mine. The person sitting next to you in your delegation could be an Operation Chaos operative. Now, let’s fantasize for a moment about where phase three of Operation Chaos could take us. I mean, let’s say we get down to this convention and they get into a credentials fight and all of the votes that have taken place up ‘til now in the Democrat primaries are rendered meaningless. The superdelegates weigh in, credentials fight, all that goes on. Let’s say it comes down to a close vote, 10, 20, maybe 30 votes separating Obama and Hillary. Phase three of Operation Chaos makes it quite possible that my operatives — my operatives! — will determine the Democrat nominee.
It is quite possible that I and my operatives will be choosing the Democrat presidential nominee. They might be saying, “Rush, why are you giving this away? I mean, you’re running a covert operation, yet you’re telling us about it.” That’s exactly right. Because you don’t think it’s true. You think I’m making it all up. You think I’m smoking you. You think I’m just having fun. Furthermore, you don’t even think it’s effective anyway. You are wide-open vulnerable for phase three of Operation Chaos. I’m happy to tell you what I’m going to do. I spell out what our intentions are every day on this program for 20 years and you haven’t been able to stop us. You will not be able to stop phase three of Operation Chaos. Here at the EIB Network, we have highly skilled information technology technicians and professionals working on a special encryption program so that I can send instructions to our operatives at the Democrat National Convention via their handheld wireless devices: iPhones, whatever it is, whatever they use. This is how Operation Chaos will send the message to various operatives that are there as delegates to the Democrat National Convention. It’s being tested as we speak. It will be ready in just a few days, probably toward the end of next week.
So even if you are forewarned — all of you liberals and the Drive-By Media people, Democrats — you will not know and you will not be able to trust and you will not be able to confirm just of which your delegates in Denver are mine. Part of Operation Chaos. They will have been credentialed. They will have passed all the tests. They will have been to state conventions prior to arriving in Denver. They will have been briefed. They will be told how to vote by me, depending on their number and the closeness of the final vote at the convention, and it will be easy for them to receive my instructions because of the special encryption that we are working on for our wireless transmission to their handheld devices. So those are the next phases of Operation Chaos. I just wanted to alert you to both of these instances. No crimes have been committed, no charges in Ohio for voter fraud. I mentioned the phase two and phase three of Operation Chaos yesterday in the final hour of the program, and I wanted to get to it the first part of the program today so that everybody was up to speed on it.
END TRANSCRIPT
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_032808/content/01125107.guest.html.guest.html
Howard the Duck just doesn't see the fun that can be found if it does go to the convention.
I do. : D
Wizard wheeze?
Great choice of words for an Obama supporter.
is there record for least number of posts and most number of KEYWORD? How does snipergate fit into this? :o)
“Snipergate” is what some are calling Senator Hillary Clinton’s fabricated story about sniper fire at the Bosnian airfield.
“We cannot go five more months with the kind of daily sniping that’s going on,” warned Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.”
Yes we can, yes we can....we have hope, don’t change... NOW, yes we can.
Si Se Puede, Amigos!
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