Medusa’s original post: According to a rumor on Daily Kos, Obama’s internals show him with a mere 2 point lead in Pennsylvania. If true, this is very bad news for the Anointed One. John Kerry carried Pennsylvania by only 2.5 points, and Kerry didn’t insult the voters there.

Heidi Li Feldman and Marc Rubin of the Denver Group and Democrats for Principles Before Party (DFPBP) have two ads currently running in different metro regions in Pennsylvania. Watch the most recent one, here:

Pennsylvania is key in the election, and as you may have heard, Democratic Representative Jack Murtha first called his own Pennsylvania constituents “racists” but has now softened the insult by calling them “rednecks.” In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Murtha said:

There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area

But actually it turns out that these people are the gun-toting, bitter, religious types that the Dems find so clingy and bitter. Murtha clarified his remarks to mean that:

some of his constituents in western Pennsylvania are “rednecks” and the entire region just five to 10 years ago was “really redneck.

Marc Rubin’s fabulous post on No Quarter How Democrats Can Defeat Obama, See McCain Win, Still Get Everything They Want and Respect Themselves In The Morning spelled out the reasons why many Democrats refuse to vote for Obama:

Many Democrats seem to be going through a period of conflict over this election. They see Obama for what he is: a dishonest snake oil salesman, unfit and unqualified to be President, throwing out one sweet talking lie after another as the political Mr. Goodbar, trying to pick up as many votes as he can get.

Rubin rightly states that Obama must be defeated in order to “fumigate” the Democratic Party of its corrupting influences. And he urges people to vote for McCain to send a clear message to the party that gave us the Rules and By-Laws that awarded Hillary’s votes to Obama:

Obama is the nominee because of a dishonest primary in which these same people, along with the press, did everything possible to sell Obama as the nominee and do it as dishonestly as they knew how, including rigging the roll call vote, violating every Democratic Party rule and procedure in the process.

Dean, Pelosi, Brazile, Fowler and every member of the DNC who engineered and went along with fixing the process needs to go. Those who won’t resign (though I think many will after an Obama defeat) need to have their power and their base removed, so the that the Democratic Party can air itself out. And the only way that can happen is with an Obama loss. And the bigger the better.

Rubin is a former advertising executive and he understands how advertising works. In a recent interview on No We Won’t radio, with Riverdaughter, Heidi Li and Harriet Christensen, Rubin explains how skewed the polls are and why, and he says that with enough money to create ads, he feels that the DFPBP could influence this election away from Obama. Listen to the interview here.

Donating to The Denver Group’s DFPBP is a powerful way to make a difference now. If we can get 500 No Quarter regulars to donate $20 we, as a community, could raise $10,000 to run powerful, persuasive ads in Pensylviania and other battleground states!!! Now is the time to act. You have the power. Click here to donate.

Remember what Hillary said:

For everyone here in Ohio and across America who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up — this one is for you.

More No Quarter posts on The Denver Group:

The quality of intent: What is really at stake in the 2008 Presidential Election by Heidi Li Feldman

Holding the DNC’s Feet to the Fire: An Interview with Marc Rubin of The Denver Group by Ani

The Denver Group’s New Video by SusanUnPc

The Denver Group’s Letter To Prevaricator Howard Dean by Uppity Woman

MAKING THE SQUEAKY WHEEL SQUEAK LOUDER Marc Rubin

NQ Radio Interview — The Denver Group Bud White

This didn’t occur to me until McCain selected Palin. I knew that Obama benefited from and encouraged the misogynistic narrative against Hillary. However, McCain’s nod to Hillary’s voters was exactly what Obama should have done but for which he is psychologically incapable. It shows a level of respect for our grief at the way Hillary was treated and it’s a tacit acknowledgment that Hillary should have been on the ticket. Riverdaughter writes:

McCain is only pandering to you wimmin. Truth: Yup. And??? You think we’re too stupid to realize this? Of course he’s pandering to us. He’s a f%*(ing politician. That’s what successful politicians do. They reach out to voting blocs and offer them something.

Why is Obama so afraid of Hillary that he wouldn’t even vet her for VP? What is so scary about this brilliant and beautiful woman who works 10X harder than him and who won the popular vote?

Much like George W. Bush, I think it’s Obama’s massive but fragile ego. Obama believes the press reports about his greatness, he drinks in the adulation from his adoring fans, and he sees himself as near-divine. Any crack to this facade threatens the whole construct; it would be the death of his ego. The faux presidential seal IS the Mission Accomplished banner. It’s no accident, of course, that the McCain campaign has skewered Obama for his narcissism, comparing him to celebrities and Charlton Heston’s Moses. Team McCain has done their homework. I have no doubt that they have dossier on Obama, not just on his friends, but on his habit of choices.

In a brilliant 12-part series on this issue, blogger Valentine Bonnaire, discusses Obama’s ego in detail. She sees his choices being made out of narcissism. A narcissist will

stop at nothing? Just to bask in the reflected glow of adoration, But really, the followers mean absolutely NOTHING to the narcissist. They are only a means to an end? And, the narcissist is consumed with “winning” except, once having “won” what they are after? It’s on to the next challenge…

Sam Copeland, writing in these pages, asks:

Why did Obama have to select a lower tier candidate – a candidate who has twice left the Presidential sweepstakes (in 1988 and 2008) in early rounds?

One answer that is often given is what we can politely term Obama’s ego. Top talent candidates such as Clinton and Clark would threaten his self-image as a one man crusader – the star of his own Saturday morning action-adventure cartoon series. A big ego can be a serious liability in making political decisions. It prevents one from seeing the world through the eyes of others, and that lack of realism and perspective-taking undoubtedly leads to political blunders.

And make no mistake, bypassing Hillary for the conventional Biden was a political blunder of Titanic proportions. First, of course, it further alienated Hillary supporters. Second, it made McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin that much more damaging to Obama. On the Left, it gives Hillary supporters the opportunity, in good conscience, to exact revenge on Obama and the DNC by actually pulling the lever for McCain. It neutralizes Obama’s insulting but effective race-baiting (”you’re a racist if you don’t for me”) narrative, allowing independents, women, and conservative Democrats a moral redoubt (I’m not voting against a black man, I’m voting for a woman). Lastly, by choosing Biden, Obama undercut his message of Change by choosing a man who has spent his entire life in Washington.

Hillary was Obama’s last chance to bring many of her supporters into the fold. The always astute Anglachel writes:

The real elephant (ahem) in the middle of the room is the unacknowledged fact that the DNC and their selected candidate abused the intelligence and trust of the party base and subjected the base’s preferred candidate to outrageous abuse month after month in the primaries. The blogosphere’s hysterical overreaction to the Palin selection reveals the fear that their hate-filled, explicitly misogynist tactics will backfire on them and that a significant enough percentage of this disaffected base will do more than sit out the election in November, but will actively cast a protest vote.

Obama’s narcissistic drive for power unleashed a politics so ugly that millions of committed progressives are seriously considering voting for his opponent. Palin is McCain’s love letter to Hillary’s supporters. Revenge is a bitch, baby.

When someone calls Hillary Clinton a bitch, it’s not just about her.It’s about me and my fellow MOMocrats and my sister. It’s about my mother and my aunts and my daughter. It’s about mothers and friends and women who haven’t even become the next generation of leaders, yet.The most famous and infamous TV pundits aren’t reserving their ‘looks are everything’ moments to talk of Hillary’s cleavage or wrinkles. There are no limits. We are all fair game.

And then there’s Hillary herself, who in all the newspapers and TV blips is calling for her supporters to line up behind the presumptive nominee. HIllary’s most devoted supporters are in a double bind: we do not want to see Hillary blamed if Obama is defeated, and we absolutely want to see Obama go down like the Titanic. Our anger is not about Hillary “losing.” This is about a stolen nomination, about the takeover of the Democratic party by the neo-liberals and the so-called progressives who use sexism, misogyny, and ageism with abandon, who belittle and insult blue collar workers and who use accusations of racism against anyone who points out that Hillary actually won the popular vote. In response to CNN’s Roland Martin, TGW writes:

Why oh why, lectures Roland, can’t Hillary and her supporters put party over “your petty personal issues.” Roland also threw around the word “dumb,” but refused to specify if he was calling Hillary “dumb” or her supporters. And we were just getting used to the term “dead-enders.”But you heard him. Fall in line little wimin! Or in the words of Barack Obama, just ‘get over it.’

If I hadn’t already been a feminist for the past 40 years, this whole primary debacle would be my conversion. Watching how it continues to be open season for shooting down Hillary, many people, not only women but especially women, have moved passed the primary and into a vast and airless realm of unreality. How has my party, the Democratic Party, become so corrupt? They use sexism to demean Hillary and ugly power plays to “defeat” her, as we saw in the RBC decision regarding MI and FL. Some of us are willing to forego our allegiance to the party because IT NO LONGER REPRESENTS US AND OUR VALUES:

Ooops. Somebody isn’t falling in line. In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken after Obama announced his VP pick, 27 percent of Hillary supporters say they’ll vote for McCain, up from 16 percent in late June. “The number of Clinton Democrats who say they would vote for McCain has gone up 11 points since June.”

Using the argument about the Supreme Court judges and Roe v Wade to guilt-trip people into voting for Obama is the height of hypocrisy in a party that has used sexism and misogyny to undermine the very best candidate for women. Do they think women are so issue oriented that we will allow one of our smartest and strongest leaders to be a sacrificial victim on the altar of their agenda and go along with it? For many women, this has gone far beyond Hillary, far beyond the election, far beyond platform politics:

With the brothers Roland Martin and Jack Caffetry lecturing the little wimin about our “petty personal issues,” the numbers of rebellious women can only increase.

For example, read this post by Riverdaughter, which she begins with a quote from Dowd’s Hillary-blaming piece a few weeks back. Dowd wrote, “Hillary Clinton feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Barack Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain.” Riverdaughter posts in response to this:

Ladies, putting aside the lie that Hillary is putting us up to this (she has absolutely nothing to do with our movement), is there something familiar about that sentence? Did it strike a bell deep in the corner of your mind where you have stored an unpleasantry? From personal experience, I can say that without exception, I have never met a man who did not behave as if his reason for being was more important than mine. No matter how supportive they were, when push came to shove, it was always my life that more easily sacrificed and compromised. My wishes and aspirations were a little less lofty. My gifts and talents a little less meaningful and worthy of praise. Nothing short of my winning a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer and a humanitarian award would be acknowledged as sufficient for a life changing decision to go in my favor. Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough. When push comes to shove, where a man lives, what he does with his time, what career he pursues and what dreams he has will always come first. The only power women have in most relationships, ultimately, is the power to walk away from them. That is, if she wants to be judged a person in her own right.

This is strong language, reminiscent of the early days of the women’s movement. But this is how many of us feel. This is no longer about Hillary Clinton for President, although we wish she was our candidate. This is about the Democratic Party’s willingness to abuse an exceptional woman in order to promote a mediocre man.

Neither the main stream media nor the Democratic Party nor even the Obama campaign itself has come to terms with the damage Obama’s tactics have done to our Party. The damage was facilitated by the media and the big blogs.

Obama’s first task was controlling the media. Politicalcenter writes:

Taking their cue from totalitarian regimes, Obama developed his own propaganda arm which spewed facts and figures to the media and made false claims designed to keep controversial issues dealing with the candidate off of the main stream media. At the same time, Obama attacked in merciless ways those who voiced opposition on various Internet systems and sources, including the media who dared to question him, and has now stopped debates in favor of tuning his message against McCain again with the help of completely compliant media.

Consider that there’s a growing movement of determined progressives who are committed to Obama’s defeat. Our swelling numbers and strength of purpose are actually pretty shocking when you stop and think about it. The PUMA movement isn’t bitter or small; it’s radical and revolutionary: This is how parties are born and die. You are living history. SusanUnPC writes:

Hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters will NEVER vote for Barack Obama. And a great many will vote for John McCain simply because they believe he is qualified to be president, and that Barack Obama is NOT qualified or experienced enough — and we’re worried sick about such a teleprompter-dependent neophyte being handed the toughest job in the world.

In addition to Obama’s race-baiting and thuggish tactics, Anglachel suggests that Obama’s problem is the illegitimacy of his nomination:

The increasing rejection of Obama by voters is a measure of his declining legitimacy. People who once thought they would gladly vote for him, like me, are now implacably opposed to him. He is no longer legitimate in our eyes…Participating in and profiting from the media hatred of the Clintons, throwing out accusations of racism to try to forestall criticism and inflate AA vote counts, encouraging people to be “Obamacans” not Democrats, the “Democrat for a Day” strategy, engaging in intimidation and threats to extract caucus votes, aggressively trying to monopolize money specifically to silence alternative voices, and treating voters who do not choose him first with contempt.

As Anglachel writes, there are several million of us who feel that Obama’s nomination is illegitimate, that his tactics are counter to our values as progressives, and that he is not the unity figure he claims to be. Indeed, Obama wears two masks: at one moment he gives high-minded speeches, at the next he is accusing Bill Clinton, a beloved former president, of racism.

As progressives, we are repulsed by the totalitarian nature of Obama’s candidacy — creating a cult of personality, the venom espoused by his adherents, the delegate stealing — tactics that are repugnant to the many who have spent a lifetime working for democracy and social justice.

Almost four years ago at DailyKos, DemFromCT wrote about Bush in ways which seem even more fitting for Obama today:

I was intrigued to hear some of the theories on the talking heads shows; it’s culture issues, not class economic issues. Kerry’s reality-based, Bush is not. Bush has run for four years to select and indoctrinate those who believe him and everyone else is against him.

During this primary season, Obama’s campaign used the big blogs as instruments to indoctrinate progressives and silence the opposition. Take the strike of DailyKos, for example. Imagine that this had happened at a progressive company: a group of women and men complain to management about rampant sexism and abuse. The manager, Kos in this case, regardless of his own agenda, would investigate and set limits on abusive language and behavior. Instead Kos, the proprietor of the biggest liberal blog, in a moment of unbelievable arrogance, calls their strike “laughable.” Feminism, justice, and respect are thrown out in favor of one candidate.

Politicalcenter continues:

The propaganda process was carefully managed turning everything damaging to Obama into racist or irrelevant issues. These included blatant refusals to print or to discuss clearly relevant issues to claims that any discussion was racism. Obama did not care about the truth. Only the message.

From this vantage point, Obama’s continual attacks on Hillary Clinton supporters were continually repeated through numerous MSM channels with little or no questioning and constant support for the Obama view of the truth. Obama thereby created the most one-sided message system ever developed in US politics.

The PUMA movement is the classic liberal fight against injustice. The ancestors to Just Say No Deal PUMAs are the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement. We’re not bound to a particular party or a candidate. We’re joined together by our values. John Kennedy famously defined liberalism as:

not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

Based on our progressive values, we reject Obama’s use of race-baiting and sexism as political tools — although ignored by the press and perpetuated by bloggers — we have documented it and are emboldened by these injustices:

Indeed, to this day, the Democrats have continued to use racism wherever they turn. From the Wright controversy, where Dean called the coverage racist, to the war against Geraldine Ferraro claiming that she is a racist, Obama has turned the tables dramatically against free speech and toward some other place that we dare not go or discuss.

Our movement faces ridicule and obstacles but is born out of our principles, and we will not be silenced. We believe that Obama’s defeat will strengthen the progressive cause long-term, we vote our conscience and we will not be bullied into supporting a candidate and movement who consistently violates the progressive tenets that include free thought and expression.

Riverdaughter perfectly expresses the progressive’s rational to reject to Obama. She writes:

Time is not going to heal this wound. Oh, I take that back. If I wake up on Nov. 5 to find that Barack Obama, the inexperienced, untested, unvetted, lightweight candidate who we counted on you to stop, if I find that he is NOT my president, I will finally be over it. If the man who called me a racist because I thought he was unready does not take the oath in January, I will be satisfied. If all the people he threw under the bus, the old, poor, working class, Appalachians, woman, latinos, asians, gay and Muslims find that the Democratic Party is now genuinely shocked and chastened for screwing us over as well as any Republican would have done, then we will have exercised our power.

The Obamabots are in a panic. Even though he has claimed the nomination still we Hillary supporters have not seen the light. They are in shock that we are not swarming with the masses to the selected one.

On Wednesday, I wrote a defiant post declaring that I would never vote for Obama. An Obamabot, in a comment which I’m sure was pasted elsewhere, asked:

Would you completely disregard women’s reproductive rights allow the US Supreme Court turn ultra-right by allowing Mccain [sic] to win? Do you think he cares about the working class? Really? Do you really want 100 years of war in Iraq? Isn’t 8 years of republican incompetence enough for you?

The answer for me (and for many others) is that I will not condone the misogyny, delegate stealing, and race-baiting from Obama and his people. I am a Democrat precisely to fight against the type of campaign run by Obama. I will not be blackmailed into voting for a candidate whose tactics I find repulsive.

One of the areas I found most repulsive was the pro-male and anti-woman symbolism employed by Obama and the Media.

The heavy use of symbolism in politics — as a substitute for discussing real policy — is sometimes called Kabuki theatre, a type of Japanese drama “in which the actor holds a picturesque pose to establish his character.”

Applied to political drama, for example, John Kerry was shown windsurfing in Republican attack ads, an image used as a symbol of Kerry’s supposed flip flopping and elitism (while Kerry cuts through the surf, a narrator says: ”Kerry voted for the Iraq war, opposed it, supported it, and now opposes it again”).

The Kabuki theatre of this election, as I see it, was the use of violent language and imagery against Hillary, and the Hero Myth journey to represent Obama.

Regrading the violence directed at Hillary, for instance, a reader posted a comment to my blog: “I have been depressed for months, because I’m a woman and the homicidal wishes towards her are also directed at me.”

As the reader suggests, a narrative coming out of this campaign has been the misogynistic killing of Hillary Clinton. Keith Olbermann wanted “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out,” and Stop Hillary suggested that “Hillary is batshit, Liebercrat crazy. Fuck her with a pitchfork.”

The other narrative, of course, is Obama as fulfilling the Hero Myth. The fantasy of a multi-racial poor boy who makes good, works as a community organizer, and then heads off to Harvard Law — he then returns to slay the dragon (”I am delighted that Barack Obama has finally slain the dragon that is Hilary Clinton,” writes a blogger named Chris Gaskin)

Obama’s pollsters, when they were first trying to develop a theme for his campaign, were shocked but pleased that the needle went off the charts when they presented to focus groups that he was raised by a single mother. It’s no surprise, then, that Obama repeated this many times in both debates and other public forms. What he didn’t mention, of course, is that he grew up in a swanky high rise in Honolulu and attended private schools.

The unrelenting sexism of this campaign has badly wounded Obama, particularly with women, and his advisers know it, indicating that they plan to perpetuate the poor boy myth:

A senior Democratic strategist who backed Mr Obama said that the candidate’s biography – he was raised by a single mother, is married to a strong woman and has two young daughters – would give him potent appeal with female voters.

It’s unlikely that Obama’s mythologized biography will be enough to win over a sufficient number of women, especially since women rightly understand that Obama received fewer votes but was selected as the nominee over a much more qualified woman.

Which brings us to the third act in this Kabuki drama: Obama is an illegitimate nominee. Riverdaughter writes:

Hmmm, now we know why the RBC did what the did. She had over 100 delegates from Florida and 73 from Michigan. If he got zero from Michigan and both states had been able to seat with full strength, she could have added over 86 delegates and he would have lost 59. Hmm, that brings her total to 1725 and Obama’s to 1707. Day-um! I wouldn’t concede either.

And katiebird concures:

Friends, riverdaughter isn’t alone in her observations: In offices and shopping malls all across the country friends are sharing their impressions of this election. As of today they’re whispering their doubts but, as The Summer of Revelations drags on those whispers will grow bolder.

The word will spread from blog to blog and friend to friend and cubicle to cubicle: The Democratic Nomination was Stolen

One website is already offering Democrats for McCain bumper stickers. Their motto is: You only thought we were bitter before!

And then there is the wonderful new creation from Riverdaughter at The Confluence.

The Puma Party. Party Unity My Ass

The action plan for PUMAs is:

1.) Dissociate yourself from the party. Tell them you will not be a party to its self destructive behavior.

2.) Reflect on your values. Read the credo at the top of this site and create at better one. Keep the language general and inclusive. Concentrate on universal truths and beliefs. Avoid wordsmithing.

3.) Stick together. We are powerful as a unit if we do not fall victim to the psychological warfare that is about to be directed at us. Turn off the media. Avoid conversations with trolls. Stand firm and do not yield.

4.) Remember that there is a better alternative. Hillary Clinton is the strongest candidate for the party and the nation. She has a lot of support out there. The nation will rally around her if we let them know we are not giving in. We must not let her concede one inch. Stand firm. Send her your good thoughts. Send her money. Do not give up.

5.) Spread the word.

And finally the fine folks at Democratic No More have began a campaign called Say Goodbye. It is a wonderful way to express to the rest of the country that you have had it with the Democratic Party and are not looking back. So please take the time to sign up.

One of my absolute favorite bloggers Uppity Woman says it best in her latest blog: Delusional Barack Obama.

Because as I mentioned earlier in Screw You Roger Simon!, the Obama camp thinks we are all little sheep that will come running back to the fold. It is as if the anointed one really does believe that his very word is all we have been waiting to hear. According to them Obama isn’t even going to waste his time working for our votes. He sincerely believes we will follow him like the rest of his Cult. Delusional is Right Uppity. No other word even comes close.

Except perhaps Psychopath.