A lot of rumors in current in Conservativeland involve the idea that secret "internal polls" show the presidential race close or even tied. The McCain people are saying this, of course; it's the kind of thing a campaign that's way behind often floats in an attempt to rally the troops, change public perceptions, or otherwise pour cologne over the flop sweat. But it's just like hockey, really; if you happen to flick the channel onto a hockey game already in progress and you see that one team's pulled their goalie, you don't say "gracious, that team has the advantage of an extra skater, how daring!" You say, "The game's pretty much over and I know which team is going to lose."
Similarly, you know what desperation truly looks like when Rush Limbaugh pulls something out of the comments section of the ridiculous PUMA HillBuzz blog and it ends up on the Corner. Desperation, in this case, looks very, very funny.
Some highlights, starting with the anonymous HillBuzz commenter pretending to be Obama campaign insider but secret Hillary fan with all sorts of Dirt to Dish about Obama's sneakiness:
Ok, I want to clear my conscious a little. Hopefully you could make a blog post to help some fellow clinton supporters out.
I work for a campaign and can’t wait for this week to be over.
I was doing it for a job. I was not a fan of any candidate but over time grew to love HRC.
The internal campaign idea is to twist, distort, humiliate and finally dispirit you.
We pay people and organize people to go to all the online sites and “play the part of a clinton or mccain supporter who just switched our support for obama”
We do this to stifle your motivation and to destroy your confidence.
That conscious is certainly clear, and perhaps even completely blank. But are Obama operatives aware of "all online sites"? It seems possible, and perhaps even probable. Further perfidy:
Next, we infiltrate all the blogs and all the youtube videos and overwhelm the voting, the comments, etc. All to continue this appearance of overwhelming world support....
People makes posts to the effect that the world has “gone mad”
And the plot goes from Rasmussen all the way up to... Bill O'Reilly! (Really!)
We have also had quite a hand in skewing many many polls, some we couldn’t control as much as we would have liked. But many we have spoiled over. Just enough to make real clear politics look scarey to a mccain supporter. Its worked, alough the goal was to appear 13-15 points ahead.
see, the results have been working. People tend to support a winner, go with the flow, become “sheeple”
The polls are roughly 3-5 points in favor of Barack. Thats due to our inflation of the polls and pulling in the sheeple.
Our donors, are the same people who finance the MSM. Their interests are tied, Barack then tends to come across as teflon. Nothing sticks. And trust, there were meetings with Fox news. The goal was to blunt them as much as possible. Watch Bill Oreilly he has become much more diplomatic and “fair and balanced” and soft. Its because he wants to retain the #1 spot on cable news and to do that he has to have access to the Obama campaign and we worked hard at stringing him a long and keeping him soft for an interview swap. It worked and now he is anticipating more access. So he is playing it still soft.
And it goes on like that. Now, Here's Limbaugh, rather unconvincingly playing like he's skeptical, but saying that it would make sense if it were true, and for him, it surely would.
This is an example of the information overload. I don't know who the Hill Buzz babes are and I don't know if they can prove any of their claims but if their claims are true, then Obama is in huge, big trouble and nobody knows it, and you will acknowledge that that possibility exists because the media is not interested in any weakness Obama has. They're into covering it up. They are pushing his agenda of socialism. They are cheerleaders. So we don't know who to believe, and that's why there's no gut feeling here.
There actually is very little to separate the belief that Obama has his agents in every single major and most of the minor polling outfits, and the belief that raising the top income tax rates 3% is "socialism." If you're loony enough to buy the latter, why would you blink at the former?
And then there's Lisa Schiffren, kindly sharing her thoughts with us:
Rush Limbaugh highlighted this yesterday, and it's subsequently getting picked up on the blogosphere today. It is, putatively, the work of a repentant Hillary staffer who moved to the Obama campaign and is appalled by what she's learned of their deviousness and scheming, and a little ashamed of the way they tried to destroy Sarah Palin. The piece is not sourced — so it's not clear who wrote it, or, therefore, the goal. But it makes two interesting points; one, that the O campaign understood Palin as an asset rather than a drag from the start. Two — that, according to internal polls, many swing states are much closer than public polls indicate, some perhaps leaning right, partly because conservatives don't talk to pollsters — on the phone or at the exit. The perhaps real blogger makes the clearly true point that there has been a concerted effort to psych out Republicans and suppress McCain votes. Not entirely new news — but an interesting, telling summary.
The phrase "a perhaps real blogger" is pretty great. Anyway, I like the idea that conservatives somehow love talking to the "internal" pollsters but just can't abide those "tainted" (Limbaugh's word) MSM pollsters. Very clever, those conservatives.
Creepshow. Just keep in mind that Limbaugh and Schiffren are pulling this out of a comments thread at a blog that's pretty preposterous even by preposterous blog standards. Gonna be a fun four years, folks. Happy Halloween!
(Below: Rush Limbaugh's head)
