The 2012 Campaign: 'It's Going to Get Really Ugly'

Jeffrey Carter at Points and Figures asserts that Bill Daley's retreat from the White House can mean only one thing: "It's going to get really ugly"

Bill Daley leaving the Obama administration was big news for ten minutes. But as my friend Streetwise Professor and I discussed on Twitter after the news broke, this really signals a big change in direction on how Obama will campaign.

It’s going to get really ugly. How ugly? Think of the election cycle from 1796-1804. It will be that ugly. The culmination of those election cycles was a duel by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, with Hamilton losing his life after the gun battle.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson manipulated the press of that time to scandalize the other side. Character assassination is a mild phrase to use when describing the vitriol that went back and forth. Look for more in the coming months.

A parallel development, according to Ace, appears to be laying the groundwork for attacks on Mitt Romney's religion by President Subprime McDowngrade.

Turns out that Obama's Svengali -- David Axelrod -- says that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's speeches were, eh, "selectively edited":

Nonsense, of course.

Here's where my ears prick up: I have said before that Obama could not possibly make Romney's Mormonism a campaign issue because of Obama's membership in an actual cult of hatred.

Right? One would imagine.

But is Axelrod's out-of-the-blue attempt to relitigate Jeremiah Wright, and claim he was quoted out of context by opposition researchers, an attempt to begin insulating Obama against charges about Wright, and thus freeing Obama and the Democrats attack Romney's Mormonism?

Ace, Ace, Ace... for a man who has compiled this list of historic firsts, you think that attacking his opponent's religion would be taboo?

As for sanitizing Jeremiah Wright's remarks, well, that might prove a tad difficult, Axelputz:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, G*d d**n America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people... G*d d**n America for treating our citizens as less than human. G*d d**n America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

On 9/16/01, blaming the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost!"

"The government invented HIV to kill the man of color!"

In 2007, awarding the Church's Trumpeter award to racist Louis ("The Jews helped Hitler get the Third Reich on the road") Farrakhan: "Farrakhan epitomizes greatness."

"Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people."

"Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain't! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty!"

"We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. ... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. ... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means... And ... And ... And! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this s**t!"

I don't know about you, but my preacher talks like this all the time.