I swear, you couldn't Photoshop this

Hoff mentioned what a joke the GOP site is, so I went and took a look for myself. And hoo-boy, is he ever right:



Now, I could swear that one of these rotating banners said "9,400 members and counting!", but I sat for as many minutes as I could stand and it never came back. But what's here is priceless enough.

First of all, if you didn't know better, you'd think this was an Obama campaign site, because Barack Obama is mentioned more than the party's own presumptive nominee. Look at the headlines -- every last one about Barack Obama, and nothing about John McCain.

Now the funny stuff:

Note how the first headline is "05-12-08 - Obama's inability to hire good help rears its head -- again." Now notice the four rotating images under the picture of Obama. Look at the one to the far left: "The Republican Party is Hiring!!" Looks like their inability to hire good help rears its own head -- again. Now look at the image next to it: "Political Education": Learn some new political skills." Like what -- gay bashing, opposing a G.I. Bill because it might give people who enlist hope for a different future than just being cannon fodder?" And speaking of opposing the G.I. Bill, look at how Republicans support the troops -- why, they create a petition! Because nothing says "Thank you for your service" quite like signing a petition expressing your support for leaving the troops over in Iraq until they are "victorious" -- whatever the fuck that means. Does anyone even know? Helping them get medical care, housing, and education when they get home -- that's for sissies. Real men, real patriots, sign a petition. Oh yeah, and they donate to McCain while they're at it.

You don't even want to KNOW about the "Faces of the GOP". But if you look at this and think "Faces of Death", you're not alone.

Ah....OK, I reloaded the page and here it is -- a screencap crowing about how the GOP's Facebook group is "9,400 members strong and growing!!" (Pssst....Barack Obama's has 831,532 strong...and growing.)



And of course, this one has the ever-popular "Vote Fraud Updates" -- designed to make sure that the nonexistent problem of illegal immigrants deciding to expose themselves to government officials so they can vote is Taken! Care! Of! Let's click on that one, shall we?

It's a compendium of "vote fraud" cases. Let's see what we have....more than 500 absentee ballot applications rejected in Howard County, Indiana. They claim it's because parts of the applications were filled out by United Auto Worker officials. Now remember, these are not the ballots themselves, they are requests for absentee ballots. The beef here is that the UAW officials pre-filled some of the information, including checking off "Democratic" for the party affiliation. Now the UAW ought to know better, but the fact that they were all Democratic Party requests doesn't necessarily mean that there were any Republican UAW members who were "forced" to request Democratic Party ballots. And really, what's the big deal? It's not as if the Republican primary in Indiana was contested, and Rush Limbaugh was telling Republicans to cross over anyway.

So what else....OK, we have a blurb about the Supreme Court's upholding of Indiana's Voter ID law and we have ONE WOMAN who was allowed to keep her right to vote after being indicted for trying to vote twice in a local election last August. We have news of 14 indictments in elections dating back to 2003. That's nationwide. That sure doesn't sound like a serious and endemic "vote fraud" problem to me. I'm frankly a lot more concerned about 93,000 innocent Floridians who were disenfranchised by Karl Rove in 2000, or about the tens of thousands of largely minority Ohioans who were turned away at the polls in 2004 after standing in the rain for ten hours. If all you can do is come up with fourteen people -- even 100 people -- constituting "vote fraud" OVER THE LAST FIVE YEARS, that hardly seems like justification to implement laws designed to keep everyone lower on the socioeconomic scale than middle-class away from the polls.

But this is your 2008 GOP, folks -- a party that's ashamed to put its own nominee on its web site in anything other than a cursory manner, a party looking for onesies and twosies of "vote fraud" but cares not about mass disenfranchisement or voting machines that don't work and change votes when they do; a party selling a 5=inch pink elephant named Maxine -- yours for the modest sum of $35. Maxine is, of course, pink, which I guess is supposed to mean she's a girl, but since she is a pink elephant, feel free to insert your own Vito Fossella joke here.