there is no such thing as a liberal pro-abortion muslim religious fundamentalist

...and i think this is part of why the McCain campaign continues to flounder - they are trying to float two simultaneous messages that are, at their core, self contradictory. They would have done better to pick one or the other basis for their attacks.

Instead they have switched messages all over the place: if they emphasize reverend wright then they portray Obama as a member of a radical christian church. However, if they emphasize abortion or the 60's hippy Ayers then they float the "most liberal member of congress ever" approach, and finally if they repeat "Hussein, Hussein, Hussein" at every opportunity then they have to completely reverse gears and argue that he is a religious fundamentalist Muslim terrorist who would have all American women wearing burkas. Anyone who is even mildly informed in the year 2008 realizes that burkas and abortion are usually mutually exclusive, to say the least.

In the end, these sort of mixed messages just end up adding to many swing-voter's general sense that there is something disorganized and muddled about the republican message this year.

Via Eric Martin, the problem with the GOP's anti-Obama message:

...once you’ve made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it - you can’t just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can’t decide in chapter 2 that he’s also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.

This is the problem. It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem - although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable - it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined.