How to stop the "gotcha!" shit?

"Gotcha!"

If you were around in the '70s, you may remember this slogan from the hilarious commersh in which the guy cut himself shaving. (Notice YouPube yanked the copy of this ad because it offended somebody and maked them cwy.) But "gotcha!" has a political context too: A "gotcha!" could be a Karl Rove-style October surprise that could be so far beneath fair game that you end up just shaking your head for years about how sleazy it was.

I don't think anything major like this will happen, but with any candidate these days, you have to be prepared for it. It can happen with Barack Obama, it could have happened with Hillary Clinton, it could have happened with anyone. It can be something that's totally made up by the wingnutosphere, or it could be something that would have been a fair issue had the other side not sat on it until it was too late.

And I don't think anything serious will come out about Obama that's actually true, because he seems to have been vetted so thoroughly by the media, which thoroughly hates his guts. But what if something comes up about him or some future candidate that's complete bullshit but ruins their campaign beyond repair a month before the general election?

Yes, I know the right-wing blogosphere is funny when they fail, but when they don't, you get to see what a bunch of arrogant assholes the wingnutosphere contains. It's like how everybody laughs when a terrorist gets snookered by a criminal gang that sells them shit wrapped in newspaper and tells them it's nuclear material, but when the terrorist finally succeeds at blowing something up, everyone knows it's not funny.

Can the "gotcha!" politics be curtailed? We all wish it can be, because this brand of politics isn't in the best interests of the country.

Maybe parties should be able to replace candidates if the candidate they have decides to throw in the towel because of the right-wing attack machine. That way, the targeted party can find a stronger candidate instead of having to run with one whose chances have been dashed. I don't know what the current law is, and I'm sure it varies from state to state, but I can guess how it's interpreted. I have a gut feeling the current laws on this would be selectively enforced to favor Republicans, because that's how it works now: There were several states where Bush didn't qualify for the ballot on time, yet he was placed on the ballot anyway because it wouldn't "look right" if a major party's candidate wasn't on the ballot. (Yet nothing was ever done when Alabama kept replacing the Democratic candidate with a segregationist dinosaur.) Still, if there is a law, you can't say there's not one, even if it isn't followed.

It's tempting to also require the party that initiated the "gotcha!" to replace its candidate too, but it would be too hard to tell if the issue wasn't something that they had kept festering all year just to spring when it was too late.

Perhaps more than anything else, we should be vigilant in exposing the right-wing noise machine as the crock of bunk gas that it is.