It has been a week of strange bedfellows. The pairing that
got the most ink was Repub front-runner, and sometimes cross-dresser,
Rudy Giuliani cozying up to 700 Club host the right reverend Pat Robinson. It
is a daring move on Giuliani’s part.

Joe Biden got the biggest laugh of the night at the recent
Democratic Debate when he said that Rudy’s every sentence “consists of a noun
and verb and 9/11.” Cheap shot? Maybe, but it is certainly true that Giuliani’s
hero status is powerfully linked to his performance on the day the twin towers
fell. So when Rudy, a pro-choice Republican who during his third divorce
roomed with an openly gay couple publicly embraces the man who blamed
that terrorist attack on America’s moral failings – in particular gay marriage
and abortion – it released enough cognitive dissonance to power all the lights
on Broadway.

But Rudy had no choice. He is trying to inoculate himself
from the type of viral attack that destroyed John McCain in 2000. We dealt with
that campaign extensively in Elements of Persuasion. The key to any viral attack is that people already have the components
of the story you want to tell floating around in their heads somewhere, all you
do is activate the illness. It is all about AWARENESS. The video you linked to
if you clicked “cross-dresser” has been shown almost half a million times on Youtube. That is a lot of people
already primed to catch whatever nastiness Rudy’s opponents are planning to
dish out.

Meanwhile legitimate war hero John McCain is negotiating a 3
million dollar bank loan
to tide his cash-strapped campaign over, and some of the Swift Boat crew are
already running ads in his support – ads which McCain has quickly, and
strategically, disavowed. It looks like South Carolina’s primary will be a lot
like professional wrestling – not filled with truthiness, but very, very manly.