Anti Obama Group PUMA Gets Scary - Update
Tommy Christopher
I started out covering PUMA, a confederation of websites dedicated to defeating Barack Obama, out of a fascination with the apparent cognitive dissonance required to go from rabid Hillary Clinton supporter to John McCain voter.
What I found was a hydra-headed "movement" comprised of a group of justly frustrated voters, fed up with a sexist culture and a confusing nominating process, being led by a disparate array of people with other agendas.
Trying to untangle the mess is an exercise in futility that I will leave to crusading pre-school teacher Christina Cedeno. For me, it is enough to strip away the disingenuous mission statements, hidden agendas, and PR posturing, and focus on what they do, their raisons d'etre: to smear Barack Obama.
Darragh Murphy's PUMAPAC is the political wing of the Pumas, and a great example of the deception, delusion, and defamation at work in the PUMA/JSND movement.
Here's the scary part. PUAPAC is shooting a "documentary" called ""The Audacity of Democracy," and they've released a ten minute trailer. I was chilled by the first minute.
I have been trying to figure out, for the life of me, what is funny about a lunatic soliciting the murder of a presidential candidate. I asked Darragh if she could clarify, or provide context for, that passage. She has declined.
Being charitable, you could suppose that she was amused at the absurdity of the suggestion, but why include it, then? To talk about the murder of a presidential candidate, with no context other than 9 minutes of rants against that candidate's "movement" seems a little bit irresponsible.
It was then that I realized what bothered me about it. It is one thing to oppose a political candidate, even to dislike one, but the relentless attacks of the PUMA crowd, and Darragh Murphy, go beyond that into fearmongering, and they belie their stated mission of reforming the DNC and combating misogyny.
Their attacks go from the idiotic (he thinks he's better than us!), to the scurrilous ("Larry Sinclair is worth looking
into"), to the frighteningly absurd (he's a fascist), and even racist (check out this Michelle Obama poster from a PUMA-affiliated site). All of this is in service to whipping the rank-and-file PUMAs into an anti-Obama frenzy.
The funny thing is, most of the PUMA leadership, if not all, don't even believe this stuff. I know that Darragh Murphy is no dummy. She knows better than to think that the "Obama Movement" is out to kill her and her followers, something she explicitly suggests on her website.
The political pros of the Puma coalition also have an agenda that differs from their members'. From my reporting and conversations with Puma insiders, it is clear to me that the top cats, so to speak, are much more interested in a pro-business agenda and the privileges of power than in protecting the rights of ordinary women.
Their courtship of the McCain campaign is mainly a lever to gain more from the DNC, but the concessions that they seek from McCain, and will never get, are already granted by the Democrats. The only difference is power and influence.
Others in the Puma coalition are nothing more than Republicans opportunistically scooping up angry Pumas, winding them up, and pointing them at their opponent.
In Darragh Murphy's case, I won't try to guess at her motivations. If she wants them to be known, I'm sure she will come here and reveal them. I can tell you what they aren't. 
I don't think she's in this for the money. She seems to have plenty of that. Although PUMAPAC constantly has its paw out for donations, I also know that travel and lodging for a PUMA party in Denver is going to be expensive.
I know it has nothing to do with feminism, since she's working to elect a man with a horrible political record on women's (and most other) issues, who is a sickening misogynist. As I said before, Darragh Murphy is no idiot. In the "not an idiot" category, you can also file "thinking Hillary can still win", and "Obama is a fascist."
Is it out of loyalty to McCain? She and I talked it over, and she says no, that her donation to him was part of an anti-Bush strategy. I don't think it is productive to argue about it, since even if she was a Republican, that would by definition make her only OK with McCain.
What I do know is that she appears on TV and radio a lot. I can see, also, that she has a really prominent place
in the documentary she is producing. On her website, she is treated with reverence and obedience. She's even taken to quoting herself on her website.
All the while, PUMAPAC seeks to paint Senator Obama as a cult leader, but in reading their case, it looks like as classic a case of projection as I've ever seen.
Come to think of it, Darragh, Will Bower, and all of the other PUMA mouthpieces have become celebrities wherever Democrats are hated, most notably on grossly sexist Fox News.
The shame of it is that most of the PUMAs I talk to are whip-smart and full of passion that could be put to much better use than email-bombing Howard Dean and pasting smears about Barack Obama all over the internet. Imagine what they could accomplish if they spent their energy on helping to end domestic violence, or child abuse, or even helping to elect like-minded people to Congress.
PUMA is an opportunistic creation, born first out of Hillary Clinton's opportunistic demonization of Barack Obama and the DNC, but it is a golem that she now cannot vanquish. That's what happens when the enemy of your enemy is an even bigger enemy.
My question is, now that you've got all of these people convinced that Barack Obama is this fascist whose "movement" is out to kill women who disagree with him, what are they going to do if he wins?
Update: While I was checking the PUMAPAC website to see if they had taken my comment "out of moderation" (Darragh screens all of the comments to keep out any dissent) I came across some choice cuts of "DNC protest" from Darragh Murphy-approved PUMA regulars. My comment, #491, was scrubbed. It was a link to this story, under the screen name "HillaryRocks." What? She does.
