Sadly for Morris, companies contacted by Forbes rebuffed his innovative suggestions. “That’s why he’s a consultant, and we have our own ad agency,” a Reebok spokesman scoffed to Androshick.

Largely unreported, however, is the fact that other, more forward-thinking clients have apparently taken Morris’ advice to heart. In a rare coup, Salon has obtained draft scripts for several consumer ads written and directed by Madison Avenue’s new wizard of darkness. The ads are still in storyboard form, and air dates have yet to be determined. But Morris’ corporate converts are said to be so enthusiastic about the new strategy, several of them are already thinking Super Bowl.

Client: Rogaine

Opponent: Propecia

Title: “Side effects”

ANNOUNCER: You’ve seen those TV ads for the hair-growth drug Propecia.

Maybe you’ve noticed that cryptic warning about “certain types of sexual side effects.”

Certain types?

Merck is telling you only part of the story.

Here are the facts.

Those side effects can include:

• less desire for sex

• softer erections

• less semen

[Cut to close facial shot of middle-aged man seated with his chin resting in his hand. The man sports a luxuriant mane of hair, yet his face is pinched, and expresses deep uncertainty.]

ANNOUNCER: If you want less semen in your life, Propecia may be for you.

[Switch to intercutting pictures of couples walking along the beach and clinking glasses over dinner. Heroic music starts gently, then builds.]

ANNOUNCER (voice brightening): Rogaine promises robust erections. And plenty of semen.

Propecia. Put it down if you want to get it up.

Client: Burger King

Opponent: McDonald’s

Title: “Furlough”

OPEN: A steady procession of convicts circling through a revolving gate, and marching forward — toward the viewer.

ANNOUNCER: Remember Michael Dukakis?

He vetoed the death penalty. Then he gave furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole.

One of them was Willie Horton.

[Blurry black-and-white photo of Horton being arrested.]

ANNOUNCER: Horton was sentenced to life without parole, but Dukakis gave him a furlough. Horton went on to rape and torture others.

[Cut to close-up mug shot of Horton's scowling, unshaven face.]

ANNOUNCER: And what did Willie Horton request for his last meal?

A McDonald’s Filet o’ Fish.

[We see Horton's face morphing into a Filet o' Fish sandwich.]

ANNOUNCER: At Burger King, we DON’T believe violent career criminals deserve a break today — or ever.

That’s why Burger King supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers.

[Cut to another procession of convicts circling through the Golden Arches, which have been converted into a revolving turnstile.]

ANNOUNCER: McDonald’s on crime. We are all victims.

Client: Chi-Chis

Opponent: Taco Bell

Title: “Extreme”

OPEN with shot of Taco Bell Chihuahua running over to a fire hydrant and lifting his leg.

ANNOUNCER, in tone of sneering disbelief: What’s Taco Bell putting out this week?

[Cut to shot of new "Extreme Fajitas," splashed across the screen in fluorescent blue colors, accompanied by harsh sound effects.]

ANNOUNCER: Taco Bell is at it again. They say their Extreme Fajitas are the right choice for America.

[Insert grainy shot of newspaper headline.]

ANNOUNCER: The nonpartisan Veterinarian’s Weekly is an authority on who’s telling the truth.

And according to Veterinarian’s Weekly, 70 percent of Chihuahuas fed a diet of Extreme Fajitas developed tapeworm.

Chi-Chis opposes Taco Bell and its risky, extreme taco schemes.

[Cut to images of the Statue of Liberty, rolling wheat fields, and a rippling American flag, intercut with photos of enchiladas and chimichangas.]

ANNOUNCER: Here at Chi-Chis, we share your most treasured values. We support traditional Tex-Mex meal concepts — and we always will.

Read our lips. No new tacos.

Client: Baskin-Robbins

Opponent: Ben & Jerry’s

Title: “Liberal”

ANNOUNCER: Ben and Jerry say they sell Vermont’s finest ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet.

But what they’re really selling is more of the same tired old liberal solutions.

[Still photos of Vietnam protesters, Charles Manson and the riots outside of the '68 Democratic convention are rapidly intercut with pictures of Ben and Jerry.]

ANNOUNCER: We’ve come a long way since then. But Ben and Jerry just don’t get it. They want to return us to the failed policies of the past.

[Tight close-up of white Popsicle.]

ANNOUNCER: This is a “Peace Pop.” Ben and Jerry say 1 percent of profits go to peace.

But the profits really go to organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund.

What does the Children’s Defense Fund stand for?

• more welfare

• more taxes
• unwed motherhood
• compassion for criminals

ANNOUNCER: The Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pop. The ice-cream novelty of the corrupt liberal welfare state.

[Cut to a photo of founders Ben and Jerry, who gradually morph into Marx and Lenin.]

ANNOUNCER: Ben & Jerry’s. Too liberal to swallow.

Paid for by Americans for Just Desserts.

Client: Hugo Boss

Opponent: Ralph Lauren

Title: “Name”

A dark, smoke-filled room. Sitting around the table are a group of fat men. The light glints off their pinky rings. It is clear that they are haberdashers.

MAN No. 1: We just got a truckload full of cotton pique shirts.

MAN No. 2: How we going to unload all these shirts?

MAN No. 3: Hey, I got it. We put a polo player on ‘em! People will think they’re getting something special. Not more of the same haberdashery as usual.

MAN No. 1: Oy! Ralph, you’ve done it again.

[Cue nerve-grating klezmer music. As the men sign checks and flourish handfuls of cash, the camera zooms in on their fat fingers.]

INSINUATING MALE ANNOUNCER: What’s your real name, Mr. Lipshitz?

Ralph Lauren — He’s not one of us.

Brought to you by Citizens Against Cosmopolitan Dry Goods.

Client: Kool-Aid.

Opponent: Hawaiian Punch

Title: “Grandpa and Susan.”

Very old man sitting down in a mythic, light-strewn living room. His granddaughter comes up to his rocking chair. They exchange affectionate glances.

SUSAN: Well, I’m off to the store to pick up a shelf-stable juice product. I think it will be Hawaiian Punch.

GRANDPA: That’s nice, Susan. But did you know they’ve used the same tired old spokesman, “Punchy,” for the last 59 years?

SUSAN: Really? I didn’t know he was still around.

GRANDPA: Mmmm mmm. He’s been holding the same stalemated ideas for a long, long time. Hey, maybe your generation can do something about it.

SUSAN (with pensive look): I hope so.

ANNOUNCER: Think it’s time for Punchy to punch out?

Try Kool-Aid. New ideas for a new millennium.

Client: Franco-American/Spaghetti-Os.

Opponent: Chef Boy-ar-dee

Title: “Stand”

ANNOUNCER: Where do you stand, Chef Boy-ar-dee?

FACT: On March 4, 1995, American Home Products, employers of Chef Boy-ar-Dee, announced that the chef’s line of prepared pastas would target young kids.

In TV ads, the chef introduced viewers to his son, Chef Junior, who made products “just for kids 6-and-under,” and his dog, Rigatoni. The ads touted the young chef’s addition of “a lot more cheese.”

FACT: On May 2, 1999, Chef Boy-ar-dee flip-flopped!

In an interview with Brandweek, Boy-ar-dee announced the launch of his new Homestyle line, described as “grown-up flavors for more grown-up tastes.”
The goal, he said, was to “bring new and lapsed adult users back into the canned pasta fold.”

Adult users? What happened to putting children first?

Wake up, Chef. Our kids asked for “a lot more cheese” — not a lot more sleaze!

Chef Boy-ar-dee. A recipe for deception.

Paid for by Citizens for Spaghetti Equity.

Client: Little Caesars Pizza

Opponent: Domino’s Pizza

Title: “Life”

An unadorned talking-head shot of a woman. She is shot in tight close-up, so the furrows of heartache etched on her face are clearly visible.

WOMAN: Domino’s Pizza changed my life forever.

Last summer, in his rush to meet the company’s deadly pledge of pizza in 30 minutes or less, a Domino’s driver ran over my son, Timmy.

Little Timmy was killed — his wheelchair destroyed.

When their risky experiment failed, Domino’s simply changed the subject.

They’ve scrapped their 30-minute delivery guarantee. Now it’s all about their so-called patented “wicking” technology. They say it makes for a hotter, fresher pie.

As for me, I worry that people don’t know enough about Domino’s record.

So the next time Domino’s asks to be a part of your family dining occasion, think of little Timmy.

And ask yourself: Who died for your pizza today?

MALE ANNOUNCER: Little Caesars. Pizza for life.

Title: “Water”

Client: Evian

Opponent: Keeper Springs water.

Ominous-sounding male ANNOUNCER: Maybe you’ve heard the news.

[Cut to shot of a plastic bottle, featuring a blue label with a pristine waterfall scene.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental lawyer, has introduced a new brand of bottled water. He calls it Keeper Springs.

He says part of the profits will go back to protect water supplies. Whoa, there, Robert.

Haven’t the Kennedys had enough trouble with water? First, there was the Bay of Pigs.

[Cut to footage of Cubans wading ashore, their hands raised in surrender.]

Then, there was Chappaquiddick.

[Cut to picture of a bridge.]

ANNOUNCER: Now, Robert Kennedy wants us to entrust our palates to his risky new bottling scheme.

The Kennedys. Wrong for the premium bottled water category. Wrong for America.

“If there’s a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I’ve never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.”

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country — a breach of the political boundaries of “traditional journalism” that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

Nevertheless, it is true that Barnes has enjoyed greater credibility than other journalists on the partisan right throughout his career. After all, he is a former reporter for such publications as the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the New Republic. He was once a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and served as one of three panelists for the first nationally televised debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Now, however, there is further evidence that Barnes not only routinely helped Republicans raise money as a banquet speaker, but accepted tens of thousands of dollars from party organizations as well:

• In February 2006, Barnes was paid $10,000 plus travel expenses by Oregon’s Lane County Republican Central Committee to deliver the keynote address at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. (Thanks to Carla Axtman for research assistance.) These payments, recorded in filings with the Oregon secretary of state, were evidently made through the Premier Speakers Bureau of Franklin, Tenn., which represents other Fox personalities including Sean Hannity, Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee. Barnes is no longer listed on the Premier website, but the company did not respond to phone or e-mail inquiries about its relationship with him.

• In February 2007, Barnes spoke at the annual  Lincoln-Reagan Dinner held by the Republican Party of Fort Bend County, Texas — home of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who purchased a ticket to the event. The party organization’s filing with the Texas Ethics Commission shows two payments of $5,000 each on April 26, 2007, to Premiere Speakers Bureau (with the notation “LRD 2007 Speaker – Fred Barnes”) and travel expenses of $1,823. Photos of a smiling Barnes with various local dignitaries at the event, which netted a reported $70,000 for the party, can be viewed  here.

• In early March 2008, Barnes served as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County at its annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Whether he received the customary $10,000 is not clear because the party’s  filing with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections show only a single payment of $5,500 to Premiere Speakers Bureau on Feb. 18. The committee reported net $120,000 in net proceeds from the event.

Barnes didn’t return a call seeking comment. Neither did a Fox News spokeswoman. The question they avoided answering is whether accepting money from party organizations is appropriate for any political journalist, and whether such payments fall within the ethical guidelines of Fox News. Whatever Fox might say, the Murdoch network’s  long history of excessive coziness with Republican politicians and organizations offers little reassurance.

I hoped to ask Barnes whether he agrees that being on the team payroll means he is indeed “on the team” — the Republican Party team. Understandably, he may prefer not to respond. But he ought to reflect on his standing to criticize the behavior of other journalists, left or right, before he mounts his high horse again.

Exactly what is so disturbing about the Upper West Side? As Joan Walsh notes, it is a place renowned as liberal in politics, Jewish in ethnicity, and therefore, according to Kyl’s implication, foreign to the nation’s heartland. Never mind that some of the greatest American authors, musicians, actors and artists — including very many who happened not to be Jews — lived and worked in that special slice of urban landscape over the past century or so, including Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Humphrey Bogart, Harry Belafonte and George M. Cohan, an Irish Catholic who won the Congressional Gold Medal in 1936 for composing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” among other achievements. (Rush Limbaugh used to live there, too. And Joe Scarborough says he “loves” living there with his family today.)

Beyond the narrow and ignorant parochialism of such remarks by Kyl and others, what is most galling is their absolute phoniness. Scarcely anyone on the Republican right ever suggests that Weekly Standard editor William Kristol ought to shut up because he was raised on the un-American Upper West Side, a few blocks from Ms. Kagan. Anyone who does so is rightly rebuked for appealing to prejudice. Are Kristol and all the other neoconservatives who have inhabited that neighborhood, beginning with those named Podhoretz, to be tarred as “un-American” too? In May, Commentary editor John Podhoretz published a timely, quasi-nostalgic essay about his family’s half-century in the neighborhood, candidly dismissing the right-wing stereotypes:

Conservatives sometimes invoke the Upper West Side in their lists of petri-dish-like leftist enclaves along with Cambridge and Berkeley, but despite its homogeneous radicalism, it didn’t then and doesn’t now offer much in the way of interesting, unexpected, or comical ideological excess.

Podhoretz goes on to mention that it was anything but sociologically monolithic or elite:

It might have been the most integrated area in the United States. According to a 1966 study, out of 150,000 residents, 105,000 were white (of whom 40,000 were Jews); 26,000 came from Spanish-speaking homes; and 18,000 were black. “Only in Honolulu,” wrote the journalist Joseph P. Lyford, “is there a greater confusion of blood, ancestry, language, and culture in as small a space.” But though there were racial and ethnic tensions aplenty, and these would grow exponentially as the years passed, the division in the neighborhood was primarily one of class — a division between the middle class and the lower class. (There weren’t many rich people on the Upper West Side then, a situation much altered today.)

Let’s not forget Dick Morris, cousin of Roy Cohn and Upper West Side native, who earned his political spurs in the neighborhood’s Democratic clubhouses. Will Fox News dump the voice of Fox Nation as an Upper West Sider and potential crypto-socialist? Of course not. He’s a Republican now, and those nasty ethnogeographical snarks are reserved for Democrats only.

The spurious resentments encouraged by Republicans only begin with Kagan’s home turf. Moving on to her legal education, they sought to demean the memory of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked — and for whom she expresses unreserved admiration, despite the fact that he called her “Shorty.” The late justice was best known for his life’s work ending legal discrimination in America, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down “separate but equal” education in public schools. This is a topic that Republicans might wish to avoid, considering their recent embarrassment when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul started a debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its violation of his “freedom” to discriminate in public accommodations. But Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, along with several of his colleagues, could not resist a gratuitous assault on Marshall as a “judicial activist.”

Coming from Sessions, this sounded like a dog-whistle appeal to segregationist nostalgia. But even if that isn’t what he meant, the “activism” complaint is bogus. Republicans endorse activist decisions whenever they like the result. The most notorious example is still Bush v. Gore, but the current Supreme Court majority is just as eager to overturn precedent and engineer society from the bench, as they proved this year in the Citizens United decision. Reversing more than a century of the jurisprudence that upheld congressional authority to regulate corporate political speech, the conservative justices overturned basic precedent to make a sweeping and ominous change in law. Indeed they seized an opportunity to venture far beyond the issues at hand in that case to free corporations from any restriction and corrupt our politics even further.

How did Chief Justice John Roberts justify that outrage, after repeatedly and falsely promising during his nomination hearings to respect precedent? He cited Brown v. Board of Ed, writing that had the court observed precedent in 1954, “segregation would be legal.” Many legal scholars would quarrel with that claim, but the point is plain enough: Activism is fine, as long as we like the outcome.

It is probably a forlorn hope, but before these hearings conclude the Republicans should stop pandering to their dimmest constituencies and instead try to elicit the actual views of this accomplished American woman, who is almost certain to join the high court next fall.

Such hysterics must be expected from every carnival barker in Fox Nation, especially a featured player like Morris – and the shrill rhetoric surely helps to separate the rubes from their money, in this case through donations to the League of American Voters, sponsor of this morning’s e-mail and many more from him.

Scamming aside, however, a prediction is a prediction, and Democratic legislators preparing to vote yea on reform should be comforted whenever Morris prognosticates their demise, because he is dead wrong with almost perfect consistency.

Only two months ago, following the election of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election, the excitable Morris looked into his crystal ball and  told Fox listeners that he had seen the effective end of Obama’s presidency. “Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts … ultimately, this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed,” he pronounced. (Which must mean that the healthcare bill is almost certain to pass next weekend.)

During the 2008 election cycle, Morris offered many forecasts, none of which were right. Early on he picked Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani as almost certain nominees of their respective parties and trashed John McCain as a sure loser. In January 2007, he told an audience of conservative journalists: “I think what’s going to happen in the world is that Hillary’s going to be the next president.” Not too long after that, he and wife Eileen McGann wrote a column for the New York Post headlined “It’s Now a Rudy Romp.” A year later, he was predicting that Clinton would crash and burn in the New Hampshire primary, right up to the evening before that election. Her tears had proved to voters that she was unfit to serve as president, he explained. When she won the following night, he overreacted again by predicting that she would surely go on to secure the nomination. (Back when Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate from New York in the 2000 cycle, Morris similarly made one delusional prediction after another, claiming that she would never run, withdraw, falter, lose, and so on. She ran and won, of course.)

Among Dick’s wackiest blunders in recent years was his confident assertion — on the eve of the 2006 midterm election — that North Korea would become the overriding issue in that campaign, eclipsing taxes, the war in Iraq, and Republican corruption. As Glenn Greenwald observed back then in a mordant post: “It’s just not possible to be more wrong than this.”

By Election Day, Dick had forgotten about North Korea and could no longer ignore the unanimity of polls showing that the Republicans were on the verge of a historic defeat. (He occasionally gets it right, if he waits until moments before the polls close to place his bet.)

Part of Dick’s problem, in the years since he sold out completely to the Republicans, is his irrepressible urge to spin rather than analyze. This has led him to some fantastically stupid conjectures, captured on video. One of my favorites came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when President Dubya made a desultory speech in New Orleans.

On Fox News, Morris rated the weak speech as “fantastic!” Building up a head of steam, he cruelly raised Republican hopes. “The people who said this storm is going to hurt Bush’s presidency,” he declared, “are just wrong.” Defying polls that showed the president’s public approval scraping bottom, he went on to assure listeners that the Katrina fiasco would be nothing more than “a distant memory,” while the city’s recovery would prove to be “a huge positive for Bush. That will be a second term legacy … [Bush] can get all the money he wants out of Congress ’cause of this disaster, the people will be solidly behind him, the media will cover it like crazy and he’s gonna look like Santa Claus.”

Obviously he pulls a lot of these prognostications straight out of his butt, with no polling or expertise required. Certainly there are plenty of polls showing that the Democrats will face serious trouble come fall (although there are also surveys showing a hint of daylight now, too). But when someone like Morris warns of catastrophe, there just may be reason for optimism. 

Fortunately for Romney, the good news is very good: Given Morris’ recent history of prognostication, it’s probably best to now consider Romney the front-runner for the nomination, if not a lock to win in the general.

Most people have probably forgotten by now — or, at least, that’s probably what Morris is hoping — but the former strategist for Bill Clinton turned professional Clinton-hater was the author of a book, published in 2005, titled “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.” In it, he and his wife, Eileen McGann, wrote:

[A]s of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 presidential election ….

But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza “Condi” Rice.