it takes chutzpa to question Obama’s commitment to Israel

Or, in lieu of chutzpa, an RNC-financed 15 minutes of fame will do.

Perhaps you’ve heard of this guy, he’s a plumber—OK, an unlicensed, non-union plumber—I think his name is Joe? Anyway, even though he’s a member of the Natural Law Party, and as low as a low-info voter can go, the McCain campaign has wrapped its arthritic arms around him. Yesterday was day one of the Joe the dumber plumber bus tour, and JtP decided to use the opportunity to say that an Obama presidency would mean “death to Israel.” It was so inane and so nakedly hatemongering that even Shepard Smith of FOX News had to speak up:




Smith's indignation deserves praise—it’s nice to see a FOX-er realize that he’s still got to live in the America that the McCain-Palin team is trying to rip apart.

But why just let Shep Smith speak for Israel? We’ve got actual Israelis (and in such a nicely made little film, too):




And, if the Israelis won’t do, how about Barack Obama:

Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security...I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat - from Gaza to Tehran.... Across the political spectrum, Israelis understand that real security can only come through lasting peace. And that is why we - as friends of Israel - must resolve to do all we can to help Israel and its neighbors to achieve it.

Need a little more, Joe? How about this (from the Obama-Biden campaign website):

Barack Obama and Joe Biden strongly support the U.S.-Israel relationship, believe that our first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel, America's strongest ally in the Middle East. They support this closeness, stating that that the United States would never distance itself from Israel.

“Never” is a pretty strong word, there, hey Joe? (It’s probably a stronger word than I would use if I were running for president, but I’m not, so Joe shouldn’t worry his bald little head. . . .) I will personally add that Obama’s stated goals of opening a serious diplomatic channel with Iran and encouraging a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would do more to ensure the security of Israel than pretty much anything the Bush Administration has done in the last eight years. . . which means it would do more than anything proposed by John McCain.


(cross-posted on The Seminal)

landslide or no, we’ve got a lot of work to do

In the last 48 hours, I have received a couple of interesting emails from a friend. My friend has been a supporter of Barack Obama since early on, and she has two siblings—one who stands outside McCain-Palin rallies with a sign that says “I AM a real American,” and then posts YouTubes of the experience:




And another who sends e-mails that say things like this (reproduced verbatim and unedited):

I can give you at least 5 reasons why working class people don't want Obama elected. Never once have I heard "secret Muslim" on that list, nor "black man" on that list. Not once. Here's what I have heard:

• Obama supports making union membrship mandatory vs. optional, taking away one's freedom to decide whether one wants to join the union - and making the $500 annual dues mandatory as well. Big deal for the working class.

• He further supports taking secret ballots away from unions, making all votes known - increasing the potential for manipulation and lobbying within unions.

• He voted against funding for the Iraq war when their friends, neighbors, and colleages were serving there - directly endangering their lives.

• His tax policies make the American dream of work-hard-become-successsful that much less attainable by making the marginal tax rate after $250K up to 70% by some projections (oh, and that $250 is per household - so it's $125K for a single person. Do you think that a single person living in Manhattan or LA is so filthy rich that they should give 70% of their taxes after $125K to the ineffective US Government?)

• When you live in a working class neighborhood, you know that the biggest problem with assistance for the needy is not the lack of it, but that it goes to the wrong places (like the family who lived across from us for 2 years when we first moved here. The stayed up partying with their friends- and their baby- every night until midnight or later, had cases of beer in their trash every trash day, had the smell of pot constantly wafting from their garage accross the street. And they were on food stamps. Nice.)

I don’t post either of these to make fun of these people or try to shame them. I feel I am better informed and perhaps less afraid than the folks that shout epithets or trade in absurd rumors, but I don’t feel superior. Instead, I post this for all the ‘sphere to see because I have question: Now what?

I have to admit that I pounced on the misperceptions and outright lies in the forwarded e-mail, and I sent a point-by-point refutation, replete with links, but I also thought, if this is what this voter believes this late in the election cycle, even a close relative will probably not succeed in winning the argument—or winning another vote for Obama. After writing my comprehensive reply, I had to add, if your sib doesn’t live in a swing state, you should probably save your breath.

At this stage of the race, that might or might not be good advice, but I am pretty sure that come November 5th, I should come up with a different answer.

I will need a different answer because, rest assured, an Obama victory, no matter how large, will not put an end to the arguments, will not silence all of the doubters, will not pacify all the haters, and will not convince all of the unconvinced.

Over time, I would hope that an Obama Administration could produce results that might ease some minds and even win some converts, but I am not a Pollyanna. Not only will there be people who, for whatever reason, will never accept Obama as president—not to mention, as a successful president—there will be political interests that will work overtime exploit those people and their beliefs, laying the groundwork for the next neoconservative and/or corporatist putsch.

So, what should we do? I can think of all kinds of small-bore things that might work here or there in a specific situation with a specific person, but I want to think in broader terms. We have to live with the people in that video—and I would even like to get some of them to help with tall task of undoing the disasters of the last decade—is there anything that can be said besides “let’s just agree to disagree”. . . or “stfu”. . . or “please stfu!”?

I don’t have a lot of good answers right now, do you?



(cross-posted to Daily Kos and The Seminal)

But who do you really love?

Just a quick observation:

Number of times John McCain mentioned Senator Joe Lieberman in the two presidential debates: 4

Number of times McCain mentioned his vice presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin: 0


. . . .

Bonus observation regarding McCain’s affinities:

Number of times John McCain said “My friends” in the first debate: 2

Number of times McCain said “My friends” in the second debate: 19

Olbermann puts the blame on Mame

On last night’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC host delivered one of his patented “Special Comments,” this time raking Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin over the coals for yet again cheapening the quality of debate in the presidential race, this time by accusing Senator Barack Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists.”





While I don't disagree by-and-large with the substance of the segment, Olbermann failed to do what I think is most important when attacking Palin.

Palin is, to my eye, a horrible person, certainly unqualified, overtly corrupt, viciously ambitious—a joke, really (and a bad one)—but at the end of the day, no one votes for the Veep. The biggest problem with Palin is that John McCain picked her. McCain showed in this, like in so much else, his complete lack of sound judgment, his fascination with the maverick-ie gamble to buttress his bogus brand, and his track record of putting his own ambition above any other consideration.

Any attack on Palin has to remind voters that she was put in this position by a cynical candidate McCain. Keith came close to that point when he explained that he forgives Palin—because she is in a situation “beyond her ability to cope”—but he needed to make it explicit: You can't forgive Palin without blaming McCain.

. . .

As for the title, I think I’ll let Rita explain:

“ace” McCain

The LA Times goes somewhere I have resisted going for a very long time:

Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator

Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.

Yup. It’s not like many didn’t know this, it’s just that we weren’t supposed to talk smack about a “hero.” Well, the LAT has the goods: John McCain was a shitty pilot, a “flat-hatter” or show-off, who was reckless and negligent in the cockpit. McCain’s actions were found to be suspect in four of the five planes that he lost—including when he was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967—and in at least three of the incidents, McCain lied about the circumstances of his crash.

Hmmm. . . inattentive, reckless, an inability to learn from his mistakes, a cavalier attitude about the safety and property of others, and ready to lie to cover his ass. . . sounds pretty much like campaign ’08. More evidence that McCain is the same asshole he’s always been.

what is up with these McTies?

(M. Lyons, Getty)

Honestly, would you trust this guy to. . . well, to do much of anything? The eye rolling and sarcasm, the angry, whiny tone and manic behavior, that would be enough, but those ties! I previously decried Friday’s hypnotastic disaster, but I think Monday’s choice in neckwear may be worse. It looks like he forgot to pack a tie, so he just grabbed a tablecloth from that little Italian place on the corner and wrapped it around his throat.

The gingham check is bad, but the width is even worse. It is not completely obvious in this picture, but this tie is HUGE! It looked on TV like it’s five inches wide! Dare I suggest this was one he had leftover from his first campaign?

You know the joke “I’ve got neckties older than that”? Well, no one has ties older than John McCain, but, clearly, John McCain has ties older than many voters.

McCain’s Gerald Ford moment

Looking back on 1976, many historians and casual observers alike will tell you that if President Gerald Ford ever had a chance against challenger Jimmy Carter, that chance disappeared when, during a debate, the president forcefully declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Ford was given a chance to correct his assertion in a follow-up, but he stuck to his guns, even underscoring the point by saying that Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland were “independent” and “autonomous.”

Here’s what Time magazine had to say about what they called “The Blooper Heard Round the World” back in October of 1976:

Thus, in his second debate with Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford made what could well be the most damaging statement of his career. For any politician, calling Eastern Europe free would be an amazing gaffe. For a President, especially one who is running partly on a campaign theme of experience in foreign policy, the mistake reawakened many voters' suspicions that Ford is a bumbier [sic].

Fast-forward 32 years, and a candidate who is, yes, “running partly on a campaign theme of experience in foreign policy” makes a mistake that is possibly a bigger fo-pol faux pas than Ford’s.




You heard that right, John McCain called the Pakistan of the late 1990s a “failed state.” To quote Max Bergmann, that is simply “not true.”

McCain just badly misstated the history of Pakistan. For someone claiming extensive foreign policy knowledge, this is simply not acceptable.

[emphasis added]

Darn, if that don’t sound familiar. Here (again, courtesy of Bergmann) is what really happened:

Musharraf took power in a military coup in 1999 when he deposed Nawaz Sharif - who recently participated in the latest election. The coup followed the 1999 war in Kashmir with India and was due to a power struggle with Sharif, not due to Pakistan being a "failed state." The United States did not welcome the Musharraf coup. Instead the government of the United States imposed sanctions against this action.

Remember Pakistan had nuclear weapons in 1999. Did McCain believe that there was a failed state that possessed nuclear weapons? If he did he showed no concern at the time.

And I do think that McCain’s blunder is bigger than Ford’s. While Gerald Ford made the mistake of garbling his talking points on whether the Soviets had gotten the better of a 1975 trade pact—and then, rather than correcting his error, tried instead to look more sure and presidential—John McCain seemed to believe his contention that Pakistan was a failed state prior to the military coup that elevated General Pervez Musharraf.

Either that, or McCain was just vamping—which, given the import of the office he seeks and the delicate nature of US-Pakistani relations, is probably worse.

One might say that such behavior is erratic or unstable. To paraphrase Time: it might even have reawakened many voters’ suspicions that McCain is dangerous.

Will such a dangerous gaffe hurt McCain the way Ford’s big-league bumble derailed his campaign? Claiming that Poland was not under Soviet control is thought to have swung votes in crucial northern states with large Polish-American populations. Whether Pakistani-Americans in this cycle’s swing states will take similar offense at McCain’s slight (or whether voters of any stripe will be more basically appalled) remains to be seen.


(h/t Rachel Maddow)


(cross-posted on capitoilette, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

and the winner of tonight’s presidential debate is. . .

John McCain’s tie!

Not because I liked it, but because its not-safe-for-TV stripe pattern grabbed most of the attention.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it just amazes me that Team McCain keeps making TV production gaffs. From the primary night in front of the “green screen of death” to the Walter Reed Jr. High lawn and blue screen of death at the RNC—and now to his moiré triggering tie—the McCain campaign keeps staging things terribly for television.



I expect to have a more, shall we say, substantive set of observations later. . . tune in tomorrow.


* Again, the TIE won, not McCain.

McCain: still crazy after all these years

Well, if I said once, I’ve said it a thousand times: once an asshole, always an asshole.

No wonder John McCain "suspended" his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis -- he's been pulling the same stunt for nearly a decade now, boosting his poll ratings by pretending not to care about them.

You probably remember his suspension of the Republican National Convention's first day of business in order to raise funds and awareness for the victims of Hurricane Gustav (a move that, besides allowing umpteen convention speakers to praise McCain's selfless patriotism, neatly airbrushed the unpopular sitting president and vice president from the proceedings).

But McCain first used the tactic to spectacular effect way back in March 1999, when -- even though his White House run had been chugging along for five months -- he postponed the "official announcement" of his candidacy so that the nation could focus as one on the week-old war in Kosovo. "It's not appropriate at this time," the somber senator said then, "to launch a political campaign."

How did that play out? As McCain's sympathetic first biographer, Robert Timberg, wrote, "His decision amounted to a masterful political stroke."

This, of course, confirms a couple of things for us. First, it goes to show that this idea that there once lived a good and principled McCain that was replaced somewhere during the last eight years with this cynical, pandering model is nothing but another McMyth. The Arizona Republican was an angry, unstable, self-absorbed, preening asshole the day he landed in Washington, and he is just the same today. Second, the “suspension,” if not abundantly clear already, was never intended to be anything more than a campaign stunt.

But there is something different about this post—the above quote is from a column by Matt Welch, editor of Reason. It is not often that you are going to find me singing the praises of a prominent libertarian. Well, get your cameras ready; I am about to do it some more.

But if McCain's latest "country-first" outburst is a mostly empty symbol in terms of actual campaigning, it's a meaningful one in other ways. By taking what was originally Obama's behind-the-scenes initiative of cobbling together a joint candidate statement on the bailout package and opportunistically turning that into yet another chance to portray his patriotism as shinier than his opponent's, McCain is ripping what little facade remains over his campaign. This is not an election about ideas or policy; it's an election about a Great Man, facing down an interloper.

The upside to running a Great Man campaign against Obama is obvious: The Illinois senator is untested and comparatively unvetted at a time of war. . . .

And, in general, the more of the next few weeks that can be used up stressing vague issues of patriotism and "cleaning up Wall Street," the better McCain's chances of continuing to avoid any talk of the elements of his record that key parts of his GOP coalition despise. . . .

But as many Great Men come to learn, there is a colossal downside built into running a campaign on outsized personal virtue. The line between stoic, honorable service and showy moral vanity is oftentimes difficult to maintain.

And when a candidate confuses his own political ambitions with the fortunes of his country, that's when Great Men turn into self- parodies.

"I have craved distinction in my life," McCain wrote in his 2002 political memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." "I have wanted renown and influence for their own sake. That is, of course, the great temptation of public life. ... I have never been able to conquer it permanently, but I have tried."

Don't say he didn't warn us.

Welch has spent years chronicling the dick circus that McCain calls his career, and I think that perspective has paid off here. I am, myself, a little embarrassed at how much space I have expended on McSame’s shenanigans, rather than the real issues of the day. But McCain and Palin are like that proverbial car wreck—and you can’t help but rubberneck. The difference here is that rather than driving by that wreck, in the case of these characters, the wreck is heading straight at us—so, even if it’s hypnotizing to watch, it’s still probably a good idea to sound the horn.


Interested in more honking? Click on over to capitoilette. . . .

sounds like an asshole I used to know

Senator Barack Obama quietly reaches out to Senator John McCain, McCain says "I’ll get back to you on that," Obama waits, and then McCain goes public with a self-serving, grandstanding statement.

Does that sound familiar? It sure did to me.

From a post I wrote on February 7, 2006:

On a weekend when his party was air-testing the “Hillary Clinton is too angry to be president” message, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain publicly rebuked Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) in what Matt Stoller called “the single most bitter, nasty letter I have ever seen from any Senator.”

Obama had approached the Senator from Arizona about working together on ethics legislation, and then sent a letter asking if McCain would think about co-sponsoring a plan drafted by moderate Democrats.

"I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform were sincere," McCain writes.

When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership's preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter. . . . I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again.

And just to make sure Obama really, really understood how he felt, McCain closed with:

I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

And McCain’s motivation in breaking with the time-honored tradition of not publicly criticizing other members of the millionaire’s club? Atrios puts it this way:

The real subtext of this story is that McCain wants an opportunity to preen in front of the cameras and an adoring media as he waxes nonsensically about ‘reform’ for months as we head into the presidential primary season. Oh, and that McCain is pretty much an asshole.

Pretty much.

I had pretty much backed off using the McAsshole epithet in recent months in an effort to concentrate on the epic failures that are McCain’s policy positions, but when you read about the events of Wednesday—September 24, 2008—I really have to call a. . . well, I have to call an asshole an asshole.

It seems pretty clear now that the Obama campaign reached out to McCain first about issuing a joint statement on the economic crisis and bailout. While team Obama waited, either for a response from the McCain camp or for language to further negotiations, McCain unilaterally contacted the press to announce that he was “suspending” his campaign and returning to Washington to. . . actually, not sure what he plans to do except parachute into an institution that he hasn’t visited since April and, um, preen in front of the cameras.

That this move was anything but a political tactic, an attempt to reverse course on a really bad ten days on the Good Ship McCain, has been belied by the day’s events, the fact that nothing changed in the financial markets or on Capitol Hill between Monday and Wednesday, the 52% showing for Obama in Wednesday’s WaPo poll (along with many other bad numbers for McCain), the continued front-page focus on McCain’s lies about campaign manager/lobbyist Rick Davis’s ties to Freddie Mac, revelations that McCain hadn’t spent enough time prepping for Friday’s debate, Johnny Mac’s meeting with rich backer Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chris Dodd’s comments to Rachel Maddow that the Connecticut Senator had heard from Obama “numerous times,” but had “never heard from McCain on the issue” of the economic crisis, the comedy-rich cancellation of McCain’s appearance on David Letterman (only to be caught using the time to sit down with Katie Couric), and the fact that McCain is, as of this writing, still in New York, likely on his way to shake a few hands at the meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, before he finds his way to DC for what has now become a White House photo op.

And, of course, there was that accidentally leaked memo telling McCain surrogates how to spin this “suspension” to the press.

One’s gotta ask, “Just what does ‘suspend the campaign’ mean?”

Oh, wait, let me rephrase that: “Just what does ‘suspend the campaign’ mean, asshole?


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

country club first

By now most of you know about McCain’s call to suspend the campaign, as well as Friday’s debate, in order to concentrate on fixing the Bush-McCain-Gramm financial crisis. That’s supposed to make him look all presidential, above the fray, putting, as they love to belabor, “country first.”

But the timing of this—and the timeline of McCain’s Wednesday behavior—tells quite a different story.

The day started with Team Obama contacting the McCain campaign to draft a joint statement detailing what both presidential candidates could agree upon moving forward on this week’s bailout debate. While Obama’s people were waiting for a response, however, McCain was exercising his leadership skills by taking a private meeting with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the superrich international financier who once supported the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, but recently tried to make a big deal of her switch to McCain because she believed that Barack Obama was. . . wait for it. . . “elitist.”

So, to recap: Obama takes the lead by trying to hammer out a joint statement, McCain leaves Obama hanging while he rubs elbows with a rich backer, and then McCain announces he is “suspending” his campaign.

The Obama folks are still waiting on McCain to get back to them about the statement.


(h/t Gem Spa)



Just Breaking: Still President Bush has now weighed in with a McCain bailout plan (that would be a plan to bailout Sen. McCain, not any actual plan to fix the crisis that could have been authored by the Arizona blowhard), inviting both presidential candidates to the a White House powwow with other congressional leaders on Thursday. Obama has already accepted.


And Now Breaking: The two campaigns have finally released that “Joint Statement.” When I find the text, I will post a link.

The American people are facing a moment of economic crisis. No matter how this began, we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our economy. The jobs, savings, and prosperity of the American people are at stake.



“Now is a time to come together – Democrats and Republicans – in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of the American people. The plan that has been submitted to Congress by the Bush Administration is flawed, but the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.



This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.

But, Obama wanted to say more. . . . Quoting the official Obama-Biden blog:

Speaking for himself, Senator Obama outlined the following principles that he calls on Senator McCain to support:

I believe that several core principles should guide this legislation.

First, there must be oversight. We should not hand over a blank check to the discretion of one man. We support an independent, bipartisan board to ensure accountability and complete transparency.

Second, we need to protect taxpayers. There should be a path for taxpayers to recover their money, and to turn a profit if Wall Street prospers.

Third, no Wall Street executive should profit from taxpayer dollars. This plan cannot be a welfare program for CEOs whose greed and irresponsibility has contributed to this crisis.

Fourth, we must help families who are struggling to stay in their homes. We cannot bail out Wall Street without helping millions of families facing foreclosure on Main Street.

Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.

This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. This is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem – this is an American problem. Now, we must find an American solution.

To me, this reads as if the first paragraph was hammered out pretty easily, early in the day—it’s really hard to disagree with much there—but Sen. Obama wanted to go further, and was waiting for feedback from McCain. After a day of waiting while McCain suspended his campaign by talking to a wealthy campaign contributor, and later to CBS anchor Katie Couric, and then holing up in New York with his soul running mate, with events moving forward, the Obama team decided to just agree to release what they had and reiterate the additional points, the ones that the Illinois Democrat has been stressing all week.




(cross-posted on The Seminal)

MORE on Wednesday's campaign antics now up on capitoilette. . . .

McCain attacks ally once floated as his possible vp

Attempts to eat his own; winds up putting foot in mouth.

Republican presidential wannabe John McCain, desperate to find his footing on the US economic crisis, chose to attack Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox in a speech in Cedar Rapids, IA, today.

“The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission, kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino,” McCain said.

“The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and in my view, has betrayed the public's trust. If I were president today, I would fire him.”

McCain has been trying to find a way to distance himself from the Bush-era deregulation that he has consistently supported, and Cox was likely seen as the low hanging fruit—problem is, he’s not low-hanging enough. As ABC News has noted (h/t Sam Stein), “while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president.”

But that’s not the only absurd angle on McCain’s latest attempt to dance away from his record as a supporter of the system that has created the current economic crisis. McCain was part of the Senate that unanimously confirmed Cox in 2005, and the Arizona senator has said little about Cox since. And, as noted today by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), McCain has actually been to the right of Cox on regulatory issues.

How simpatico are Chris Cox and Johnny-Mac? Well, it was only this spring that Cox was considered one of the frontrunners for the Vice Presidential slot on the Republican ticket. Here’s Quin Hillyer writing for the uber-conservative American Spectator:

Chris Cox: The best choice [for VP], bar none. This thoughtful and reform-minded chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission made his name for 16 years as the brainiest and perhaps most principled Reaganite conservative in Congress, as well as one of the best on TV. In a brilliant column two weeks ago at this site, Lisa Fabrizio laid out the full argument in Cox's favor. Other columnists have also written that he would make a good Veep choice, among them Lisa Schiffren of National Review Online, Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics, and the reviewer for Exurbanleague.com, which is the top-ranked conservative blog in McCain's home state of Arizona. Ditto for an article yesterday in the Financial Times and a column yesterday by John Gizzi of Human Events.

Cox is well thought of by just about every conservative columnist around, and respected by the David Broder institutionalists for his brains, diligence, and decency. He could probably help at least a little in Minnesota, where he grew up, and of course he is a favorite of the Californians he represented in Congress. Of great significance, perhaps, McCain himself was asked two Fridays ago at a bloggers' briefing which states he thought he might be able to move from the Democratic to the Republican column, and his first answer, the one he focused most on, was California. And McCain is sure to appreciate Cox's grit in coming back from a horrendous off-road vehicle accident three decades ago that left him partially paralyzed for a while.

Two days ago, McCain proposed “a 9-11 style commission” to look into the causes of our economic crisis—I believe that was the same day that John Boy boasted that as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, he oversaw every aspect of the US economy (heckuva job, Johnny, btw). Today, the senator says that after he becomes president—in four months—he will fire a regulator he helped confirm (even though he can’t actually fire him and, as is being reported, Cox will likely step down at the end of the Bush Administration, anyway). The economic ship is taking on water and listing heavily, and McCain is still rearranging the deckchairs. Sad enough on its face, but infuriating (and the height of dishonesty, really) when you realize that John McCain was not only one of the builders of this boat, he helped drive it headlong into the iceberg.


(cross-posted on The Seminal)



More economic news and musings today over on capitoilette.

the view to a kill?

Is it possible that the women of The View are the members of the establishment media with enough credibility and independence to call out Mr. Straight Talk, John McCain, for his never-ending string of lies?

Just maybe. . . .

hey, McCain, get the hell off my lawn!

I’ll admit that I missed it, mesmerized as I was by the soaring rhetoric that Republican Senator John McCain used to inspire the thousands of mostly male white people assembled in the Xcell Energy Center last Thursday night; apparently, there was some talk about the background. . . .

what's in a name?

Even in a misspelled one, the answer is: not much.

more of McSame

Many suspected it, and Wednesday night served as proof; John McCain picked a running mate that is able to do something that he can’t: read a teleprompter.

The bar was set very low for the small-town mayor turned small-state governor turned last-minute Republican VP pick, so it should surprise no one that Sarah Palin was able to meet and in some ways exceed expectations. Still, Palin, who is reported to have practiced this speech for over six hours, was an impressive mouthpiece for a litany of Republican attacks—especially impressive when you consider that the McCain team wrote most of the speech for someone else.

And since the speech was supposedly drafted for another mouth, it is not surprising that Palin’s primetime coming out party did little to introduce the McVeep to American voters. (And why would you want to spend any more time talking about a woman, Palin, under investigation for possible abuse of gubernatorial power, a woman with close ties to oil lobbyists and to indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a woman who has fought hard for the boondoggle earmarks that McCain says he’s against, a woman that is opposed to reproductive choice, even in cases of rape and incest, a woman who has ties to a party that advocates Alaskan secession—through violence, if necessary—a woman who demanded personal loyalty oaths from public officials, tried to ban books from the public library, and raised taxes as mayor and as governor?) It did, however, remind all of us why the last decade of Republican domination has been such an abject failure.

For Sarah Palin chose neither to provide a substantive defense of the Bush-Cheney policies that she and McCain plan to continue, or offer any examples of what another four years of Republican “leadership” might do differently. Instead, Palin offered better than a half-hour of partisan, Karl Rove-style attacks—as rife with flat-out lies as they were with snide, cynical jokes.

Palin lied about her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” (she was for it before she was against it). Palin lied about Obama’s record as a legislator (Obama has authored or helped pass ethics reform, healthcare expansion, aid for wounded vets, incentives for alternative energy, safeguards against “loose nukes,” and a system to put federal funding details in a searchable database). And Palin joined with other Republican speakers on Wednesday night to belittle the hard and important work of community organizers everywhere (community organizing is not only noble work, often for no or low pay, that requires a day-in-day-out connection with people not privileged enough to have private jets to sell on eBay, community organizing was hailed by none other than President George H.W. Bush).

Indeed, it was perhaps most stunning that a woman billed (ad nauseam) as a “Hockey Mom” and as “relate-able” spent so much time acting just like all the other millionaires and billionaires who took the Xcel Center stage before her. (The combined worth of Meg Whitman, Mitt Romney, Carly Fiorina, and Rudolph Giuliani currently tops $4 billion—more than the gross national product of any of over a third of the world’s countries.) For, while Palin’s choreographed sniping might have won her cheers from the diehard Republicans inside the hall, it only helped accentuate the distance between her and the America she hopes to help govern. Wednesday night thus served to demonstrate not that Sarah Palin is fit to lead us into the future, but that she, like her soul mate, John McCain, is closely aligned with the failed Bush-era politics of division and destruction. Sarah, like John, is more of McSame.

Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that Palin did such a good job mouthing Republican insiders’ boilerplate rhetoric. No surprise at all.


(cross-posted on capitoilette, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

open mike night at the RNC: Murphy calls Palin pick cynical; Noonan declares race over for McCain

Earlier today, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan and Republican strategist Mark Murphy finished a segment with MSNBC host Chuck Todd. . . and then kept talking:


What the live mikes catch is truly something to behold. Noonan says of the presidential race, “It’s over,” as in it’s over for McCain. Murphy calls McCain’s pick of Palin “Cynical.” (transcript below)

Earlier today, Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column declared:

Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It's not going to be a little successful or a little not; it's not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history's accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books.

Peggy plays it coy for the sake of journalistic “balance.” If we are to believe Noonan’s gut AND mouth, then her verdict is already clear: the Palin pick is NOT going to work.

And, it seems, we won’t have to wait till after the election to hear those sniping quotes—and, it seems that they won’t be “unattributed,” either.


Transcript (taken from the YouTube audio):

Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing-state governor world. Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. And these guys, this is all about how you win a Texas race. You know, just run it up. And it's not gonna work.

Noonan: It's over.

Murphy: Still, McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

Todd: Don’t you think that the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson?

Noonan: I saw Kay this morning

Todd: Yeah, she's never looked comfortable about it.

Murphy: All bummed out.

Todd: I mean, is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

Noonan: The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives and (inaudible) the picture.

Murphy: Yeah, but what's the narrative?

Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at and they blow it.

Murphy: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism and this is cynical.

Todd: This is cynical, and, as you called it, “gimmicky.” Thanks guys.

UPDATE: Perhaps I was also being a little coy. C&L says what I feel:

Will the media start asking conservative scribes if they really feel like Murphy and Noonan do about McCain’s pick of Palin? Honesty is out in front right now as we just witnessed. Are they all just lying to our faces and not being called out about it by our talking heads sitting right next to them? We just witnessed the real deal and not the dog and pony show Republicans are so good at.

(cross-posted on The Seminal)

Mrs. McCain’s sister act

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I have sometimes wondered whether Tolstoy had that quite right, and so, by way of explanation, I submit to you (and to Leo) Mr. and Mrs. McCain.

Last Tuesday, NPR did a story about Cindy McCain, second and current wife of presidential wannabe John McCain, and referred to her as the only child of wealthy beer baron Jim Hensley. It’s not surprising that they reported such:

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase "only child," as she did on CNN last month. "I grew up with my dad," she said then. "I'm an only child. My father was a cowboy, and he really loved me very much, but I think he wanted a son occasionally."

There’s a problem with that touching little anecdote, however—Cindy McCain has an older sister, and Cindy McCain knows it.

Documents show Kathleen Anne Hensley was born to Jim and Mary Jeanne Hensley on Feb. 23, 1943. They had been married for six years when Kathleen was born.

Jim Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17, flying over Europe during World War II.

He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman — Marguerite Smith. Jim divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945.

Cindy Lou Hensley was born nine years later, in 1954.

She may have grown up as an only child, but so did her half sister, Kathleen, who was raised by a single parent.

[Kathleen Hensley, now Kathleen] Portalski says she did see her father and her half sister from time to time.

"I saw him a few times a year," she says. "I saw him at Christmas and birthdays, and he provided money for school clothes, and he called occasionally."

Big Jim helped put Kathleen’s kids through college, and did give about $10,000 in gifts to their family, but when Jim Hensley died in 2000, he left all of his vast fortune to Cindy. Kathleen got $10,000; her children—Jim’s grandchildren—got nothing.

It is a slight that Cindy Hensley McCain has never attempted to redress.

While it is true that Cindy McCain is not the one running for president, I think there is still something here to explore.

My takeaway on this is that Cindy McCain is icky. I know that sounds a tad juvenile and reductive, but I mean it to be visceral, because that's how I think this story is relevant to the presidential election.

Had her husband chosen a less public line of work, Cindy's family schism would be her affair, but thinking about it in the context of the life and career of Arizona’s oh-so-senior senator, this revelation just adds a (OK, another) sleazy taint to the whole McCain clan. Yes, Pa Hensley made this mess, but Cindy could have gone a long way toward cleaning it up by first correcting the reports that billed her as an only child, and second by sharing some small part of her substantial fortune with the family her father chose to screw.

All families have past sins—it is what a person does to address those sins that matters.

According to campaign surrogates and a fawning press, we are to believe that one of John McCain's great strengths is his judgment. He himself harped on judgment Monday in a speech before the VFW. His camp loves to talk up the idea that you can judge how maverick-alicious he is by the company he keeps. Well, what does it say about McCain and his judgment that he chooses a life partner that is so, I'll say it again, icky?

Obviously, when attacking McCain, this wouldn't be the head of the spear—there are plenty unsavory alliances to fill an anti-McCain quiver—but I am all for letting McCain be judged by the company he keeps. The icky company.

And, I'll just add a nagging question that says so much, I think, simply as a nagging, unanswered, question: Why was it important to the McCain campaign to perpetuate the idea of Cindy as an only child?

Is it perhaps because the Hensley’s unhappiness is so similar to the unhappiness John McCain caused his first family?

What would Tolstoy think?


(cross-posted on capitoilette, Daily Kos, and The Seminal)

celebrity: McCain doth protest too much

With all the back and forth on “celebrity” in the presidential campaign ad wars, and with John McCain’s camp continuing to run ads calling Barack Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” or some permutation thereof, I think you might find this interesting.

I stumbled across a post I had written just ten weeks ago titled “McCain ‘Smitten with the Celebrity of Power’” that takes on new meaning given the current ad cycle. In that piece, I include this excerpt from one of the stories in the New York Times’ series “The Long Run”:

Mr. McCain has often said he decided to run for office because he felt his war injuries would make attaining the same rank as his father and grandfather “impossible.” But Mr. Lehman, now an adviser to the McCain campaign, and two other top Navy officers familiar with Mr. McCain’s file insist that was not the case.

Instead, many who knew him say, Mr. McCain seemed bored by Navy life. “Sitting down with Anwar Sadat or Deng Xiaoping and being treated as an equal — that is pretty heady stuff,” said Rhett Dawson, a former aide to Mr. Tower who is now president of an electronics trade group. “It had opened his eyes to a much broader world.”

Mr. McCain was captivated, recalled Jeffrey Record, then an aide to former Senator Sam Nunn, the hawkish Georgia Democrat. “He thrives on competition, and he thrives on political combat,” Mr. Record said. “He saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”

[emphasis added]

McCain? Smitten with the celebrity? Gosh, ya’ think?


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

flashback 2006: “team torture” hard at work

Jamie Rose for The New York Times

When I first posted this photo back in September 2006, I wondered aloud about what was going on here. This week, an article in the New York Times has perhaps shed a little light on this scene:

[McCain] likes trading jokes about colleagues with a small group of friends that includes Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. . . . Entertaining guests at his property in Sedona, Ariz., [McCain] invariably drags them for long walks to indulge his passion for bird watching. “If you took all the people at Gitmo, put them in the cabin for the weekend and made them listen to John talk about the birds, they would all spill their guts.” Mr. Graham said.

Perhaps Senator Graham had developed some sort of reflective tedium shield that bounced McCain’s stories right back at Arizona’s pre-eminent snooze button.

If McCain surrogate Graham does indeed posses such technology, I urge him to share it with the rest of America with all due alacrity. The consciousness of the electorate may depend on it!

To read more about my suggestions for what Graham and McCain can do to help America, please head on over to capitoilette.