Read the report:

“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign,” McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said in a statement.

“McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

“Americans are sick and tired at this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career,” the statement said.

So, according to McCain, the New York Times is out to politically assassinate him with a smear campaign, playing gutter politics? That’s a bit of a stretch. But maybe that’s the only thing McCain can say right now. Denying the affair is easy: unless there’s a confession or some visual record, there’s slim to no chance that an affair will be proved. But the really damning stuff would be the simple association with a lobbyist, and the public record that McCain indeed intervened on her behalf.

Notice that McCain does not address that point. They just issue a general denial, claiming that the story shows nothing to suggest that he violated his principles. Really? Intervening on behalf of a lobbyist in such a brazen act of engendering political patronage that he was publicly rebuked by the commission he tried to sway in her favor:

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.

For a man who sells himself as the champion of campaign finance reform and a bane to lobbyist, this hard evidence certainly does sound like it’s a betrayal of some principle or another.

It’s official!

“If the House had nothing better to do, this futile partisan act would be a waste of time,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. “The ‘people’s House’ should reflect the priorities of the American people, not the fantasies of left-wing bloggers.”

Well, maybe not me, probably they’re referring to Josh Marshall. This is about the House vote to hold presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt for not responding to subpoenas issued by the House compelling them to testify under oath.

The background is familiar over the past few years: the Bush White house fired nine US Attorneys and apparently pressured a great many more for reasons that are completely improper. The attorneys were pressured to pursue election fraud charges against Democrats even if the attorneys felt the charges had no merit, and they were similarly pressured not to pursue legitimate cases against Republicans. In the investigations that followed, the Attorney General and other White House officials made misleading and false statements under oath to Congress, and the White House has refused to surrender documents and has “accidentally” destroyed mountains of evidence, much pertaining to this case.

The White House refused to allow Miers and Bolton to testify on the grounds of “executive principle,” which is a code word for “we want to deny the checks and balances guaranteed under the Constitution.” Bush offered to allow them to testify, but only if their testimony were not under oath–of course, the only reason to make this demand is if there is an intent to lie to Congress. When House Democrats voted for the contempt charges, the Crybaby Republicans stomped their feet and held their breath, staging a walkout–as if it were the height of impropriety to investigate massive corruption, if the focus of the investigation were Republican.

If anything, the Democratic Congress has been far too soft in its investigation, letting the White House drag its heels and show utter contempt for Congress’ authority for the past year. The move to hold the White House officials in contempt is, quite frankly, very late in coming. The intensity and depth of political corruption in this White House far exceeds that in any presidency in U.S. history, and deserves far more scrutiny and investigation.

Worse, since the Bush White House controls the enforcement of laws, it simply refuses to honor any charges held against it. It is exactly as if a prosecutor were a serial criminal offender, but was put in charge of the prosecution of the cases against himself–and simply declined to do anything. In any other such case, there would be a higher authority that would step in and clobber the scofflaw–but here, we are dealing with an executive branch that has no higher authority than the Constitution, which they hold in contempt and refuse to follow. There being no higher corporeal authority, there is not much else that can be done.

The Bush White House’s legacy will have been to establish that the president is above the law, that he can violate any statute, make any ethical breach, and get away with it.

Theoretically, the next president could reverse these decisions and release any documents not shredded or deleted by this administration (which will probably be very few by that time), and allow justice to be realized. But if a Democratic president tried to do so, he or she would instantly be attacked in fury by conservatives, accusing the new president of “wallowing in the past,” not allowing “bygones to be bygones,” and of “abusing the power of the presidency to exact partisan political retributions.” In short, the claim will be that a president can break any law, refuse to prosecute himself, and then enjoy immunity the day after he leaves office.

After all, this is the presidency that promised to “restore honor and dignity” to the White House.

We’re still waiting.

This is Bush’s rationale on why taxing the rich won’t work:

Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat party is going to field a candidate who says I’m going to raise your tax.

If they’re going to say, oh, we’re only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We’ve had — we’ve been through this drill before. We’re only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

It is obvious: if you raise taxes on rich people, rich people get stuck with the bill. That’s why they fight tax cuts like crazy.

Bush’s theory is that if you tax only the rich, somehow that tax will only affect people who the tax is not applied to. Huh? So if we make a law that raises the Alternative Minimum Tax for people making over $200,000, exempt everyone below that line, do not allow for special exemptions above that line, and anchor the tax to inflation, somehow rich people will not pay a penny more but people making under $100,000 a year will end up paying these taxes? Wow! Rich people must be magical!

Of course, it’s all a sham. The AMT was created to make sure rich people paid more taxes, and while I’m no expert, it appears to have worked. Not perfectly, of course; it needs to be tagged to inflation, some more loopholes closed, and it needs to be applied more to the super-rich, but overall, it prevented exactly the kind of thing Bush was talking about.

It is also hard to understand why Bush, on multiple occasions, either cut or tried like hell to cut, again and again, in way after way, taxes for rich people. He sees rich people as dishonest deadbeats, elite bastards who hire accountants to evade paying their fair share–so he rewards them by making it easier for them to avoid paying taxes? Interesting.

Really, what Bush is trying to say here is the same simple right-wing message: don’t tax the rich, and Democrats who say they want to tax the rich just want to raise your taxes. Boogah! Boogah boogah!

The tactic is simple. Use lies and scare tactics to get the middle class to vote against their own best interests, and support a massive welfare system for the rich.

Side note: have you noticed how Bush never uses the proper adjectival form “Democratic” to describe the Democratic Party? It’s way beyond an occasional misspeaking–he uses the conservative-created pejorative term “Democrat Party” virtually every time he names the party. He did so three times in the Wallace interview quoted above.

When Bush gave his State of the Union speech in 2007, he used the term–which was seen as the depth of political partisanship, to use that kind of a partisan slam in such a formal occasion. Soon after, he tried to blame it on “poor diction.” (His diction affects written scripts?) However, he only “misspeaks” when referring to the party. He uses the term “Democrat” liberally, and when he uses the word in adjectival form, he uses it correctly to refer to “Democratic leadership,” or “Democratic Senator,” and so on. But when speaking of the party, it is virtually always the “Democrat Party.”

Either this is from him simply being so immersed in a crowd who are so politically biased and entrenched in spiteful partisan politics that he never hears a different term, or it is a conscious decision by Bush to attempt to control the language to malign the opposition party.

Ah, so familiar a story. For years, Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House (and even before, when they controlled just Congress for years), Republican pork spending explodes to stratospheric levels, and Bush never vetoes it or does anything about it.

Then Democrats win back the Congress. Suddenly, the president sees pork as a major problem. Democrats cut pork spending in half, taking most of the brunt themselves, as Republicans still dominate pork even from the minority.

Seeing even bigger Democratic wins coming soon, leading to more Democratic pork than Republican pork, right-wingers complain that pork is again a major problem. With Congress bound to remain Democratic and a Democratic president seemingly inevitable, conservatives start to clamor for pork to be eliminated altogether.

Until, and you can bet the house on this, Republicans take control again someday. At which point, pork will return in a massive surge and Republicans will find no problems with it.

The End.

Hat tip to C&L.