Wow. McCain’s lead media consultant, Mark McKinnon, is resigning from that post… because he likes Obama so much, he doesn’t want to make negative ads against the man. That is not an exaggeration; in the Summer of 2007,

McKinnon told Cox Newspapers that if Obama was the Democratic nominee, he would not play an active role in McCain’s effort to defeat the Illinois senator.

“I just don’t want to work against an Obama candidacy,” McKinnon told Cox Washington bureau chief Ken Herman; electing Obama, he added, “would send a great message to the country and the world.”

I repeat: Wow. That says something. Sure, McKinnon is a former Democrat, but he has worked for Republican candidates since 2000, helping elect Bush twice and working for McCain up until now. And yes, he says he’ll still vote for McCain, but considering what he’s doing, you gotta figure that he might be just saying that.

Not that everyone in the GOP feels that way. Sure, Republican Chuck Hagel likes Obama, but the Georgia GOP chair thinks that McCain is like Jesus on the cross. And no, I am not making that up.

Meanwhile, the media in the U.S. seems fixated on Bush’s cell-phones-to-Cuba gimmick, while apparently ignoring the fact that Israel, where Bush just gave his “talking to radicals is appeasement” speech, Israel has announced official talks with Syria (“it’s better to talk than to shoot”)–and the Bush State Department has no objections. Apparently no one outside a few liberal blogs has noticed the contradiction.

If you’re in the mood for sleaze, check out a political ad run by a Republican candidate (and incumbent) for Congress. Basically, it attacks the Democratic candidate’s “San Francisco values,” demonstrating that by having three slutty-looking swingers partying it up, bumping and grinding. I’ve lived in San Francisco and grew up in the area, and this doesn’t come any closer to representing the values of the area than a seedy strip club in Missouri represents theirs. But apparently, this passes for kosher in conservative Missouri politics.

I reflected on how people would react if, say, a Massachusetts liberal were to put out an ad representing rural/heartland values by showing gun-toting redneck hicks drinking beer and picking their noses in front of a pickup truck with a Confederate flag on the side. Such a politician would instantly be excoriated, blasted out of the water as an “elitist.”

What it comes down to is the fact that not just ads showing such “San Francisco” values, but pretty much all criticisms of the same sort–attacking either urban/coastal or liberal values as “elitist”–this is in fact the true “elitism.” The same people who claim that liberals are prancing around thinking they are better than everyone else are themselves the ones with the superiority complex; they think that their values are better than those of others. The values I remember from the San Francisco area were pretty much respectful of a wide variety of views and beliefs; it is an accepting, big-tent culture, with “tolerance” being a major theme. I don’t see much tolerance or acceptance among the brand of people who complain about “San Francisco values.”

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A new study:

In the “first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution,” the authors show that one in eight high school biology teachers present creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to Darwinian evolution. While this number does not reflect public demand–38% of Americans would prefer that creationism to be taught instead of evolution–it does represent a disconnect between legal rulings, scientific consensus, and classroom education.

Before you think that one in eight is not bad, or even, “what’s wrong with introducing creationism alongside evolution,” consider that this is similar to one in eight Medical School teachers telling their students to consider prayer as a scientifically valid alternative to antibiotics. And then consider whether or not you’d want to be treated at the hospital staffed by graduates of those classes.

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Finally! Rumors of the iPhone coming out in Japan. The carrier: NTT DoCoMo, as I predicted. Apparently, all the attention crashed the Apple Insider web site, which I could not access as of this time. However, the rumors only say that Apple is “close to signing deals” with the Japanese and Korean carriers, and has no specifics about when the iPhone will be available–and Japan is rather infamous for getting stuff late.

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Uh oh. Conservatives are starting to talk about “character” again. I guess, after eight years, they must miss being able to use the word in public when referring to their candidate for president.

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From Virginia:

A federal appeals court panel in Richmond, Va., on Tuesday struck down a Virginia law that made it a crime for doctors to perform what the law called “partial birth infanticide.”

Good. “Partial birth abortion,” a political (not medical) term in this case escalated to “infanticide,” is nothing more than a manufactured straw man intended to stand in for abortion in general. The idea is to vilify the entire practice by choosing the least-commonly practiced (less than one-fifth of one percent of all abortions) but most-easily vilified form of abortion, and making a campaign of it, completely ignoring the medicine or the ethics involved in the process.

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Ewww. An off-duty Japanese railway worker was arrested for forcibly kissing a woman on a train right here in Ikebukuro. Reportedly, he was so drunk that he doesn’t remember what happened, which only makes the image worse. Imagine that guy sticking his tongue down your throat–or your wife’s. From the article:

His employer was apologetic about the incident. “We’re sorry about the case. We’ll improve our guidance of employees,” said a spokesman for Seibu Railway.

Yeah. Be sure to give those employee seminars about not to get completely smashed and sexually assault women. That oughta do it. I mean, such “guidance” is stupid: any employee who doesn’t know better shouldn’t be working there in the first place.

No word in the article about whether or not the guy would be fired.

McCain’s direct statement:

“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,’’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. ”I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’’

Then, McCain’s policy adviser announced:

SHUSTER: Nancy, does the McCain campaign believe that talking to our enemies is the same as appeasing them?

PFOTENHAUER: We have never used the term appeasement and you know that.

SHUSTER: But the president did. […]

PFOTENHAUER: We have specifically not used the term appeasement.

Um… OK. So, Pfotenhauer either doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she’s lying. Great.

But here’s my question, relating to McCain’s statement that “it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.”

The hostages came home at the exact moment Reagan was taking office; Reagan was never president at a time when negotiations could have taken place. McCain seems to be suggesting that Reagan’s negotiation policies were so amazingly tough, that the Iranians released the hostages before Reagan had even said a word.

He also seems to forget that when hostages were taken on his watch, Reagan not only talked with Iran, but he in fact directly appeased them, selling them weapons and supplies, in direct violation of his own stated policy, in exchange for hostage releases. Reagan continued his secret policy of appeasement for years, in fact, probably causing more hostages to be taken, while he continued to supply Iran with arms.

So, why isn’t the media challenging McCain’s romanticization of Reagan’s actions? It’s a clear lie–McCain was in Congress during the Iran/Contra hearings, he could not have forgotten about it. But after immediately recognizing this lie, I did a search, and found no media attention to it whatsoever. Only the Democratic party and other blogs picked up on it.

The Liberal Media™ at it again!

Update:

Here is Obama’s response to McBush’s “Appeasement” accusation, in which Obama hits on all the high points, all the lies and errors. It’s quite measured, methodical, and comprehensive, and well-delivered… so naturally, McCain called it a “hysterical diatribe.” Presumably McCain used those word because he wanted to engage in civil, high-minded debate like he promised.

As much as Bush & McCain made fools of themselves in the last week, nothing they did could touch the inappropriate, hypocritical, bullying remarks Bush made addressing the Knesset to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary of nationhood. Bush not only violated the general protocols that say you don’t use foreign podiums nor official appearances at major events to toss out political attacks, he also got his facts wrong and made a baldly hypocritical accusation against Barack Obama:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ”Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.“ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Oh, where to start. First of all, Bush apparently is not aware of what the word “appeasement” means. In short, it means to “pacify or placate someone by acceding to their demands.” Not talking to them–giving in to them. If Bush thinks that talking to someone is the same as appeasing him, then he has just accused Ronald Reagan, not to mention countless other American leaders, of being filthy appeasers.

Second, Bush is clearly trying to attack Barack Obama here. There is no parsing necessary to figure that out: Bush uses the weasel words “some seem to believe,” which he routinely uses when he wants to refer to Democrats without being held responsible. It is clear who he is talking about–Obama is the only prominent politician currently in the spotlight for talks with countries like Iran and Syria (though he balks at Hamas). Bush claimed he was not attacking Obama specifically, but with Obama the only prominent voice, and with the White House press secretary letting slip that she was “not going to get into ’08 politics” in reference to Bush’s remarks, it appears clear to just about everyone on the planet that this is exactly what Bush was trying to do. If, by some wild chance, Bush’s remarks had no relation at all to Obama, the remark was still incredibly inappropriate because any rational observer would have instantly made that connection–as just about every observer, including most right-wingers gleeful at high-level Obama attacks, immediately saw.

Not to mention that, as Laura Rozen points out, Bush has–by his own definition–been a serial “appeaser”:

Beyond the fact that Bush’s own administration has repeatedly offered to negotiate with Tehran should Iran suspend uranium enrichment, and that his top diplomat in Iraq has talked with his Iranian counterparts, as well as his former ambassador to Afghanistan, both with the White House blessing, as well as the ongoing negotiations with Pyongyang, Libya, and the Syrian deputy foreign minister’s visit to Annapolis; beyond those recent demonstrated exceptions in action to Bush’s rhetoric (I guess the word for it is “hypocrisy”): It’s also worth pointing out, as several Israeli security officials and political observers have recently done to me here, a bit of recent history Bush neglected to mention at Israel’s parliament. That Israel and the Palestinian Authority have chiefly him to thank for Hamas having a degree of political legitimacy it otherwise would not have had. After all, they point out, it was the Bush administration that “twisted the arm” of Israeli and Palestinian leaders against considerable resistance and skepticism on their part to allow the Palestinian militant group Hamas to run in 2006 Palestinian elections that Hamas won — an outcome to its policy interventions that the Bush administration once again failed to anticipate.

So, not only did Bush approve of “appeasement” with many “terrorist and radicals,” but his own ham-handed and actual appeasement to Hamas in 2006 allowed them to win their current place in power.

Apparently fearing that he would be left out of the publicity that Bush generated, McCain took the opportunity to take an “unrelated” potshot at Obama:

Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, McCain said he took the White House at its word, but then he weighed into the spat himself, saying: “This does bring up an issue that we will be discussing with the American people, and that is, why does Barack Obama, Senator Obama, want to sit down with a state sponsor of terrorism?”

Asked if Obama was an appeaser, McCain said Obama must explain why he wants to talk with leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and added that Obama’s position was a serious error. “It shows naivete and inexperience and lack of judgment to say that he wants to sit down across the table from an individual who leads a country that says Israel is a stinking corpse, that is dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel. My question is, what does he want to talk about?”

The hypocrisy: Not only has Obama insisted that he would not speak to Hamas, John McCain has said that he would. While McCain seems to have forgotten that he favored talks with Hamas, the reporter who interviewed him has not:

RUBIN: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”

McCAIN: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”

APPEASER!!! So, is this a flip-flop? Or hypocrisy? Could be both. Video of the interview:

An Obama spokesman further detailed McCain’s hypocrisy:

It is the height of hypocrisy for John McCain to deliver a lofty speech about civility and bipartisanship in the morning and then embrace George Bush’s disgraceful political attack in the afternoon. Instead of delivering meaningful change, John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s irresponsible and failed Iran policy by refusing to engage in tough, direct diplomacy like Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan have done.

McCain’s lapdog Leiberman later joined the fray, backing Bush and McCain, making for a perfect McBush day.

UPDATE: CNN has the story, that White House officials privately confirmed Bush’s statements were about Obama:

The president did not name Sen. Barack Obama or any other Democrat, but White House aides privately acknowledged to CNN that the remarks were aimed at the presidential candidate and others in his party.

Just confirming what we all already knew.

Okay, let’s plumb the depths of McBush over the past few days.

First, an appetizer: Bush claimed, in an interview, that while our own brave young men & women fought and died in Bush’s unnecessary, politically-motivated, wasteful, al-Qaeda-boosting, and horribly mismanaged war in Iraq, Bush himself was paying a terrible, unthinkable price: he gave up golf. In an interview with The Politico, Bush said:

Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

Bush: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.

Q: Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?

Bush: No, I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life. And I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it’s just not worth it anymore to do.

This absurdly outrageous question was just as offensive to soldiers as anyone imagined:

Brandon Friedman, a veteran US infantry officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Press Association: “Thousands of Americans have given up a lot more than golf for this war. For President Bush to imply that he somehow stands in solidarity with families of American soldiers by giving up golf is disgraceful. It’s an insult to all Americans and a slap in the face to our troops’ families.”

The real slap in the face: Bush was lying–he hadn’t given up his golf game, not for de Mello:

The problem is that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. envoy in Iraq at the time, was killed Aug. 19, 2003. Bush, according to news reports, was still playing two days later, when he teed off at the Crosswater Golf Course in Sunriver, Ore., during a two-day visit to the Pacific Northwest.

He also played Sept. 28 with friends at Andrews Air Force Base course and again there on Oct. 13, in honor of Columbus Day. It appears that he didn’t golf after that — at least judging from a review of media coverage since then.

Keith Olbermann had a few sharp words for Bush on this.

Not to be outdone, McCain gave a major policy speech today which could quite legitimately be called the “Magic Pony” speech. In it, McCain fantasized about ending his first term in January 2013:

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy… The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. … There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. The United States and its allies have made great progress in advancing nuclear security. … The size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased, and are now better equipped and trained to defend us. … the United States, acting in concert with a newly formed League of Democracies, applied stiff diplomatic and economic pressure that caused the government of Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force, with NATO countries providing logistical and air support, to stop the genocide….

The United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth, and Americans again have confidence in their economic future. … Congress has just passed by a single up or down vote a tax reform proposal that offers Americans a choice of continuing to file under the rules of the current complicated and burdensome tax code or use a new, simpler, fairer and flatter tax, with two rates and a generous deduction. … Congress has not sent me an appropriations bill containing earmarks for the last three years. … New free trade agreements have been ratified and led to substantial increases in both exports and imports. … The world food crisis has ended, inflation is low, and the quality of life not only in our country, but in some of the most impoverished countries around the world is much improved. … Public education in the United States is much improved thanks to the competition provided by charter and private schools…. Test scores and graduation rates are rising everywhere in the country.

Health care has become more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history. … The reduction in the growth of health care costs has begun to relieve some of the pressure on Medicare; … Their success encouraged a group of congressional leaders from both parties to work with my administration to fix Social Security as well, without reducing benefits to those near retirement. … The United States is well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil; progress that has not only begun to alleviate the environmental threat posed from climate change, but has greatly improved our security as well. … Scores of judges have been confirmed to the federal district and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, who understand that they were not sent there to write our laws but to enforce them….our southern border is now secure. Illegal immigrants who broke our laws after they came here have been arrested and deported. Illegal immigration has been finally brought under control…. A sense of community, a kinship of ideals, has invigorated public service again.

As I said before, winsome fairies and prancing unicorns would not have been out of place in this speech. I have extravagant hopes for the achievements of an Obama administration, but not only do I keep them to myself, none even come close to the massive self-indulgent, massively overreaching self-gratification McCain wallowed in with this speech; he must think he’s the freakin’ second coming or something.

Had he given the speech in terms of goals, that would be one thing–but to try to convince people that in four years he could solve virtually all the world’s problems single-handedly and accomplish more than all other presidents combined… it comes across as absurdly arrogant, self-aggrandizing fantasy.

Fortunately for McCain, he did not have much time to suffer the ridicule that naturally follows such inanity: Bush stole the limelight and made an even bigger fool of himself soon after… with McCain quickly jumping on Bush’s brainless bandwagon. More on that in Part II.

Man.

I’m going to blog more on this later, but Bush & McCain really outdid themselves today with sheer idiocy and hypocrisy.

Really. Imagine Bill Clinton, in mid-2000, going to Israel and comparing then-Governor Bush with Hitler appeasers. Republicans would have gone nuclear with rage, not the least of which would have been at the idea of an American president going overseas and using a foreign podium to slam another American politician.

And then there’s McCain, whose big day was trounced on by Bush’s speech. Personally, I think Bush did McCain a favor by eclipsing his “Magic Pony” speech, in which he’s finishing his first term in office and he presides over a world of winsome faeries and prancing unicorns. All McCain could do in Bush’s shadow was to agree that that nasty Obama man was indeed an appeaser.

And then the wingnuts, apparently attracted to stupidity light moths to flame, chimed in. Reserving further comment for later, I will simply let you watch Chris Matthews utterly annihilate the right-wing talking head as an unimaginably blustering moron. It is literally breathtaking.

Some days you can be so thoroughly stupid that even your pals in the media come out and call you a laughable moron.

Maybe now I understand why gun-rights supporters fear gun control laws so much: they believe that gun control advocates will act the same way that right-wingers act, taking a legal victory and using it to try to go to ludicrous extremes. Even I did not see this shameful act of vote-stealing coming, and I have a low opinion of these people:

The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.

The measure would allow far more rigorous demands than the voter ID requirement recently upheld by the Supreme Court, in which voters had to prove their identity with a government-issued card.

Sponsors of the amendment — which requires the approval of voters to go into effect, possibly in an August referendum — say it is part of an effort to prevent illegal immigrants from affecting the political process. Critics say the measure could lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legal residents who would find it difficult to prove their citizenship.

As if thousands of illegal immigrants have been flooding the polls in Missouri and stealing elections.

I shudder to think of what they’d do next if they actually got away with this. Require genetic scans to prove you are really you? Submit transcripts of your school records from kindergarten to high school? Take a language test?

Don’t laugh–the idea of needing special proof of citizenship at the polls is so ridiculous I don’t think many saw that coming. And lord knows what they’ll require as proof. You can bet it’ll be the thing least likely to be easily available to the elderly and poor.

We have already seen a number of voters-including a dozen or so elderly nuns–denied their right to vote in Indiana because of the Voter ID law that is denied to deny exactly such people their votes, instead of the imaginary voter fraud that is claimed as the “real” threat.

H/t to C&L.

This is starting to become a habit within the GOP: see if you can take words spoken by Obama, take them out of context, claim they mean something they clearly did not, then smear him with it. Nothing new; they did it all the time with Gore. But they hadn’t done i as much, while Hillary was there to do it for them. Now that Obama’s the nominee in all but name, they’re starting the drumbeat of lies and smears. In just the last few days, McCain did this with Obama’s remark that McCain had “lost his bearings” in terms of McCain’s breaking his promise to keep a clean campaign; they claimed that Obama had made a crack about McCain’s age, which he clearly did not.

Now they’re at it again. Obama made a remark about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling it “a constant wound, a constant sore,” noting that the conflict “infects our foreign policy.” Republicans very dishonestly interpreted it to mean that Israel is a “constant sore.” Here is the exchange:

JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?

BO: I strongly reject the characterization. Israel is a vibrant democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and there’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.

JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?

BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

Right-wingers are very dishonestly “misunderstanding” Obama, with GOP leaders attacking Obama over the imagined slight, bloggers insisting that he’s flagrantly insulting Israel:

Obama partisans are claiming that he said that the Midle East [sic] conflict is a constant sore. But quite clearly the antecedent to “this constant wound, that this constant sore” in the question is “Israel.” Perhaps the Harvard-trained lawyer who tells us that words are important wants us to believe he was just sloppy. Or maybe words don’t matter when he doesn’t want them to?

What dishonesty. In their quotes, they only cite the one paragraph by Obama, completely omitting the preceding paragraphs which lay down the understood subject as the conflict; as the Washington Post pointed out:

It is pretty clear from this passage that Obama is not calling Israel a “constant wound.” Indeed, he specifically says “no, no, no” when asked if Israel is a drag on America’s international reputation. He is referring to the overall Israeli-Palestinian problem, including continued Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Goldberg describes Boehner’s characterization of his interview with Obama as “mendacious, duplicitous, gross, and comically refutable.”

The thing is, this is so easy to understand it’s not even funny. Just look at the one paragraph in context; pay attention to the words I have highlighted in bold:

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

If you truly believe that the “constant wound, constant sore” is in fact the state of Israel, then you get in trouble in the very next sentence, where Obama says the very same thing is a problem that “Israel has a security interest in solving.” If, as the bloggers and Republican leaders Boehner and Cantor claim, Obama was referring to Israel itself as the “constant sore,” then the trailing sentence spoken by Obama would have to be read as, “Israel has a security interest in solving Israel.” Which is a stupid assertion to make.

Fortunately, the media seems more inclined to note that this obvious lie is indeed a lie.

So, what’s next? Probably won’t have to wait long.

Another tack Obama should take: deconstructing McCain’s image as a campaign finance reform champion. With all the campaign finance laws and rules McCain has twisted and broken (not to mention breaking many of his own policies), from using his wife’s corporate jet while she steadfastly refuses to make her tax returns public, to violating federal law on withdrawing from public financing without FEC approval and after having used public financing as collateral on a loan and Bush’s attempt to re-staff the FEC to ignore McCain’s violations, Obama could have a field day with McCain on what is supposed to be one of McCain’s strongest issues.

And that’s before we even get to the fact that McCain has surrounded himself with lobbyists. Consider today’s news: a second McCain aide had to resign because he’s a lobbyist for the brutal regime in Myanmar. Think about that: McCain had not one, but two campaign aides who were paid lobbyists for the same small foreign power. McCain has so many lobbyists working for him that two are significantly connected with a relatively unknown southeast Asian ruling junta. You could probably throw a dart at the issues board and be assured of hitting something connected to more than one lobbyist working for McCain these days. After getting all that laid out in public view, we can move on to the many instances of McCain exerting his official influence to pay back lobbyists who have him in their pocket.

Of course, with this issue and the issue of McBush/McSame, the problem lies in getting the media to recognize it. But there should be an easy way: somebody at SNL should write a skit where the media is ignoring every single McCain misstep while jumping down Obama’s throat on the irrelevant stuff. It’d be a funny skit, and if the media responds to it like they did to the skit which had them loving Obama, then there should be an immediate dumping on John McCain like never before.

Obama should continue striking this theme. Remember how the Republicans successfully hung Clinton on Gore in 2000; Gore’s big mistake there was to distance himself from Clinton, whose popularity was high at the time–more than twice Bush’s rating now, Clinton was in the 60% range. Obama could easily hang McCain with 28% Bush, seeing as how McCain’s policies are very, very close to the current president’s, whose unfavorables are higher than Nixon’s just before he was forced to resign.

The beauty of this tactic is that it’s policy based, not distraction based, and draws upon huge dissatisfaction not only in the country in general, but from within the Republican ranks as well. Bush is not only divisive for the country, he is also now divisive within his own party. And while McCain and his supporters have tried to distance themselves from Bush, they find that when pressed, they cannot–and more importantly, do not want to–draw that distinction. A prime example, via My DD:

BLITZER: You just heard Congressman Van Hollen say that he represents a third Bush term. You know how unpopular the job approval numbers are right now.

[HOUSE GOP WHIP ROY] BLUNT: I don’t think anybody believes that. I think everybody does believe from his record that here is somebody who has always been willing to complain about the way business was done in Washington. And, frankly, people want to see that…

BLITZER: When it comes to domestic economic issues, what is the major difference between President Bush’s policies, what he wants to do, and what John McCain would do if he were president?

BLUNT: Well, I think what John McCain wants to do is continue these pro-growth tax policies that our friends on the other side have been talking…

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: But that’s what President Bush wants to do too.

BLUNT: And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with that.

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

Emphasis mine. Rather amazing, isn’t it, how Blunt morphs from “Nobody believes that” to “I believe it, and it’s a good thing” so quickly. It’s pretty laughable when you know what to look for.

And that’s the key: McCain doesn’t want to be seen stating emphatically that he’s no George W. Bush, that he thinks Bush is a failure. McCain will spout on about how he’s criticized this president, how he was the first and the loudest out there to say Bush made mistakes–but when it comes down to it, he’s not gonna say that Bush was a bad president. McCain is in bed with Bush in terms of policies on the economy, Iraq, energy, taxes, abortion, foreign policy, gun control, health care, corporate welfare, deregulation, stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing constructionist judges, the list goes on. Ironically, McCain is also the same as Bush, from the right-wing perspective, on immigration, which will hurt him with Republicans. Hell, McCain even voted with Bush on torture, when it came down to it. The biggest contrast with Bush is supposed to be campaign finance reform, but with McCain violating campaign finance laws and ripping the laws’ spirit to shreds, there’s really not much of an actual difference there, either.

With this line of attack, Obama can (a) be telling the truth, (b) stick to policy debates instead of trivial distractions, and (c) go way negative on McCain without actually going negative–and McCain would have a hard time saying how being equated to Bush is a “negative” attack without alienating his core base.

During the 2000 election, Bush repeatedly attacked Clinton for cutting military spending and allowing the armed forces to weaken, primarily because of deployments in the Balkans:

“If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report …, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.’”

But Maj. Thomas Collins, an Army spokesman, told CNN: “All 10 Army divisions are combat-ready, fully able to meet their war-fighting mission.”

The ten divisions included the two that Bush claimed were not ready–a claim clearly recognizable as false, as the two divisions were at that time deployed, therefore obviously ready to report for duty. That didn’t stop Bush, of course. He claimed that the Clinton administration was responsible for the cuts in military spending–ignoring the fact that Bush’s father (with Dick Cheney at his side) started the cuts as part of the post-Cold-War “Peace Dividend,” that Bush 41 cut more funding than Clinton had, and that Clinton was actually reversing the trend of cuts and was starting to increase military spending.

Bush has increased military spending to levels higher than at the end of the Cold War, a tragic irony considering that despite the expenditures, Bush has broken the military and made it less ready to fight a war than it has been since after Vietnam. Clinton’s military was positively buff in comparison.

Today, the U.S. military has been stretched far too thin. Think that’s a convenient liberal myth? Then think again–that’s what “3,400 active and retired officers at the highest levels of command”–that means officers of the rank of Major or higher–said in a recent survey (PDF). 88% reported that the Iraq War has “stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.” Not just thin, but dangerously thin. 52% of all interviewed said they “strongly agreed” with that assertion.

And that’s not the only opinion they have: 60% say the military is weaker now than it was 5 years ago; the three most important reasons were cited as the pace of troop deployments and rotations, civilian leadership/oversight, and wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, according to 76% of those who thought the military is weaker. Only 2% of the one-quarter minority who thought the military is stronger cited civilian leadership as the reason (53% said it was “personnel with more experience, education, and training”).

80% said it would be unreasonable to expect the U.S. military to successfully wage another major war somewhere else in the world today. 50% said “very unreasonable.” Only 3% said “very reasonable.” So, what was that Bush was saying in 2000 about two of ten divisions reporting “not ready” if called on for duty?

74% said that the Bush administration set unreasonable goals for the military in post-war Iraq. Only 7% approved of using criminal and health waivers to beef up the military–the least-approved of measure, which is exactly what the Bush administration is resorting to now.

52% said that the military is weaker than it was 10 years ago, under Clinton, as opposed to 35% who said it was stronger; this coming from a strongly conservative military community–so much for Bush’s claims. Almost the exact same number–51%–said the military is weaker today than it was in 1993, when Bush 41 handed it over to Clinton. Again, a sharp blow to the idea that Clinton was the one who weakened the military somehow.

After five years and endless reports that our soldiers are not being equipped properly, 45% still report that the administration is still equipping soldiers “inadequately,” as opposed to 34% who said the equipment was “adequate.”

37% said that Iran has gained the greatest strategic advantage from the war in Iraq; China came in second at 22%, and the U.S. third at 19%. Heckuva job, Bushie!

95% of those who responded to the survey had served at least 16 years; 81% had served 21 or more years.

After understanding all of that, consider that John McCain wants to keep our troops in Iraq for another fifty to one hundred years.

I know we shouldn’t respond to liberal-baiting by right-wing media loons, but I think that in this election season, there is a value to pointing out to people who consider themselves ordinary Americans exactly how sick and depraved the conservative side of things can get.

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, while playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”–an obvious, racist reference to Hillary winning the Democratic nomination–stated on air that he dreams of, hopes for race riots in Denver to sink the chances for a Democratic win in November.

The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here. … Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.

The fact that he called the riots an “objective” is what spurred many to understand that he was calling for, trying to instigate riots; with his “Operation: Chaos” history, the impression was that Dittoheads would descend upon Denver and spark the riots themselves, then blame blacks and Democrats for the violence. Rush denied this, insisting that he only expected blacks to riot and prayed for such an outcome, not that he would try to instigate such an outcome (which, after all, would be a felony offense).

When a caller confronted him with this the next day, he claimed that his conduct on the show demonstrated “nothing but love, care and concern for people,” then proceeded to call the woman he was talking to a “mush head.” Defending himself on his racist-toned Denver riot fantasy, he claimed that it was Al Sharpton who was reprehensible and responsible:

The fact is that the Democrat Party has members in it that have already said, ‘There will be riots,’ or something to that effect. Al Sharpton. He was throwing down the gauntlet to the superdelegates: ‘You take this election away from Barack Obama, and there’s gonna be trouble. There’s going to be trouble in Denver.’

Because, as we all know, if Al Sharpton warns of “trouble in Denver,” that has to mean race riots and nothing else, like a contested convention that could be harmful to the party. Reportedly, after making that statement, Sharpton then went straight to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and ordered an “M.F.’ing iced tea.”

I searched the web for any independent source of the Sharpton quote, and could find nothing at all. Rush either picked up on some stealth report of Sharpton’s words, or twisted Sharpton’s words so far out of context that it would not be possible to find the actual quote, or just made up the attribution out of whole cloth.

Whatever the case, whether Sharpton said there would be trouble or not, Limbaugh is showing the same propensity he did when he jumped on an L.A. Times article about the film archetype “magic negro” to launch a weeklong racial tirade against Sharpton and Obama. The pattern is to take a marginal statement out of the media and use it as cover for allowing his racist attitudes to take flight. It’s not him who is racist, you see–he’s just commenting on racial matters that someone else brought up.

Remember also that Limbaugh, while outrageous, is not some fringe loon–he popularly represents a mainstream Republican caucus. If you’re considering voting Republican, consider carefully the company you keep.

Wow, the right-wingers are really showing their true colors as bigots. They just filibustered (what, the 5,349,816th time this session?) a bill that would make it possible for workers to sue for pay discrimination, essentially killing it. Obama and Clinton returned to D.C. to vote for it, and McCain stayed away, signaling that he would have voted to kill it anyway.

Let’s rehash: this is based upon a scummy re-interpretation of law by the Bush administration. The original law was intended to make it so that if you found out your employer was paying you less than another worker for the same job because you were the wrong gender or race, you could sue them, so long as you filed suit 180 days after the last occurrence of the discriminatory pay. That was obviously meant to be structured so that the 180 day deadline happened after the last disparate paycheck was issued.

In a suit based upon this law, an employer tried to claim that the 180-day deadline started when the initial decision was made to issue unequal pay, taking advantage of wording that was just nebulous enough to allow for that interpretation (if you’re a complete idiot). Co-workers don’t immediately disseminate how much money they make to all coworkers, and employers often strongly discourage (or even try to prohibit) such sharing in any case. Finding such disparity within 6 months of the initial pay difference is so rare to discover that the law would essentially be meaningless under the new interpretation. It’s about as obvious as it can get that this was not the way the law was supposed to work.

The plaintiff, Ms. Lilly Ledbetter, won her case, and all the appeals until it reached the conservative-stacked 11th circuit (a spin-off of the 5th circuit, the most conservative in the country)–whereupon the law suddenly changed to support discrimination. Then the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and naturally, the Bush administration jumped on the company’s side, filing a brief in support of the bigotry, in opposition to the EEOC’s rational application of the law in accordance with decades of precedence. And the 5-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court voted along straight party lines to uphold the ludicrous reinterpretation that essentially gutted the law. (Message: if you’re a corrupt, lawbreaking corporation, now is the time to get your suits before the high court! Get the payoffs while they last!)

Some right-wingers used the “it’s the law’s fault” defense, saying that they’d like to fight against discrimination, but darn it, the law is just so clearly written to be stupid, we have no choice but to follow it and be stupid ourselves. The Bush administration made no such dodges; they simply claimed [PDF] that once a decision was made to discriminate, a corporation could not be expected to remember that it had initiated such discrimination beyond 6 months, and it would be a travesty if people were allowed to sue after discrimination had continued for years and years. (They even made the deranged argument that the Ledbetter law would discourage allegations of discrimination from being “expeditiously resolved.”)

So if a corporation got away with discrimination for 180 days, then they were home free–untouchable from that point on. As I pointed out before, this asinine view of the law just begs for abuse, and is even institutionalized in posterity if pay increases are decided as a percentage of initial pay levels.

Well, no problem–just re-word the law so that it clearly states the obvious intent. But there’s a big problem–no, two big problems: one, the president–who vowed to veto the reworded bill, and now the Senate Republicans, who just filibustered it to death before it could even get to the president’s desk.

So the conservative wingnuts in all three branches of government have not voiced their intent to let bigotry reign.

Ready to vote yet?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the insidious Liberal Media™ continues to call Republican obstruction “blocking” or “denying” in their headlines, even eschewing the correct term “filibuster” in the full text of most of the articles covering this story (the few that there are, that is). They showed no such reluctance to use the word “filibuster” almost endlessly in the far more rare cases when Democrats blocked a handful of the most extremist right-wing judicial nominees.

Oh, and here’s a bonus bit of Republican hypocrisy:

Republicans said Democrats were playing politics, by timing the vote to give the Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, time to return to the Capitol from the campaign trail. Both senators spoke in support of the bill before the vote.

Yes, how terrible that they allowed senators time to vote on legislation. As opposed to four years ago, when Kerry returned to D.C. to vote for a veteran’s health care vote… and the Republican leadership delayed the vote so Kerry couldn’t vote on it. Those Republicans are just pips, aren’t they?

Do a Google News search on “McCain FEC” and look at the results. In the past two days, there has not been even one story from a non-biased U.S. media source about McCain and the fact that he is now in clear violation of federal election laws. Not one. You have to go back to March 3rd to find one, and that’s an LA Times piece that calls the story “a debate that only law students could enjoy.” Excuse me? The Republican nominee for president violating a law that could net him five years in federal prison?

McCain is Mr. Campaign Finance Reform, Mr. I’m Squeaky Clean, Mr. Anti-Corruption; and yet here he sits, surrounded by lobbyists, with a string of hard evidence showing that he has interceded on their behalf in governmental affairs on multiple occasions, and now he’s flipping off the FEC and saying that he can do whatever the hell he wants. McCain doesn’t like the restrictions imposed by the FEC, and the FEC chairman says he can’t withdraw? No problem: I’ll wave my magic wand–poof! I’m no longer bound by FEC rules!

Meanwhile, Obama gets steamrolled by the press on the NAFTA thing because–supposedly–it shows that his actions don’t live up to his words. Come again?

Instead, all we get is feel-good stories about McCain. The Liberal Media™ rides again!

Remember back in last year, when the Republicans disabled the FEC in a political power game? Well, it may be coming back to bite them in the ass now.

I blogged on this last October: the Federal Elections Commission is down to just two commissioners, far short of its normal six. Bush and the GOP want to put a political stooge, Hans von Spakovsky, onto the commission. This nominee has been implicated in the US Attorney scandal, is sharply partisan, and so was seen as completely unacceptable by Democrats, led by Barack Obama and Russ Feingold. But Republicans wanted von Spakovsky on the commission badly, so they said that either von Spakovsky gets approved, or nobody gets approved. They refused to consider the other three nominees if their boy was not seated. They probably thought they were being ever so clever: either seat a Bush stooge on the elections commission, or have no commission at all, either way allowing for all sorts of GOP hanky-panky leading up to November.

And so there was no confirmation, and the FEC remained understaffed, with only two commissioners; as a result, the quorum of four cannot be made and the commission cannot function.

That doesn’t mean the commission can’t be inconvenient, however. The way Republicans have set things up, they may wind up completely disabling the McCain campaign for the next six months:

The nation’s top federal election official told Sen. John McCain yesterday that he cannot immediately withdraw from the presidential public financing system as he had requested, a decision that threatens to dramatically restrict his spending until the general election campaign begins in the fall.

You see, McCain opted into the program for the primaries, but did not yet take federal funding that would lock him into it. And now that he’s all but won the nomination, he wants to opt out, as he’s reached the top spending limit for anyone in the program.

Here’s where the irony comes in. If you’ve opted in to public funding, you can only withdraw if the FEC votes to let you leave. But since Republicans have left the FEC with only two commissioners, they can’t do that. Like I said, sometimes dirty tricks can come back to bite you in the ass.

But even if the FEC were to be re-enabled, McCain still might not be able to leave. Why not? Because of McCain’s sweetheart deal to get a $1 million loan from a bank in order to keep his struggling campaign afloat before the New Hampshire primary. In getting the loan, McCain had to promise the bank that were his campaign to flounder, he would opt for public financing to pay back the loan. In short, he used public money as collateral for the loan. And that, according to FEC rules, is the same as accepting federal money, and locks you into the system.

So McCain might be locked into public financing from two different directions, which means that he is not allowed to spend more than $54 million until September, when the primary season ends and the Republican convention is held. But McCain already spent $49 million by the end of January–which leaves him a paltry $5 million to spend over the next six months, money he may have already spent in February.

McCain’s solution seems to be to take the Bush route: break the law and then insist you didn’t break it. McCain’s lawyer is already claiming that McCain is somehow magically no longer tied to public financing. Now, he may be able to get away with this, but even if he does, it’ll be a big blow against him politically. He has been running as Mr. Clean, using that image to bash Obama for even considering to reneg on an oral pledge, not even legally binding, to use public financing for the general election later this year. But now that McCain is probably going to knowingly violate campaign finance laws himself, it would appear as extremely hypocritical for him to go after Obama on this.

In fact, Obama could use McCain’s actions to get him out of his pledge. Obama never made a statement that he would break his pledge, and his pledge was not to use public financing, but to “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” But if McCain breaks the law on public financing, Obama could say, “I can’t trust any deal with someone who so cavalierly violates campaign financing laws,” thus dealing McCain a double blow–Obama gets to raise huge amounts of money in the general election, and paints McCain as a hypocritical scofflaw on campaign finance at the same time.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops in the press over the next few weeks, especially after McCain’s trouble with the lobbyist connection. All in all, not a good week for the Republican nominee apparent.

Addenda: The McCain-lobbyist story is now morphing from a sex scandal into a lobbyist scandal, and rightly so. As a sex scandal, it’s more juicy for the press, but McCain could deny it more easily. But as a lobbyist scandal, he’s in real trouble. First, John “Mr. Campaign Finance Reform” McCain has admitted that his campaign staff is riddled with lobbyists, and second, McCain has been caught in a lie concerning his involvement in the Iseman/Paxson favoritism scandal.

CNN just ran a piece that on the surface seemed to go after McCain for the recent lobbyist story, but wound up being a puff piece that seemed almost eager to clear his name. After first going over the charges, they repeated again and again how he denied, denied, and denied the charges. Played video of him denying the charges. Then emphasized how he denied the charges, repeating how he said they just weren’t true.

But no mention was made about the documented facts that the lobbyist had urged McCain to send a letter to the FCC to press them to quickly approve a TV deal for the lobbyist’s clients–and McCain fired off two letters quickly thereafter doing exactly what the lobbyist asked for, letters which were so ethically questionable that they drew a rebuke from the FCC chairman.

Then CNN did a bit on McCain’s history as a reformer, going over bills he passed that were supposed to clean up campaign finance. Why they did this was unclear to me, but they gave the impression that McCain was above reproach on this issue.

What they did not mention was that McCain became a ‘reformer’ only after being implicated in a campaign finance scandal, where he became known as one of the “Keating Five,” for being a paid stooge of a man whose S&L was one of the biggest to fail in the collapse of that industry in the 80’s. Nor did CNN report on the many ties McCain has had with lobbyists or the times he hedged on or even broke with the campaign finance reform he is the poster boy for.

If CNN keeps going this way, they might find themselves being “fair and balanced” some day.

By the way, McCain announced:

At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust.

Apparently, in McCain’s world, the Keating scandal never took place. Or, in his eyes, did not constitute a betrayal of the public trust.

Update: Okay, CNN apparently just remembered the Keating Scandal–they mentioned it briefly before again lauding McCain’s “reformer” persona. Still no mention of all the other questionables aside from simply airing McCain’s press conference.

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.

Just as McCain has tied up the Republican nomination, this out from the New York Times:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Ouch.

A lot of people are calling this a non-story, but I’d say that remains to be seen; once reporters get through with it, if all that there is is rumors, then I’ll agree. Or, if they mean that it should be considered a non-story until something tangible comes up, I’d go along with that as well. But if the story is true to any degree, then it is anything but a “non-story.”

If the story does come to anything, it’ll be a double threat: not only would McCain (already divorced after committing adultery in his first marriage) be guilty of adultery again, but he’d be in bed with a lobbyist–Mr. Squeaky-clean I’m-against-lobbyists campaign-finance-reform John McCain. Literally in bed with a lobbyist, and he even wrote letters to government regulators on behalf of this lobbyist/mistress.

Even if the adultery part is not true, then the showing-favoritism-to-a-lobbyist part should be somewhat damaging all by itself.

But in all fairness, it’s refreshing to see a story like this take hold on a Republican the same way it has on Democrats in the past; from a fairness perspective, if Dems get smothered by the press when stories like this come out, then Reps should get the same treatment. Bush has been, for some reason, unusually exempt from this kind of scrutiny. And this while McCain is calling Barack Obama “deceitful”–if it turns out to be true, then McCain deserves to be walloped big-time. Some even suggest that this is actually a slam from the right–from Republicans who don’t want McCain to be the front-runner. Whatever the case, it should focus more heat on McCain than on Obama for the whole public-financing non-issue McCain has been trying to push lately.

Some days, you kind of have to wonder at the blessed political life Barack Obama enjoys; he seems to catch all the breaks.

It should be interesting to see what happens to McCain’s and Huckabee’s numbers now that Romney has unexpectedly pulled out of the race. Are Romney people the more religious segment of the party? How many are people who simply won’t accept McCain? How will Romney’s numbers be split between the two remaining candidates? It’ll be three days before the Gallup daily tracking polls have a full sampling on the split, but it should be interesting.

Also interesting is the sheer vehemence of the Republicans who simply cannot accept McCain. Several conservatives have already stated publicly that if it’s McCain vs. Hillary, they’d vote for Hillary. When McCain spoke at the conservative CPAC convention (where Ann Coulter last year called Edwards a “faggot”), the audience booed McCain–even though they were explicitly instructed not to boo him. Just the fact that they felt it necessary to admonish the crowd not too boo their front-runner in the first place is pretty telling of how much open revolt there is to his candidacy.

And that in itself is pretty amazing, considering that McCain is pretty conservative. He’s moderate on the budget and on immigration, but is firmly anti-choice, likes strict constructionists, is anti-union, anti-gay-marriage, anti-civil rights, pro-death penalty, is a hawk on war issues, and is the man on Iraq… so why do conservatives hate him so much? Do they look back to 2000 and think that he’s a liberal in conservative clothing? If so, they’re wrong–he was no more liberal back then than he is now, that was just an image of moderation, without actually being too much of a moderate.

To see just how conservatives see John McCain, see the “accidental” caption that Fox Noise put on McCain’s video clip (look at the party affiliation):

That’s the caption they put on Republicans who are exposed as sex offenders. Um, okay.

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.