The news came out recently that commentators with ties to al Qaeda writing that McCain has the terror group’s support, as his policies would further their goals.

Now, it’s no secret that I believe this to be true; I have posted at least a few times in the past that the Bush administration’s policies have benefitted al Qaeda greatly, and that in fact, the two have fed off each other since 9/11. Since McCain’s policies are essentially an extension of Bush’s, it naturally follows that the the terrorist organizations would want McCain to win. An Obama victory, on the other hand, would just by its presence win a great deal of sympathy toward America from al Qaeda recruiting grounds, diminishing their strength and effectiveness. Obama’s policy of going straight for al Qaeda to defeat them, rather than feeding and using them as a tool to gain more power, would just as certainly not be welcome with the terrorists.

So forth and so on–you get the idea, but that’s not the central thrust of this post. The reason I did not jump on the news when it came out was because any statement from al Qaeda or its supporters must be suspected as self-serving; while I believe that the statement made was true in a factual sense, it could be interpreted in the opposite sense as well, in that such a statement is bound to hurt McCain and that might have been its intent. So the end valuation of the remark is self-cancelling, and therefore can not be interpreted as having any real meaning or impact.

However, as I reasoned thus, I immediately reflected on the fact that had the al Qaeda statement been in support of Obama instead of McCain, conservatives–the McCain campaign and John McCain himself at their vanguard–would have exploded into an orgasmic state of exuberant mega-attack against Obama that would have made a shark feeding frenzy look like a Jenny Craig seminar. That the terror group’s support was reported to be with McCain made things different: Democrats know that riding such pronouncements is dishonest and thus we have the resultant relative silence on the issue.

On the conservative side, however, the perception is very different. Maybe intellectually they know that Democrats are too straight-arrow to jump on this, but their conservative smear-campaign instincts just won’t allow them to believe that in their truthiness-imbued guts. They obviously felt that someone on the left would make a big deal about it, so they held what a reporter called a clearly “panicked” conference call intended to defuse the issue. Which, of course, was self-defeating, as the Democrats were not going to play this news like the Republicans would have.

In the conference call, the McCain spokespeople just reinforced their own reputation for opportunistic dishonesty, the same reputation they were trying to foist on the Obama campaign. They not only claimed that the al Qaeda-affiliated endorsement for McCain was actually an attempt to undermine McCain, but they also brought up the litany of unsavory people (Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Gaddafi) making statements that appeared to support Obama–in effect, attempting to turn the anticipated attack against Obama and thus voiding or reversing it.

Sometimes, just the simple state of being a bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking rat bastard can be its own worst curse. But you knew that already.

Stumble it!

The claim is that ACORN is a group with close ties to Barack Obama and is involved in a massive scam to register hordes of fake voters so as to throw the election for Barack Obama. McCain claimed in the debate last night that ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

The truth, of course, is significantly different.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a voter advocacy group that holds registration drives, focusing on increasing participation among lower- and middle-class citizens. While ACORN often finds itself aligned with Democrats on the issues, it is not affiliated with any political party, and McCain himself was the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally, where he praised ACORN and its workers, saying, “What makes America special is what’s in this room tonight.”

ACORN is not involved in any vote fraud. The focus of the recent storm is something which has always plagued all registration drives by all such organizations of any size: workers scamming their employers for a little extra cash. ACORN, and many organizations like it, hire people to register citizens to vote. You’ve probably seen this many times, where a card table is set up somewhere in public with forms, and a few people are approaching passers-by and urging them to register. The people who work these tables are hired just like with any organization or company. They are paid to register people. And whenever you hire lots of people, some will be dishonest. In this case, some decide that it’s easier to simply fake registrations instead of signing up real people, which is how you get registrations for Mickey Mouse and Tony Romo.

This is not directed by or encouraged by ACORN, Barack Obama, or John McCain, it is not the fault of anyone except a few dishonest people for hire. ACORN, the actual victims of fraud here, do their best to flag such fraudulent registrations, but are not allowed to throw out even the most egregious fakes–all must be submitted. But this does not mean that this will result in any fake votes. This is a few people trying to get a few extra bucks by submitting forms with fake names and information.

There is no evidence–zero, zilch, none, not a scrap–that this is anything but what I have described above. So why is it such a big story? The answer is an old one: because it is a helpful red herring for right-wing efforts to commit real election fraud.

There is a real and penetrating effort by conservative groups to suppress the poor and minority votes, primarily due to the fact that these groups vote strongly Democratic. There are several ways to do this. One is to introduce new laws which challenge and restrict registration and voting by these groups, such as Voter ID laws, which discourage poor voters by throwing more obstacles in their path. Another way is to fight against laws which make it easier for these people to register, such as Motor-Voter laws, which conservatives have always fought against. Another way is to disenfranchise large numbers through a variety of dodgy, dishonest, and often contemptible means, such as voter caging; the most recent iteration of this is to challenge the registration of voters whose homes have been foreclosed.

How are these efforts helped by false claims of fraud by groups like ACORN? In truth, there is very little actual voter fraud amongst these groups; in light of that truth, there is little justification for the conservative efforts to suppress the vote. But by claiming massive voter fraud where there is none, such efforts are given a false veneer of legitimacy. Without any voter fraud happening, Voter ID laws don’t make much sense; by claiming voter fraud is rampant, you gain support.

In McCain’s case, the reason is more immediate: to not only sully his opponent and energize the base, but also to begin construction of a false narrative as to why the election will go the way it will go.

This whole situation is made much worse by the recently leaked news that the FBI is now launching an official probe into ACORN. Coming just a day after McCain made his big ACORN smear campaign official, the news smacks of dirty tricks, giving just such false legitimacy to the claims of vote theft. The real question here is why ACORN is being investigated while blatant efforts of real election fraud go uninvestigated and unpunished, from Katherine Harris’ 2000 fraud where she knowingly disenfranchised tens of thousands of Democratic voters in Florida under an intentionally-botched purge of felons from voter lists, to more recent caging efforts that target college students who are required to leave their dormitories during summer break, or even soldiers who are serving overseas.

These efforts result in the actual loss of voting rights by tens of thousands of real American citizens at the polls, as compared to the claimed ACORN fraud, which has very little if any impact at all on actual votes cast in any election.

But those real and significant cases of election fraud benefit conservative politicians–draw your own conclusions as to why they go uninvestigated.

Stumble it!

With McCain and Palin whipping their crowds into frenzies, getting them so worked up that they are now regularly shouting stuff like, “traitor!” “terrorist!” and “kill him!!” one conservative commentator suggests that Obama represents a potential “thugocracy.”

A few days previous, Hans Von Spakovsky–the Bush administration’s vote-suppression pit bull whose nomination held the Federal Election Commission hostage for many months–bemoaned “how partisan and politically-biased the Justice Department and other federal agencies would be under an Obama administration.” This after years of the Bush administration blatantly saturating the bureaucracy with die-hard loyalists, going further than any administration in history to politicize what had been considered completely off-hands to partisanship–with Spakovsky himself being a poster-boy for that very movement.

Hypocrisy? Projection? Working the refs? Blindness? Uber-partisanship? All of the above, and then some?

Stumble it!

Story out of Michigan: a left-leaning web site reported that the Macomb County, Michigan Republican Party Chairman James Carabelli stated that he plans to use lists of families with foreclosed homes as a target for challenging their voter eligibility. In just the second quarter of this year, about 63,000 homes were foreclosed in Michigan alone, and reportedly more than half of the foreclosures in Michigan are on homes owned by African-Americans–likely Democratic voters, as are the others who lost their homes. As the saying goes, a Democrat is a Republican who lost his job, or in this case, his home.

While it is true that the report came from a left-leaning web site and that the source denies the story, it fits in very closely with Republican voter-suppression tactics of the past. In 2004, Michigan Republican state senator John Pappageorge said, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.” Publicly. Also in 2004, the GOP played a dirty trick by sending mass mailings to black college students during the summer break when they were inevitably not at their college addresses; when the letters, marked “do not forward,” were of course returned, they were used to challenge these strongly Democratic-leaning voters their right to vote in that election. So going after people, mostly black, who had their homes foreclosed–most likely strongly Democratic–fits in perfectly with documented past Republican efforts.

The Republicans who are denying this story claim that it can’t be true because “the lists don’t give them information on where a voter lives.” However, this is not a deterrent for the GOP voter caging program–in fact, it’s a perk for them. Remember, in the 2000 election, they successfully disenfranchised tens of thousands of African-American Florida voters, overwhelmingly Democratic, simply because they had names resembling those of convicted felons. Here again, they have a list which is mostly black and Democratic, and would likely use the same tactic of overreaching to try to disenfranchise everyone in the state with names matching those on the lists. As stated, it fits in with past documented Republican disenfranchisement efforts.

So, while there is a possibility that this story is not true, the Obama campaign is quite wise to file in court for an injunction to prevent Republicans from doing this. Because despite their current spate of denials, Republicans also have a past record of not only denying stuff they’re doing, but also of doing reprehensible acts and then defending it with thinly-veiled arguments to make it sound like it was somehow necessary, justified, or even patriotic. After all, the whole voter caging and disenfranchisement effort is based upon accusing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of honest American citizens of being vote-stealing criminals. Which also fits this story.

Stumble it!

Hmm… Obama gets clear weather and a huge, unprecedented crowd to watch his Democratic Party star-studded convention, despite some conservative Christians praying for rain in Denver.

Now that the Republican convention is starting, a huge storm approaches, and Bush, Cheney, and several others cancel their visit to McCain’s party. (Though it seemed Bush & Cheney seemed almost too ready to cancel…)

If the storm gathers up steam and news coverage right through the convention… then stops short of land and does no one any harm… well, I might start believing a little bit more than I used to.

Stumble it!

I don’t think Lieberman will be the Veep choice for McCain. Why not? Too much foreplay in the press, too much noise that seems to come from inside the campaign that Lieberman is seriously being considered. They know full well that choosing Lieberman wouldn’t impress the left- or center-leaning enough (a turncoat is rarely popular to anyone but those they turn to), and it would really tick off their base, turning way too many people away from the polls on election day.

So why the buzz? Because they want to give the image of a centrist maverick, while still being reassuringly hard-right for the base. It’s only because of the Liberal Media’s™ tireless campaigning for McCain that anyone believes that he is a (1) straight-talking (2) centrist (3) maverick who (4) has not reinvented himself (shame, shame, Brokaw). All 180 degrees away from the truth, but the media loves an image, however false. That, and the constant hammering of Obama has allowed an ineffectual, flip-flopping, gaffe-ridden old charlatan even in the polls with a strong, young, charismatic Democratic candidate.

Stumble it!

Threats and mysterious powder sent to McCain just as McCain is scrambling to escape scrutiny over the latest effective attack by Obama? The stuff was even sent from Denver, where the Democratic convention will be held–nice touch. But I don’t buy much into the whole idea of coincidence.

A closer read of the article, however, calls into question whether there was any “powder” at all:

“Our guys did not find any powder. There were maybe a couple of grains of something inside an envelope and they had to kind of work to get a sample,” [Andy Lyon of Parker South Metro Fire Rescue Authority] said.

Did the McCain camp simply decide to manufacture an anthrax scare by taking one of many threatening letters any campaign gets, choosing one from Denver for effect, and then claim there was powder inside to create the scare? They would certainly know what it would do to the news cycle, and how much it would help them.

Stumble it!

I seem to recall a time when each party gave the other a break during convention time; when one party held it’s convention, the other would tone down its events and let the other party have its day. Not today’s GOP:

Democrats won’t have the show to themselves next week during their convention.

The GOP says it’s planning a rival post near the Democratic National Convention and will put on speeches by prominent GOP opponents including former presidential nominee and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Republicans haven’t said exactly where they’ll set up, but party leaders say they’ll have an arena for rival speeches near downtown’s Pepsi Center, where Democrats gather Monday.

Speakers include Tuesday Romney, a former rival to GOP nominee John McCain. Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said Romney, considered a potential vice presidential choice for McCain, will speak in Denver before heading to Nevada on Wednesday. Romney handily won Colorado’s Republican presidential caucus in February.

At some time we apparently will be informed as to when and why Mitt Romney acquired the nickname “Tuesday.”

Seriously, however, this may not be new, but it is certainly an indicator of how the GOP is dragging down the election process, one step at a time. Not that this tactic is the worst of it–in fact, it’s about as mild as such tactics go. It seems almost innocuous compared to stuff like Corsi’s book of smears and its being propped up by right-wing organizations and heavily publicized by Fox News–a new tradition begun four years ago, and likely to continue from now on. The savagely negative campaign seems now a set right-wing feature, along with the covert email campaigns spreading disgusting innuendo. No, scheduling competing noise-making events during the Democratic convention (which the media will of course obligingly cover) is dirty pool, but pretty bland next to most new GOP tactics.

Still, it’s in the same general category, and simply reinforces what we’ve known for some time now: the GOP will do pretty much anything to win elections. “Ungentlemanly” is the least of the offenses.

Stumble it!

Have you ever seen those soccer games where one player barely brushes against another, and the other player immediately collapses onto the ground, clutching their limb as if it had been severely mangled, all so they can wrangle a penalty shot?

That’s McCain right now. Bob Schieffer–not Wes Clark–used the words “gotten shot down,” and Clark simply said that that wasn’t a qualification for being president. That in a conversation where Clark (a) was clearly framing the entire discussion as a matter of strict qualifications and not an attack on McCain’s character, and (b) Clark had just gotten through laying effusive praise upon McCain, admiring as being a “hero.”

Sullivan’s antics aside, anyone who seriously considers this anything more than a blip is overreacting to the extreme. Even if you do take offense at the language, it was Schieffer’s language, and Clark’s statement did nothing more than mirror it.

But this is what the McCain campaign has been reduced to: making incredibly exaggerated claims at injury whenever even the slightest brush involving McCain’s wartime record is perceived.

There has been this meme going around that McCain, in his dignity and humility, has never used his war record to his political advantage. This is wholly untrue: McCain has always used his war record, mentions it all the time, and plays it up to ultimate effect–which is one reason it is the most-known thing about McCain. If he were truly humble, we wouldn’t know much about it. Bob Dole is more the humble type–people would comment on that pen he holds to hide his disability, but Dole himself doesn’t tout it much, just as Senator Inouye doesn’t bring up his Congressional Medal of Honor all the time; this is why fewer people know about these things.

But McCain? He almost like Rudy Giuliani–not quite using a noun, a verb, and “I was a POW” in every sentence, but sometimes it seems like it. He constantly drops a joke at the slightest hint of inconvenience, saying that “I haven’t had this much fun since I was in Hanoi.” The whole “I’m offended by aspersions cast on my war record” act is nothing more than yet another attempt to capitalize on this whole thing.

You know what I wonder about most in this whole charade? Why the hell was Bob Schieffer acting so angry and offended when Wes Clark, after lauding McCain as a hero, simply stated that McCain’s service did not give him experience or expertise that would translate into talents of use to a president? Watch the video–Schieffer comes across as almost scandalized.

Why?

Stumble it!

McCain is at it again. His propensity for lying in only thinly veiled disguise is pretty stunning. A week or so ago, he said that our troop levels are at pre-surge levels, then he denied he was wrong, trying to pretend he never said “pre-surge” in a way that was pretty blatant. Today, he’s lying even more outright–listen:

So, essentially, he’s saying that he’s not for privatization, those damned nasty liberul Democrat Party meanies will twist his words and claim he’s for privatization, but he’s not. Instead, all he wants to do is allow for people to put money that would otherwise go to Social Security payments and instead place them in personal accounts. In other words, privatization. (Oh, no! I just twisted John McCain’s words! I’m going to hell for sure now!)

Josh Marshall points out how Republicans, similar to the way they blamed their own “nuclear option” terminology on Democrats, backed off from “privatization, saying the that Democrat Party™ was responsible for it all along. They switched to ”private accounts,“ and when that didn’t work, ”personal accounts,“ the language McCain just used in aggressively denying he was for privatization. It’s kind of like watching an intelligent-design proponent vigorously deny he’s a creationist when all the time he’s thumping on a bible.

Undoubtedly, we are taking him out of context yet again, which is now McCain’s knee-jerk response to any public mention of his numerous lies. So, for context, here is the word from John McCain himself:

So, what do we have just recently? McCain claiming that Obama lacks knowledge and experience about Iraq, while claiming that our troops are at pre-surge levels, and that all violence in Iraq will magically disappear soon after he takes office. (This built upon repeated McCain gaffes and blunders about Iraq, from his famous ”marketplace stroll“ fantasy to his inability to discern Shiite from Sunni.)

McCain claiming that Obama will raise Americans’ taxes by ”thousands of dollars,“ that ”Americans of every background would see their taxes rise,“ claiming that McCain is the middle-class tax-cutter when in fact, Obama would cut middle-class taxes much more than McCain, and would only raise taxes on people in the upper class while giving small businesses and middle-class workers big cuts; McCain, meanwhile, gives the lion’s share of his tax cuts to the rich.

According to McCain, Obama is dirty because one of his Veep Vetters simply worked for Fannie Mae, while McCain’s own Veep Vetter was a paid lobbyist for Fannie Mae.

And that’s just in the past week or so. Keep going back and it’s practically anunending string of stuff like this–reversals, lies, and double-standards.

My question is, how long will it take for the media to recover from the softening effects of the Kool-aid-drinking McCain barbecues and start reporting even half the obvious truth about McCain, showing him up to be a liar, a flip-flopper, and a hypocrite on levels that makes even George W. Bush pale?

Five minutes after that happens–if it ever does–expect the right-wing PR machine to go into high gear, claiming that the (a) Liberal Media™ has (b) gone back on the May-I-Get-You-A-Pillow-Senator-Obama Bandwagon and (c) is unfairly demonizing John McCain for no good reason.

Stumble it!

Recently, McCain said that when U.S. troops come back from Iraq is “not too important.” He was instantly criticized by Democrats; in response, he complained that the criticism ignores the context.

And you know what? McCain is right: his statements were taken out of context.

The catch, for McCain, is that if you look closely enough at the context, you’ll see an even deeper problem. The context is that McCain’s statements about Iraq (including way back to his “hundred years” statement) are based upon the premise that Iraq will very soon become a peaceful place where our soldiers never get attacked or killed. That’s what McCain is talking about when he says that our having soldiers and bases in Iraq will be just like our having soldiers and bases in Japan, Germany, and Korea.

And within that context, you can see why McCain’s latest comment makes sense: if things are peaceful in Iraq, then having troops there will be just another ordinary overseas assignment–whether a soldier gets posted to Baghdad or Yokota simply depends on that soldier’s preference for weather and the occasional venture into trying out the local cuisine.

This, however, is where McCain’s context breaks down: there is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq will become anywhere near so peaceful in the near future. It could happen, but that is so unlikely as to approach absurdity. Yes, last year’s cease fire by the Mahdi Army (and not the Surge™) has allowed for lower casualty rates among our soldiers, which is more than I would have thought possible–few predicted that al Sadr would do such a thing–but even with Iraq’s most important militia leader playing nice, even with things going as well as we can temporarily hope for, we’re still seeing an American soldier killed every day on average. Hoping for violence to completely disappear is almost literally a pipe dream.

But McCain is hoping to rewrite the conventional wisdom by acting as if a peaceful Iraq in the very near future is a foregone conclusion–that’s a big part of what his “2013” speech was about. He’s hoping to take the illusion of a successful Surge™ and ride it to the assumption that we’re winning in Iraq and will soon see it become just another U.S. ally where IEDs, marketplace bombers, and mortar attacks simply do not happen.

And this is where McCain could get into trouble: the pitch just isn’t selling. Most Americans do not make the same assumptions that McCain is making–which is why his “not too important” and “hundred years” comments play so badly.

And McCain has seen this trouble before. If you recall, he dropped into obscurity late last year, and everyone (myself included) figured he was toast. But people seem to have forgotten why that happened. McCain’s campaign plummeted after he made his statement that Iraq was safe enough to walk around its streets completely unarmed and unprotected–and then“proved” his point by visiting Iraq and taking a “stroll” through a marketplace–wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by a hundred soldiers, and covered by three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. Soon afterward, he became something of a laughingstock.

Iraq is doing better now than it was then, which may have contributed to McCain’s comeback, but it is not doing so well that we can consider it another Japan or Germany. As I see it, McCain’s press to change assumptions about Iraq can have only a few possible outcomes, and none of them are very good for McCain. At best, he’ll get many or most Republican voters to see Iraq as maybe becoming manageable enough to keep our troops there. However, I think it is much more likely that things will continue as they are now: people will not accept McCain’s assumptions, and his statements about Iraq will continue to disconnect with what Americans perceive.

So, when McCain complains that his statements are being taken out of context, he is correct, but it is more his fault than anyone else’s–they’re taken out of context because McCain’s context is so patently absurd that no one will accept it.

Stumble it!

Everybody believes that the military is relatively right-wing, that conservative values and often Christianity are emphasized. It is likely true, though not having been there, I cannot say–but that tends to be the impression given from a wide variety of sources, with little to refute it.

However, this is not a case of cause-and-effect in terms of policy and legislation, or else the members of the military are masochistic. The Bush administration and the Republican Party, for quite some time now, have treated the soldiery–at the very least–with disregard. Oh, sure, they talk a good game–support the troops, how dare you criticize the troops, and so on–but these statements are generally made in reference to attacks on Bush and Republicans, whereupon they try to make it sound like an attack on them is an attack on the troops. The whole “human shield” strategy of dodging criticism, using the honor and sacrifice of the troops as a means of evading responsibility for malfeasance and incompetence. They love using the troops, not actually supporting them.

It’s not as if they actually care about the troops themselves. I would not go so far as to say they dislike the troops; it is simply that they don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the troops when it comes to actual, real-life support. I would not suggest that the Bush administration or the Republican Party actively hate soldiers when they decide to arbitrarily lengthen their tours of duty, deny them benefits, scale down pay increases, or generally act in a way that disfavors the troops. I don’t think they do these things because they dislike or disrespect the troops. I think that they simply don’t care one whit, and would just rather spend the money on pet projects instead.

So it is no surprise that the new GI Bill, the one that actually benefits soldiers, is opposed mainly by conservatives and the Bush administration. The bill outlines broad new policies that allow for greater education benefits, not just for members of the active military, but also for those who serve in the National Guard and Reserves but nonetheless serve the same as those in the regular military. It is a promise that anyone who serves, learns. You get an education, an education that will benefit not only the soldier but will continue to benefit the country.

So why are conservatives opposed? Because it’s too generous. Well, after all the effusive praise, and “nothing’s too good for the troops” talk, and the protestations to defends and support the troops at all costs, that sounds a little, well, contradictory. But they insist: be too generous in post-service benefits, and you’ll have trouble with retention, with keeping soldiers in the service.

This attitude has two problems: first, it’s bogus:

The Congressional Budget Office, in its cost analysis, estimated that the benefits would result in a 16 percent drop in re-enlistments, a number opponents have repeatedly cited. But the office also predicted a 16 percent increase in recruitment because of the new benefits.

In short, we’ll get as many new troops as we’ll lose former ones, so it evens out. But the second flaw in the argument against is the attitude of “let’s treat the soldiers like crap when they get out so they’ll never want to leave.” Anyone see a problem with that?

Naturally, John “I’m a War Hero and I Love the Troops” McCain is against it (his response to Obama’s criticism: “you didn’t serve like I did, so shut up!”), as is George W. “I’m a War Hero Even Though I Went AWOL” Bush. McCain is against the bill (he simply didn’t show up for the vote), and Bush promises to veto it. Fortunately, enough Republicans are now so scared of losing their jobs that they crossed party lines (along with a few who actually do respect the troops) and supported the bill, so it has passed with a veto-proof majority.

But it is nice of McCain and Bush to go on the record and state officially that they would sooner short-change the troops than take even the smallest chance of decreasing the amount of cannon fodder they need for their perpetual war in Iraq.

Because, of course, they support the troops so much.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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.

Stumble it!

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