The delusional McCain?

Apparently, Cindy McCain has forgotten the way the Bushists' allies slimed her daughter and her family in South Carolina in 2000. As a parent, I would find that unforgivable even with the White House at stake. (Another reason I'll never be President!) There is no way I could ever greet warmly the man who permitted my daughter to be used against me the way Bushists used Bridget against John McCain.

Still, according to Cindy, what Obama is saying about her husband is worse. Bullshit. There are a large number of what Karl Rove would call character issues that Obama has left alone against John McCain:

• Cindy's drug addiction (without legal consequence)
  
• John's infidelity
• John's temper
• John's gambling
• John's rambling
• John's dismal flying record
• John's dearth of academic achievement
• John's willingness to exploit the protection of his admiral father
  

Yet Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in American history." I suppose it's only natural for people who believe in Republican economics - we earned our inherited wealth - to believe that they are entitled to their own facts.

But Cindy's lack of perspective could only come from someone who has always had the field tilted in her favor and who can't remember as far back as 2000 - or chooses not to.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

GOP doctrine of total political war

John McCain has a choice: lose honorably or generate a furious shitstorm of mudslinging to change the race's undeniable trend.

Ed Rollins advocates another way, not a bomb-dropping attack, but a return to Republican ideology. This is a stunning rejection of the orthodox GOP core doctrine of total political war, and no one in the McCain camp appears to be listening.

McCain tasted total political war from the Bushists in 2000. Now, the hero of the Hanoi Hilton can rationalize any means to his own ends - because he's a hero, after all. If he gave up his conscience on torture in order to gain the nomination from the pro-torture Republican base, how bad is a little gutter politics?

Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do. Get them anti-macaca voters to the polls. Too bad McCain has a black baby, but Obama has two. Feh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Coming to a gutter near you

More Republican bullshit, the smearing ugly kind! Let's see, Obama runs into radical Bill Ayers by accident on the street. Sarah Palin does the nasty with an Alaska secessionist, her husband.

This is only going to get worse as the election nears. McCain and Palin can't win on the merits, but by damn they'll try mud-slinging. Even worse, they'll be proud of it.

Tucker Bounds, unrepentant liar

Tucky Bounds is in love with his $42,000 lie on behalf of John McCain. So in love that he repeats it in all sorts of contexts, including accusing Joe Biden of an "outright lie." If you're going to be a Republican spokesman, you need the satanic ability out of "The Exorcist" to induce head-swivelling like this. Imputing your sins to everyone else is their standard method of making me projectile vomit.

The truth, which big media mostly refuses to tell us, is here (in the economy tab), reported for children, who actually need facts, unlike adults, whom we allow to make up their own out of their impressions. Here's the Washington Post's table:

Change in Yearly Taxes
1) 0 to $18,981	-$21	-$567
2) $18,982 to $37,595	-$118	-$892
3) $37,596 to $66,354	-$325	-$1,118
4) $66,355 to $111,645	-$994	-$1,264
5) $111,646 to $2.87 million plus	-$6,498	+$3,017
$111,646 to $160,972	-$2,584	-$2,135
$160,973 to $226,918	-$4,437	-$2,796
$226,919 to $603,402	-$8,159	+$121
$603,403 to $2.87 million	-$48,862	+$93,709
More than $2.87 million	-$290,708	+$542,882

Yeah, that's Obama's tax plan on the right. Hmm, which one helps the middle class?

(h/t MediaMatters, via Atrios)

See you in four years, Michigan

Sarah Palin thought bubble: People tell me I sound like I'm from Michigan, so I know I can compete up there. They'll vote for me in 2012. And, heck, yeah, the UP is just like Alaska, right next to Canada, cold in the winter, and hardly anybody lives a-way up there. They even have some moose for me to shoot. Now that would be a photo op.

The truth is: So what, so Palin wouldn't leave Michigan. Who cares about that level of disagreement with John McCain? If she couldn't defend McCain's healthcare plan or his tax plan or his Afghanistan policy or whatever, that would matter. Oh, right...

Reasons to be cheerful

"New polls show Obama breaking away in key states" --CNN

FiveThirtyEight.com shows Obama with 336 electoral votes after today's polls and projects Obama winning in 85% of scenarios. A different type of projection gives Obama 51% of the eventual vote, and that's a hard number to beat for McCain.

Update (10/2): Essentially a repeat of the CNN story above, with a little commentary added. Bill Schneider chalks Florida up to storm surge from recent candidate visits. He seems to think this couldn't possibly be a trend away from his pal, John McCain.

Eternal verities

Even in a parallel universe, some things are inescapable. Aieee!

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Me, too

McCain says, "Me, too," about Obama's FDIC insurance increase. McCNN leads with McCain.

Incredible.

So, why is $250,000 of FDIC deposit insurance an obvious idea? CNN doesn't bother to say, but the goal is to prevent a bank run. We're already in a deeply dry credit market. A run could not only kill banks that are basically healthy, it could also tighten credit even further as more and more people and institutions flee risk into cash or T-bills, where they are no longer loanable to stimulate business activity.

Better late than never

The Presidential election will determine whether this investigation ever goes anywhere. If McCain wins, why would his AG provide resources or back-up to Nora Dannehy.

For now, Mukasey's just trying to get his reputation back at a time when it's too late to hurt the Bushists. That's not all that's too late.

Triangulation

I'm hesitant, too, hesitant to call Bill Clinton a great man. In fact, I'd go one step further and say that he is not a great man. That's just not a status I give automatically to Presidents. I don't even think Clinton was a great President, just a good one.

Look at the men who have held that office during my lifetime, and there's really only one great man - Eisenhower, and I wasn't yet three when his Presidency ended. Besides that, Ike's greatness was made in the ETO, not in Washington. JFK might have been great, too, but we have to dream of Camelot instead of remembering it.

This means I superficially agree with Bill that Obama is not a great man. Not yet. I think he could be, though I think he more likely will be successful President without attaining greatness.

I think Obama is a good man, and I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that he's a smart man. I suspect that he has far more self-possession and self-control than Clinton, despite some similarities in their backgrounds (single mother, absent father, life on the margins of poverty), and maybe that's part of what galls Clinton. If Clinton had had what Obama has, maybe he could have been a great man.

McCain is not a great man, either. He was heroic thirty-five years ago, though I'm always wary when a pall of myth is cast over human frailty. After all, he did break under torture, too (as all eventually do). He is a human, not some demigod of resistance. For another, people who are willing to torture you are clearly willing to lie to you. There's no reason to credit the North Vietnamese offer of early release to McCain. More likely, they were trying a softer psy-op to divide him from his fellow POWs. He and his buddies would have seen this before, they would have been trained about it, and they would have been obliged to resist it.

But really, it's transparently obvious that Clinton would rather be passive-aggressive like this to try to get Hillary another shot in 2012 before she ages out of eligibility. He's back to triangulation, and it's pretty ugly.

Ridicule

John McCain and the rest of the Republican screw-ups are really getting stung by cartoonists and comics. Once you become the object of universal ridicule, it's pretty hard to get up off the mat. Go to the Boston Globe's cartoon roundup - of the thirty-eight cartoons, not one is a real stinker, and easily thirty are worth a belly laugh. In this time of promiscuous LOLs, you may think I'm exaggerating or taking mind-altering substances, but go see for yourself.

I'd feel bad for Tina Fey since Sarah Palin is going to vanish back into well-deserved obscurity, but Fey is plenty talented enough to keep right on prospering. Maybe in sixty years her obit will say that she played an important role is saving America from its own stupidest instincts. Dana Carvey won't even be able to say that.

Disclaimer not enough

At the bottom of Ruben Navarrette's useless apologia for John McCain's nakedly political ploy to make himself the story, McCNN disclaims:

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

I'm sorry, if you had a liberal writing commentaries about which you made the same disclaimer, you could make that stick. But given that you're consistently printing many more conservative viewpoints than liberal ones, those opinions are your responsibility.

And Navarrette repeatedly proves himself to be a Kool-Aid-drinking dipshit.

Reporters notice

What's this? The truth? Where did that come from?

CNN has a couple of people who don't simply plug in to the McCain campaign spin. Rebecca Sinderbrand is one of them, and she shows how McCain's non-suspension suspension is obvious bullshit.

It's amazing how beneficial it is to actually keep your eyes open. Hell, even Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller manage, after a fashion, to notice that McCain is posturing, even if they have to throw in a couple of darts at Obama in the name of false equivalence.

Debate bail bondsmen

McCain to Congressional Republicans:

"Please, puh-leez, do not make a deal. I really, really don't want my bail revoked. Mississippi wants me, but I can't go back there."

Which is exactly why McCain's craven introduction of Presidential politics into the credit crisis was the opposite of everything he claimed it was.

Lowering expectations

Any two-year-old who has learned to poop in a toilet can tell that McCain's suspension is not only bullshit but is pure political calculation.

McCain will show up to the debate, but his spinners will plead that the dog ate his homework if he's not ready for anything but the typical stock bumpersticker phrases. He'll say he's been spending all his time on the economy.

Barack should be ready to retort that he knows this debate was meant to be about foreign policy but that he's willing to talk about the economy off the cuff and without preparation (heh heh). And then he should smoke McCain's ignoramus ass about the credit meltdown and everything else.

That could close the deal.

I also found this pretty funny in a laugh or cry kind of way.

But Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, called McCain's decision to suspend his campaign the "greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a [Republican] presidential candidate."

There. Fixed. Trust Newtie to be clueless and over the top about responsibility.

Indelibly stained

McCNN reports this story in the passive voice to avoid saying that McCain pulled a bait and switch on Obama. But at least they reported the story.

McCain's clear motive was to gain political advantage, not to put country first. More and more, it's clear that McCain wants to be the Thane of Cawdor by any means necessary.

That stain will never come out.

Desperate times

McCain's suspension of his campaign is insincere bullshit. Its sole intent is to benefit him politically by:

• Freezing the status quo to stop Obama's rise in the polls
• Seizing the news cycle for photo ops (and they're all free!)
• Giving him the chance to pretend to ride to the rescue as if a Wall St. bailout were San Juan Hill
• Evading a debate for which he could never be sufficiently prepared (though in the mean time he'll try)

I'm sure as I can be that the last is what provoked him to do something. If the fumbling, bumbling, stumbling McCain is seen on a platform next to the brilliant, knowledgeable, and often eloquent Obama, the stark contrast will be undeniable. Since even Fox "News" has Obama up six points (warning: link blows up Firefox 2), another five-point shift would be the death of McCain's campaign anyway.

Obama should say, "McCain is welcome to suspend his campaign if he can't manage to advance more than one effort concurrently, but is that really what we need in a President?"

Or maybe Harry Reid has already done better:

"If there were ever a time for both candidates to hold a debate before the American people about this serious challenge, it is now," he added.

Update: Obama takes the best of both (at the same CNN link)!

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person [who] will be the next president," Obama said. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."

Update: I really should have been much snarkier about this, now that I think about it. Here are some possibilities:

• McCain: I haven't finished my homework, so I'd better pull the fire alarm.
• Granddad needs his nap.

Please feel free to compete in comments for best McCain no-debate snark.

Monkey business

Follow me, said John McCain.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

McCain must have forgotten Gary Hart's campaign self-immolation twenty years ago.

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

And:

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections.

Exactly the kind of payday for who you know, not what you know, that looks to normal non-Washington people totally like bribery.

The cherry on top of the bullshit sundae: McCain has been flaying Obama for ties to the river of dirty debt.

One principle left

John McCain once bucked his party's doctrine. No more. He couldn't win the nomination that way.

John McCain once bucked the "agents of intolerance." No more. He couldn't rally the base that way.

John McCain once opposed torture. No more. He couldn't suck up to the Bushists that way.

John McCain once took a dim view of war. No more. He couldn't be a Republican without advocating more force, more often.

John McCain once advocated deregulating just about everything. No more. He can't win as the doctrinaire Republican he has become, so he's pivoting away even from things he has believed for his entire political career.

The only remaining constant in John McCain's program is me, me, me. He says he's for country first, but he really only puts himself first.