The McCain campaign is in the news every other day using someone's song without permission. It has nothing of its own that it's willing to put forward for America's future. Why? Republican ideas are unpopular.
Better try to co-opt the Democrats' messages. Oh, and sign up for T. Boone's wind power plan, which he himself cribbed from liberals and moderates, put a new bow on, and called it his own.
After a week in which he carefully orchestrated calling Barack Obama and real Democrats every name in the book (a week? hell, years!), now John McCain says:
"Americans want us to stop yelling at each other."Practically every other quote in this story has some element of bullshit, too. Here's one from Tim Pawlenty:
"John McCain connects with Sam's Club voters. He gets it."How patronizing.
So. This plane all liveried up as a McCain * Palin plane (where's the American flag!) is a leased charter to carry reporters. The reporter pay the campaign for their seats on it.
The story, though, is the shiny new plane, with generous and gratuitous mention of McCain's branding for the plane he and Sarah will actually fly on. (Note to Obama campaign: Hint, hint.)
The establishment loves to cover itself and its new toys.
Update (9/6): I misinterpreted the CNN story I linked to. It was only Thursday that reporters had this plane to themselves. It apparently will be Sarah Palin's new plane for the duration of the campaign. She didn't get it on eBay, by the way. (h/t BarbinMD on Kos)
The Republican Party is the party of peace. The Republican Party is the bipartisan party. The Republican Party is the party of the middle class. The Republican Party is the party opposed to elitism. The Republican Party is the party of women.
I mean, really, who knew pigs could shit so much bullshit?
They really do think we're blind, deaf, and stupid. And can't remember anything from five minutes ago.
I have to hope they're wrong, but after the last ten years I'm not sure of it.
It is really going to be great to have a President with a jump shot and a thick skin.
Question is: Can he get that weak-ass shit past me?
Public domain photo from Wikimedia - click for more info.
Update: Forgot the money quote:
“What did you guys expect?” he asked, smiling, “This is what they do. They don't have an agenda to run on. They haven't offered a single concrete idea so far in two nights about how they would make the lives of middle class Americans better."
Sarah Palin - and it's completely undeniable that the 20-phone-call impetus came from her - believes that she can settle a personal score using the power of her office.
Wasn't Duhbya pissed at Saddam for maybe trying to kill his daddy? Now there's a good model for smart policy.
(The headline? Click the thumbnail image.)
Let me start by conceding that I would prefer that Obama had more experience with all the issues of the day. At the start of his campaign, I'm sure he knew that his chances were slim, that Hillary had left him only a small opening in her inevitability, that the most likely outcome of the 2008 campaign was national notice for a later campaign.
If all other things were equal, more experience might become decisive. Of course, Obama is a brilliant orator, much better than Bill Clinton, the best speech-making politician since JFK at least. But I can leave aside the delivery of speeches for a moment, even though communication and inspiration are very important parts of a President's job.
The crafting of Obama's speeches shows an intelligence far beyond what Americans are used to hearing. All the time, we hear words come out of Duhbya's mouth and even McCain's mouth that clearly are formulas their speechwriters and political advisers want them to say. They don't own these words. They just read them - badly - off a teleprompter.
Obama owns all his words. They're his thoughts, his policies, his cadences, his vocabulary, his references. The media loves McCain because they used to get the top of his head, even if that changed from day to day. Obama's character comes through in the text of his speeches, and that is very good.
Bill Clinton had a factual mastery that escapes all the Republicans on the scene today except for Dick Cheney. Clinton could shape that mastery into narrative, though not as well as Obama. Cheney can fashion it into bureaucratic infighting par excellence. Oh, and into war.
Sarah Palin has none of this.
Bush aide Matthew Scully was largely responsible for the speech.After twenty months, she has mastery of Alaska. Maybe. She has a colorful back story, and she wears her lipstick better than a pit bull. She has the experience of being right, hard right. And wrong about practically everything. Her political biography, like Duhbya's before it, is a tissue of convenient, attractive lies. Reformer? Nope. Foreign policy? Don't make me laugh. She's a demographic patch on McCain's political infirmities, nothing more.
Mitt Romney will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear. Even for a Republican, he's a well-practiced liar. The Boston Globe notices:
In at least one case, however, Romney seemed to venture too far, saying that liberals want to "grow government and raise taxes to put more people on Medicaid." Dependency, he said, "is death to initiative, to risk-taking, and opportunity."Paul Begala notices:
The Massachusetts health reform law, which Romney took credit for helping to create and signed into law in 2006, depends on expanding the Medicaid program to extend health insurance to more people.
Who is he kidding? Again and again he spat out the word "liberal." I was waiting for him to attack the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, pro-universal health care liberal governor of Massachusetts — Mitt Romney.Massachusetts was just a stepping stone. The truth about Mitt is that you can never tell by watching what Mitt believes in - other than himself. He's running again in 2012, though, and he has forsaken the mushy middle just like McCain.
My friend Tom nails the Republicans for their utter unprincipled knavery:
Sarah Palin is using her daughter as cynically as I have ever witnessed anyone turn their children to their own ends. John McCain is taking advantage as best he can of a pregnant teenager to advance his ambition. The McCain campaign and the leaders of the Republican Party are asking — demanding, as far as anyone can tell — that Bristol Palin suspend whatever hope for privacy she may have in order to provide her mother with the cover she needs.If they'll do this with their own children, what will they do with yours?
If Joe Lieberman still has any leadership role in the Democratic caucus come 2009, I'll probably explode. My preference: Show him the door.
Unless of course he's vote number 60!
I've actually seen this ad three times on Red Sox Double Play (5-4 walk-off bunt win after trailing 4-0; maybe these boys are serious about the AL East).
The ad is so over the top that I was waiting for the punch line, but it turned out these bullshit purveyors are serious. You really can't satirize this stuff - it's already too ridiculous.
He's younger, faster, quicker. Inexhaustible, tireless, energetic. A leader. Independent and principled. Great dad, big-hearted, funny, and kind.I shit you not, that's all of it. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. John's role is to walk purposefully even if he looks older than 41.
He's the youngest member of the Senate, but Time Magazine says, "... that hasn't limited his reach.
New Hampshire's in his blood.
Woman: "I think I'll stick with the future, John Sununu."
"I'm John Sununu, and I approve this message."
All you really need to know about the Republican Party is this: The delegates to the RNC are still proud of Duhbya.
Sometimes they slip and speak the truth:
“His speech basically passed the baton to John McCain,” Mark Quandahl, chairman of the Nebraska state party said.Sometimes it's tough to enforce message discipline into the small states with looser organization. Hmm, wonder how they're keeping Sarah Palin on message - hypnotism, threats, operant conditioning?
McCNN headline: "Gay Republicans: GOP 'on wrong side of history'.
Best quote: "We'd really like to be butch enough to be real Republicans, but the bathroom at the Minneapolis airport will have to do, big boy."
Yeah, I made that up.
Listen, guys, you're gay. You're in a gay-hating party. Do you really enjoy that? Who's on the wrong side?
But keep on going 'cause I got two or three laughs out of this story, and I can always use a good chortle.
Rebecca Sinderbrand, my new favorite journalist at McCNN, counter-programs her network today, nailing the Republican retro-fantasy machine. I would of course go a bit further than the nostalgia she sees in waves - these conservatives, like most conservatives I've ever known, may talk about the future, but they pine for a golden age of righteousness long past that never actually existed.
Nowadays, it's the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, but in the 1980s they pined for Eisenhower and in the 1950s for anyone before FDR, even Herbert Hoover and his problems in the housing market. Too bad the mean Democrats wouldn't let the market have enough time to sort out the Hoovervilles.
It may be this propensity for imagining a golden age is what made the Republican Party such a natural fit for white Southerners, many of whom (not me, of course) look back on race-based sovereignty with wistfulness and angry defensiveness.
Gonzo scot-free:
If someone would just claim that he stuffed them down his tighty-whiteys, then we'd have a story.The papers in question were so sensitive they were to be kept in the Justice Department Command Center.
The report says Gonzales violated the rules for handling top-secret information hours after he was briefed on the strict procedures for handling the documents.
"Despite this briefing, the attorney general took the notes home with him in his briefcase that evening and did not store them in a safe at his residence," the report said. (emphasis added)
Jack Cafferty goes medieval on the Republican Party's ass. It's good to see that someone at McCNN is fed up with the bullshit.
Some white people were raided and subjected to police intimidation. Also, some people who were quoted as chanting that they were white people have rioted and been arrested. As a liberal, I support the right of white people to dissent vocally and with some level of civil disobedience, but I think white people should be arrested if they riot.
What I would expect a responsible media to do is to find out whether the first group of white people and the second group of white people overlap in any way and by how much. That might put into perspective the police intimidation and at least justify the issuance of the warrants, though perhaps still not every alleged bit of police conduct.
I do expect to be disappointed in my expectation. The media are really fond of lumping all white people into the same category and holding all of them responsible for the acts of a few.
Of course, I substituted 'white people' for 'anarchists' to make the whole point of this item.
I could not look away from a story of rescue and loss in yesterday's Boston Globe, "Father drowns in Chatham rescue attempt."
A man drowned trying to save his precious young daughter from a rip current. A 17-year-old off-duty lifeguard, without a rescue tube, saved the girl. Four swimmers were rescued from another rip off Sandy Neck beach.
This very hazard was what motivated me to finally learn to swim well in my late thirties. No father who like this dead father expends his life in rescuing his child could consider that life ill-spent. My own precious young daughter then and now loves the ocean, and I wanted to be useful in the event of danger to her. Now, she's 17 and a strong swimmer, and I cannot imagine her having to make and live with the correct but too godlike choice that Tanya O'Donnell had to make to save the 10-year-old girl and leave the drowning father to his own devices.
My beach necessities happened just down the shore from Sandy Neck in Cape Cod Bay, where late in the season hidden challenges arise that can kill the unwary on a beautiful day. I have been in that buoying salt water literally hundreds of times, where the worst hazard is usually an idiot on a Jet Ski. But I've also started down the beach toward a man in trouble in the water only 100 feet from dry beach, fortunately preempted by a rescuer with the wit and experience to paddle out with a boogie board. I've swum after neighbor boys whose raft came untethered in wind that drove them quartering off shore. I could still tiptoe the sandbar when I reached them, but they were out too far to get themselves back, and they were in a panic getting off the raft into too deep water.
I'm not alone in absorption into this kind of resonant story. People naturally want to hear narratives that they can place themselves into in their imaginations.
The weird thing is that in this age of TV, many of us can no longer distinguish real narrative from fake. In 2000, millions of people thought having a beer with Duhbya would be a barrel of laughs. In 2008, the press is on the look-out for something that humanizes a candidate.
Among Alberto Gonzales's crimes, mishandling sensitive compartmentalized information related to illegal spying is relatively minor. Even so, should a Democrat do it, he would rightly be punished, though not drawn and quartered, as the frothing wingnuts wanted for Sandy Berger.
Of course, Gonzo's defense remains that he's an idiot with premature senile dementia:
[T]he attorney general was merely forgetful or unaware of the proper way to handle the top secret papers.and then:
Gonzales' "best recollection is that he always placed the notes in the most secure place over which he had immediate personal control."
