McCain’s Bearings are Fine (No Warranty, Express or Implied)

Filed under: Politics — one May 16, 2008 @ 9:00 am
 
My friends, yesterday we heard Sen. John McCain's grand vision of what the world would be like at the end of his first term in office as the President of the United States of America. By 2013 most of our soldiers would begin to come home from the Iraq war, which would be mostly won. I know what you're thinking: You had me at 2013. But the magic doesn't stop there.
 
By the end of his first term in office the U.S. Health Care crisis would be solved, not by a government program but by private industry following tax breaks offered by John McCain's administration. Every American would be forced to buy their own affordable healthcare individually and the 150 million Americans who currently receive their health insurance through their jobs would lose all tax benefits and be pressured to drop it in favor of purchasing their insurance individually too. Seniors and people with chronic conditions would have the coverage they so desperately need, assuming the health insurance companies don't figure out there's really no good reason for them to cover any of those people. It will be a wonderous world.
 
The economy will be flourishing through the use of George Bush's domestic policies, which McCain points out have worked so well for the past seven years that he wants to continue them. Our unemployment crisis and fair trade crisis will be solved by McCain's Guest Worker program, which will encourage illegal aliens to enter the country and take the jobs that unemployed Americans apparently decided they don't need.
 
There will be peace between Israel and its neighbors, the war on terror will have al-Qaeda on the run and Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed by the end of McCain's first term. Americans of all races and religions will ride down chocolate rivers on gumball canoes, floating past candy cane trees, and Jesus will come down from heaven to personally give the winning lottery numbers to every man, woman and child in New Orleans. Except the gays, of course.
 
Yes, John McCain's first term in office will be fantastic — and I use that word in the original sense: "Based or existing only in fantasy". If you would believe John McCain, everything that is wrong in the world will be set right if we are only wise enough to hand him the keys to the Oval Office. The only problem is that he doesn't seem to have a single realistic plan to accomplish any of it, in fact he doesn't even seem to have a firm grip on reality.
 
When Bush was speaking at the Knesset in Israel yesterday and made remarks about how negotiating with Iran would be the same as appeasing the Nazis, I expected some underhanded agreement from John "Hey, I didn't say it! I'm just agreeing." McCain, who just last week was asserting that Hamas had "endorsed" Barack Obama for President. I didn't expect White House Press Secretary Dana Perino to say that Democrats only think the comment had anything to do with them because they "think the world revolves around" them, but McCain on the other hand has repeatedly shown he is more than happy to dip his toes in the gutter while motoring along his "high road".
 
But what did surprise me was that one or more of John McCain's marbles apparently clunked to the floor of the Straight Talk Express and rolled under the seats without anyone in his campaign noticing. Take a look at what he said to reporters asking about Bush's remarks:
"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." 
McCain was a U.S. Congressman for Reagan's first term and became a U.S. Senator during Reagan's second term in office. With all of his highly-touted years in office and foreign policy experience you might have expected he would have remembered Reagan himself making this public admission:
"what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages." 

It's one thing to attack Obama's position on Diplomacy-First (and to be fair, Bush/McCain style foreign policy has worked out fantastically for the past seven years) but for McCain to have a memory lapse like this is no laughing matter. If reality is filed away in his mind as the "Good old days" when Republicans were men and the sheep were afraid then that calls his judgment into serious question.

People get sensitive over making his age an issue, but it's never really been about age. It's certainly not about "ageism". It's partly about whether or not he'll be alive and healthy in four years, but more importantly it's about whether he's in possession of all his faculties. The facts would suggest he is not.

Share and Enjoy


Republicans Don’t Love Their Children

Filed under: Politics — one May 15, 2008 @ 12:48 pm

Yesterday there was a flurry of outrage on Digg, across the internet and even from people I respect like Keith Olbermann about President Bush “sacrificing” golf for the Iraq war. All of you should be ashamed.

Take Keith Olbermann for example: conservatives will criticize him as a blatant liberal but the basic facts are that even when he takes sides he is far more fair and balanced in his actual reporting than anyone on the network that uses that euphemism as their slogan. Sean Hannity & co. actually continue to insist that Climate Change (aka Global Warming) doesn’t exist and is a myth perpetrated by a vast left-wing conspiracy that hates capitalism (and I am guessing supports communism? It’s the new Red Scare! Like the old one, but now with 95% more imaginary!)

But when Olbermann goes off on a tirade (part1, part2) which is mostly on-target, the factually important pieces of his message (all the things Bush actually did do horribly wrong) are largely drowned out for many Americans because the basis for that tirade is so ridiculous. Bush was asked “What’s the doomsday scenario” if we pull out of Iraq early. Bush’s answer: A terrorist attack. What’s the problem with this statement that has everybody up in arms? Bush believes Iraq is an important front in the war on terror. I completely disagree, as does Mr. Olbermann but the problem is that Mr. Olbermann frames Bush’s answer to a “doomsday scenario” question as Bush saying “The election of a Democratic President could ‘eventually lead to another attack on the United States’”

That’s a complete and utter misrepresentation of what Bush said, and I’m telling you that as a former Bush supporter who came to realize what a monster that man is and how badly he and his policies need to be removed from power — as someone who has called for the impeachment of both Bush and his undead Vice-President, you do a great disservice to the important facts within your tirade by including, in fact starting off with, a blatantly disingenuous representation of the facts. It turns off everyone outside of your base audience and the remainder of your message is lost on deaf ears.

The same is true of the golf remark. Bush was specifically asked why he doesn’t play golf anymore and his answer was that he didn’t want some mother who’s son had just been killed in Iraq to see the President on TV playing golf, that he felt it would be insulting to those families and send the wrong message. Olbermann, Diggers and apparently half the internet decided to misrepresent that as Bush claiming he had made some grand sacrifice.

If the question was, “How has the Iraq war affected you personally” and his answer was, “I can’t play golf anymore” then I would be happy to jump on board the bandwagon of outraged people who will point to this remark as proof of how despicably detached this man is from the war he’s created, but the question was, “You haven’t been golfing in recent years, is that related to Iraq?”  With a lead-in like that exactly what answer would you prefer the man give? Is he supposed to make something up on the spot about how he’d love to be out there every week but he hurt his wrist?

This is exactly the kind of factual misrepresentation the people on the left always accuse (usually correctly) the people on the right of doing, and when moderates who were leaning left see that kind of behavior they tend to back off and rethink their position because they’re afraid maybe they’ve been listening to left-wing fanatics who try to trick people into supporting their views by spreading lies.

Bottom line: When you make things out to be more than they are, you lose credibility — and that’s the last thing the people on the left need because it could end up costing this country dearly in November.

Share and Enjoy


Why couldn’t Hillary win Louisiana & Missouri?

Filed under: Politics — one May 13, 2008 @ 9:55 pm
 
The latest argument to come from the Clinton camp to explain why Hillary still thinks she should be the Democratic Party's nominee is that she is the only one who can win the big swing states that have picked the President for the last however-many elections. This is partly because she's losing to Sen. Obama in States-won, Pledged Delegates, Superdelegates, and the popular vote but it's also because Sen. Obama has won a number of swing states like Colorado and Wisconsin — which are equally important in a strategic sense, but didn't happen to coincidentally swing the way of the winner every time.
 
So apparently the new measure, and the only one that we are to believe matters — aside from white voters who didn't go to college (according to Sen. Clinton) –  are the states that are not only so-called "swing states" but also had the coincidence of voting for the candidate that happened to win. Well, even on that count she can't claim exclusivity. There are six states that have a history of "voting with the winner" for the past 10 or more elections: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia. Of them, Sen. Obama was the winner in Missouri and won by a wide margin in Louisiana.
 
That brings me to my question: Why couldn't Hillary beat Obama in Louisiana? We keep hearing so much about "Why couldn't Sen. Obama win white working class voters?" or whatever metric the Clinton camp is imagining to be the all-important barometer in this campaign. Since the new metric is "States that pick the President" then I'd have to ask Hillary why she couldn't beat Obama in  2 of these 6 states.
 
For certain, Sen. Clinton would appear to have a 4 to 2 advantage in this narrow arena, but the ultimate point is that she is losing in every other metric, of course there are going to be metrics where she is winning, but the best she can do is claim the election depends entirely on these 6 states, and by her own measure she can't even win all 6 of them.
 
Of course, I'm not counting on the probability that Sen. Clinton would respond by coming up with some clever explanation as to why Missouri and Louisiana don't count, but really isn't that the point? They've already dismissed the importance of the black vote by implying that they're only voting for Obama because he's black, as if that makes the votes count less. Hillary doesn't get nearly as much of the women's vote as Barack gets of the African American vote, but that's been dismissed.
 
Caucuses (which have gone largely for Obama) have been dismissed by Clinton as un-democratic, yet Hillary has said repeatedly that the Superdelegates (who are even more un-democratic) should be the deciding factor in this contest and should not base their votes on the democratic votes of their constituencies but instead base it on the extremely undemocratic method of guessing who has a better chance of beating McCain in November.
 
To bring this hypocrisy home, the latest polls show that Clinton can't even carry half of the swing-states that supposedly favor her. Kentucky and Tennessee are expected to go for McCain in November. This seeming-contradiction is easily explained by the fact that none of these primary results are reliable indicators for the general election which basically means there's no possible way she can reasonably claim winning in one state or another makes her more electable. But she does anyway.
 
Obama didn't lose to John McCain in those states, he lost to Hillary Clinton — and many of those voters will cross over and vote for him if it's him vs. McCain. Similarly, Hillary did not beat John McCain in the states she won, she beat Barack Obama. Many of Obama's supporters will cross over for her too, but it won't matter if the Democrats in a given state are in the clear minority, such as in Kentucky and Tennessee. Not even Sen. Clinton's beloved Michigan is expected to go Democratic in the fall, despite how important she insists it is in this primary process.
 
On the other hand, current polling shows Obama could deliver both Colorado and Virginia for the Democrats, important states that open up new paths to a November victory that are not open to Sen. Clinton. In fact, SurveyUSA's electoral maps overlayed with their polls suggests that Sen. Obama would beat McCain more easily, with more electoral votes than Sen. Clinton.
 
Ultimately Sen. Clinton is simply blowing smoke. In the end, most of the people who voted for her will support Obama in November, despite her attempts to make it seem (and perhaps even attempts to make it actually) otherwise. Against McCain both candidates both similarly, and both of them have clear electoral paths to victory in November, but Sen. Obama has won nearly twice as many states as Sen. Clinton, he has a strong lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and is even leading now in declared superdelegates. Sen. Clinton has no reasonable argument, in fact has nothing but increasingly bizarre and cherry-picked metrics to point to as she continues to insist that she is the stronger candidate.
 
In the end, the national polls show that this country prefers either candidate to McCain by similar margins and shows that either candidate can beat McCain in the electoral college, but the Democratic primaries clearly show that between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton Democrats prefer Obama by a clear margin.
 
By all means, allow Hillary to play this out until all the primaries have taken place and the situation with Michigan and Florida is resolved to the satisfaction of both states, but in the end Sen. Clinton will still have absolutely no claim on the nomination because she's simply too far behind in pledged delegates (without MI and FL she needs 94% of all remaining to overtake Obama. With those states decided the way she wants them to be she still needs nearly 80% of all remaining delegates) and her argument that she is more electable is based on the imaginary-fact that the states that voted for her are more important than states that voted Obama, and the complete fantasy that those primary results will have any bearing at all on the election in November — and that's if nearly all remaining superdelegates, given a good reason, are even willing to overturn the decision of the pledged delegates.

Share and Enjoy


<<< Previous Page - Next Page >>>