JOHN MCCAIN ARCHIVES
JOHN MCCAIN'S JUDGMENT
"It stretches the mind almost to the breaking point to think of
John McCain as an agent of substantive change. He once
believed that Phil Gramm was the most qualified person in the United
States to be president. And he now believes that Sarah Palin
is the most qualified to be vice president.
That is not the fault of Mr. Gramm or Ms. Palin. But it sure tells
us a lot about the judgment of John McCain." -- Bob Herbert
HERE'S AN
OPINION PIECE THAT PUTS THE WHOLE BAILOUT PLAN IN PERSPECTIVE
McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 27, 2008 in The New York Times
For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.
By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.
The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.
To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)
Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain. As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll. The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new polls from Fox News, Marist and CNN/Time, each with numbers closer to Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose strongholds of Alaska and Montana.
That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin. The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.
But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.
What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.
The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.) By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.
By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)
It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.
Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains, Bono, and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.
There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on the down-low.
Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”
In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience. Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”
Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”
That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David Blaine: Dive of Death.”
It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.
HOW MCCAIN VOTES
John McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time. Also he's
adopted the same smear-and-fear political playbook. He's even hired Karl
Rove protégés to run the campaign. This nation cannot afford 4 more years
of the same low-road tactics and disastrous policies.
HERE'S THE
LINK TO THE SENSATIONAL TINA FEY TAKE ON PALIN AND HILLARY
http://www.hulu.com/watch/34465/saturday-night-live-palin--hillary-open
THE JOHN EDWARDS SCANDAL AND JOHN
MCCAIN'S AFFAIR
When the New York Times ran a story in February 2008 about a cozy,
possibly romantic relationship between John McCain and Washington lobbyist
Vicki Iseman, the right-wing media went bonkers. We will wait to see
if The Wall Street Journal and other pillars of American morality treat
John McCain the same way they have treated John Edwards. Did he have
an affair? Did he use his influence to help Iseman's client?
If you intend to play dirty, spread the dirt around.
"If Americans intend to disqualify all American males who have cheated at
least once, that means that about 70% of all American males and
about 50% of American females should be considered unfit for high office.
When you add to that number those who tried but failed or wanted to but
lacked opportunity or wanted to but were too ugly, that leaves only a tiny
percentage of Americans who are fit to hold high office."--Will C.
Justice.
A WAR TAX
For years Bush and his enablers, including
Senator McCain, have insisted that we are at war. If they are so
deadly serious about this proposition, let McCain propose a war tax--a
federal sales tax of, say, 10% that will be clearly identified as a war
tax. Then we will see how popular the war really is and how long we
really want to stay over there. Will C. Justice
THE MCCAIN-PALIN CAMPAIGN IS PLAYING WITH FIRE
"As one who was a victim of violence and hate
during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by
the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds
me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain
and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is
no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
"During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better." --U.S. Representative John C. Lewis, (D GA)
This is not criticism from just anybody. John Lewis is a true legend of the Civil Rights Movement, a man who was savagely beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. This is the man who during the Saddleback Church debate was named by Senator McCain as a man whose advice he would seek.
(Astonishingly Tom Brokaw as moderator of Meet the Press characterized Lewis's comments as "guilt by association.")
Ours is a nation with a history of savage violence. John Lewis is absolutely right that McCain and Palin are stoking fires that could consume us all. --Will C. Justice
MEDIA COVERAGE OF OBAMA AND MCCAIN
A study released this week by George Mason University's Center
for Media and Public Affairs reported that ABC, NBC and CBS have been
tougher on Obama than on John McCain during the general election campaign.
Statements about Obama were 72% negative, compared with 57% for McCain.
Also, countless examples of McCain's confusion on foreign policy and other
issues have gone unreported by the media. Can you imagine what the
numbers would look like if Fox News had been included in the sample?
WILL THE REAL JOHN
MCCAIN PLEASE STAND
"McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts as skewed toward the rich and
unsustainable; now he wants to extend them forever. He co-sponsored
a relatively humane immigration bill; now he disowns it. He deplored
the torture of detainees at Guantanamo; now he attacks the Supreme Court's
decision granting them the constitutional right to challenge in federal
court their continued detention as 'one of the worst decisions in the
history of this country.'" --Dorothy Wickenden
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK ON JOHN MCCAIN
"I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot
down is a qualification to be president." --General Wesley Clark,
"Face The Nation"
Howtotalkback: "For the life of me, I can't
understand what all the fuss is about. Flying a fighter plane and
becoming a prisoner of war is an act of sacrifice, but it is not in and of
itself a qualification to be president." --Will C. Justice
"Wesley Clark didn't impugn John McCain's military service. What
Wesley Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain's war service, though
heroic, didn't necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency.
It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous--especially
given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero....
If this campaign isn't dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it
will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed
economic policy and a disastrous war--both of which Mr. McCain promises
will continue if he wins.--Paul Krugman
GUNS
Points to make in discussing the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision
striking down the District of Columbia's gun-control law.
Ask gun supporters, "Is there any restriction the government can legally
place on the right to bear arms?" If the answer is No, then ask if
they are comfortable with any American being able to own their own AK-47,
rocket launcher, nuclear weapon?
Few sensible people will reply Yes to these questions.
Yet the Court's decision opens the door to this possibility.
Visit any well-stocked gun store in many states for confirmation of your
worst fears.
Ask the right-to-bear-arms enthusiast if he/she is comfortable with
criminals possessing powerful weapons. The mentally ill? Ask
if he/she is comfortable with law enforcement agencies being overmatched
in fire-power.
Most sensible Americans know that freedoms require restrictions. The
Second Amendment guarantees free speech, but it does not guarantee the
right to slander or to incite to riot. Will C. Justice
Howtotalkback: One reason the upcoming
election is crucial is because the next president will be able to name
one/several appointees to the US Supreme Court. Senator John McCain
has already described the kind of person/s he will appoint. McCain
has already told us that he will choose justices like Alito and Roberts,
both of whom supported this radical ruling, along with Scalia, Kennedy,
and Thomas.
"On the very same day that Senator McCain was calling for the
harshest penalties against Iran* and denouncing Senator Obama for being
willing to talk with Iran, Iraq's prime minister, whom the U.S. put in
place, announced that he's traveling to Tehran in a few days to
discuss closer ties between Iran and Iraq. If you can't see the
irony in that development, it's because you're blind."
--Will C. Justice (*before the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee--AIPAC)
"McCain's willingness to keep the nation in Iraq for, say, 100 years is a sign that for all his war hero posturing Mc Cain has truly forgotten the young people we've damned to this folly we call Iraq." --Junot Diaz