"A Vile Smear" – Senator J.S. McCain – the Angry Nut In the Shell

It’s too bad it only reaches people who read, but the Washington Post has roundly denounced John “Lowball” McCain’s latest attempt to smear Barack Obama over his acquaintance with Rashid Khalidi.

Although Khalidi is a native born American, graduate of Yale and long time professor at the University of Chicago, McCain and his wretched sidekick, are using the incredible power of the bigotry of their supporters to allege that, once again, Obama has been caught palling around with terrorists. Of course it’s a lie, of course they know it, and, of course, it works with the two-legged malignancies who crave this garbage.

“We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

“Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was “deeply flawed” but conceded there were also “flaws in the alternatives.” Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging — as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he “offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

“Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable — especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults.

“…We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks.”

It’s sad really. John McCain, a man whose stock in trade for decades has been his supposed nobility, chucking it all away to wallow in slime.

 

The Delusional Warrior

The world really doesn’t need this guy in the White House

 

McCain Goes All In – Even His Integrity Is On The Line

John McCain will do anything, say anything to defeat Barack Obama and win the White House and he’s willing to sacrifice everything, including what remains of his dignity and integrity.

It’s sad really to see a guy who’s built this legendary image based on an ordeal in a North Vietnamese POW camp four decades ago show just how little that truly matters – to himself. Here’s a hint – if it doesn’t matter to John McCain, it shouldn’t matter to anyone else either.

And it doesn’t matter to John McCain. Heroes don’t dive into the gutter. I’ve had the privilege of meeting and knowing a few real heroes. They’re all dead now. One was a true “Knight of the Air,” two others were ground pounders. They all had one thing in common. They didn’t try to wear their heroism on their sleeve – they were extremely private – and they always stood tall.

John McCain has traded on his heroism. He’s exhausted it, reminding all who’ll listen of it with an implied suggestion that someone owes him the presidency because of an event largely beyond his control forty years ago.

Heroism doesn’t wear well for very long when it’s flown like a flag in public. Maybe that’s something real heroes instinctively understand. There’s something disingenuous in tossing it up in the air for people to watch again and again.

But when you couple the political marketing of heroism with slimeball, gutter politics, the aura combusts like white phosphorous exposed to oxygen. All you’re left with is ashy residue. And I guess that’s an apt metaphor for John McCain, 2008.

This campaign will cost John McCain more than his last shot at the US presidency. He will have also forfeited his dignity and his integrity. He won’t be the first hero to turn bum and he won’t be the last. At least he won’t have to spend time in the Crowbar Hotel like his fellow Vietnam hero and Republican compatriot, the former senator Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

 

It Only Took 161-Years. The Chicago Trib Endorses Obama!

When you’re a Republican and you can’t score the Chicago Tribune’s endorsement, you’re doing something very, very wrong.

Bad enough that John McCain gets turned into Grade A, Horse’s Ass meat on the Letterman show, now it’s this. And he’s lost the LA Times and the Chicago Sun (circa 1844) endorsement to boot as they too have come out for Obama. The Los Angeles Times, apparently, hasn’t endorsed a candidate from either side since Christ was a corporal.

To have the ChiTown Tribune turn on you is unequivocal proof that you’ve committed Republican apostasy. Once you’ve lost mainstream, conservative newspapers all you’re left with are the rabid degenos like NewsMax and FoxNews and the open mouth hate mongers, the Hannityh-Limbaugh lowlife. I’m sure that wouldn’t bother Sarah Palin but it has to hurt a guy like McCain with his very patrician Republican roots going back more than three generations.

Somewhere inside John McCain this has to be gnawing away as he watches his most prized possession, his notional integrity, steadily washed away.

 

John McCain’s Brain Drain

America has landed in an economic crisis and John McCain’s approach is precisely the same as what he did during the Savings & Loan scandal that nearly ended his political career.

William Black, former deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, told Huffington Post’s Seth Colter Walls that McCain is making the same mistakes he made with Charles Keating and Lincoln Savings & Loan:

“In the S&L crisis, he took his advice from the worst [kind of] criminal. Charles Keating is the person he went to for his policy advice,” Black said. “Now, he certainly is getting advice from Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, Rick Davis — the whole group of economic and top political advisers are lobbyist types. He just doesn’t seem to get it, ever, that the advice is going to favor their clients. Even if they just stop being lobbyists, you can’t just turn that off instantly. It’s their mind state that develops. … The biggest lesson is that, when you deregulate and de-supervise, you create an environment where control fraud emerges. You hyper-inflate bubbles; you get criminalization.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/01/mccain-repeating-keating_n_130612.html

 

It "Kind of Doesn’t Matter"

John McCain says she could just be the next Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Yes, McCain did say that about his sidekick, Sarah Palin. See, I told you the guy just gets goofier by the day.

And now for something completely different. Oh, sorry, that was the other Palin, the one with a functioning brain.

Sarah Palin says it kind’a doesn’t matter what causes global warming.

“I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical, and over history we have seen changes there.”

“But it kind of doesn’t matter at this point in the debate what caused it. The point is it’s real, we need do something about it.”

Okay, maybe Palin was just having a Reagan moment or a McCain “senior” moment but, still, for a journalism grad – the only one I’ve ever heard of who had to go to five universities to get her bachelor’s degree – and a local TV sports broadcaster to boot – that’s pretty bad grammar.

So, we can’t “solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” Of course you can’t, Sarah. That’s why your country still has capital punishment. It climate change was solely to blame for all of man’s activities, including armed robberies and murders, why you might have to electrocute clouds (you’ll never get a needle to work on cumulus).

Did anyone see the footage where Katie Couric asked her where she got her information on world affairs? She said she reads magazines. Couric asked what magazines. Palin said, “oh, I read’em all.” Like what, Sarah? Try to name at least one, something maybe that doesn’t rhyme with Cosmo. She couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with the name of one magazine that she reads. Maybe she’s smart enough to realize that People doesn’t count.

Meanwhile, head drover, John S. McCain took time out to mix it up with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register. From McClatchey Newspapers:

“…He bristled when accus[ed] of running false charges against his opponent in ads, defending them as “100% accurate” and going beyond that saying in his entire career he had been wholly accurate in all matters.

McCain also replied sharply when asked about the qualifications of his running mate, declaring that he “uncategorically” believed she was fully capable, citing her years as mayor and governor — and even at the PTA. Going well beyond poll results, he stated that the American public “overwhelmingly” embraced her. A new Pew survey finds today that 51% of Americans now believe that Palin is unqualified, up from 37% after her announcement.

A full report and videos are at the paper’s site:http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081001/NEWS09/810010377&theme=CAMPAIGN_2008

 

Top McCain Aide Really, Really Outed

John McCain’s problems with campaign manager Rick Davis just keep getting worser and worser.

First there was the problem of Davis serving as an influence peddler to the now ruined mortgage giant, Freddie Mac.

McCain’s first line of defence was to claim that Davis had cut his ties with FMac long before he joined the campaign.

Then it came out that, right up to death’s doorstep, Freddie Mac kept paying $15,000 per month to Davis’ old “consulting” firm, Davis Manafort.
That’s Davis (as in Rick) Manafort.

McCain’s next line of defence was to claim that his campaign manager had also cut his ties with Davis Manafort before joining the senator’s campaign. The reality there was that Rick Davis had supposedly resigned from Davis Manafot but.. there’s always a but… he retained his equity interest in the firm.

McCain’s people lashed out like cornered rats at The New York Times for leaking that one. But now the Rick Davis calamity is back, this time courtesy of Newsweek.

It goes like this. If Rick Davis severed his ties with Davis Manafort when he joined the McCain campaign, why did he ask that his $20,000 a month campaign salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort? From Newsweek:

“The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis “separated from his consulting firm … in 2006,” according to the campaign’s Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort’s—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort ‘in which we purchased all of [Davis’s] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients.'”

So which is it. Is John McCain no longer capable of discerning the truth or just incapable of telling the truth?

 

Sixes and Sevens and Nines…

Is John McCain the riverboat gambler of the 2008 US presidential elections?

He took a gambler’s gut instinct roll on his choice of running-mate, Sarah Palin.

“Always in a hurry, I never stop to worry,

Dont you see the time flashin by.

Honey, got no money,

Im all sixes and sevens and nines.

Say now, baby, Im the rank outsider,

You can be my partner in crime.

But baby, I cant stay,

You got to roll me and call me the tumblin,

Roll me and call me the tumblin dice.”

 

John McCain Slammed – by John McCain

 

OMG – The Old Fart IS Delusional

John McCain gets goofier by the day. He’ll say anything that suits him at the moment and, to be charitable, he probably can’t tell fact from fiction any longer. The guy who would be POTUS has completely lost touch with reality. Here he is discussing why Palin is capable to handle national security issues:

Palin knows more about energy than anybody else in America?

Last week, Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that her state, Alaska, produced “nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.” She only overstated that about six fold. Alaska actually produces 3.5% of America’s domestic supply of energy, ranking ninth behind Pennsylvania.

This begs the question of the veep would-be’s educational background. After all, she has precious little real experience and is astonishingly ignorant of her own government’s policies. Well, relax, she has a degree. From WikiAnswers:

She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and attended five schools before graduating: University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, Matanuska–Susitna College, and University of Idaho again.

Five schools to get a lousy journalism degree? My, that’s certainly impressive. Of course look at the current veep – he scored five draft deferments to keep his ass safely out of harm’s way in Vietnam. Is five their lucky number?