McCain - the Ultimate Elitist

Yes, I was hoping for a surprise on Obama's choice of running mate, but also worried about an unhappy surprise. I can certainly accept and be enthusastic about Biden as the VP choice, from what I know of him. For one thing, up front, he would make a far better president than John McElitist.

I'm concerned that from what I know he has not been prone towards truly progressive viewpoints a la Feingold, Kucinich, and Conyers. I have the impression he has been in Congress for a long time, rarely a good thing in this era of corporate influence and sleazy K-street lobbyists throwing money and favors at congress to buy influence and votes on pro-business legislation. He has some distinct propensity towards the verbal fumble-dum thing. Even in limited cheep I saw today he referred to the negative consequences of 4 - no 8 - years of Bush and McCain! Not that he didn't inadvertently have a point, or even one of the main points, but given the way it came off, even if intentional, it did not properly hammer on the McSame issue. It came across to me as a flub. Of course current pres has made a career of verbal pratfalls. Some portion of the population seems to love to have their politicians be (or act) so dumb that even they can feel superior.

But then again, who cares what these politicians say. Oops, that would only apply to politicians with a capital R in parens after name, right, NBC, et al?, as the corp-media, owned now by what, five right-wing thugs, has it. When it comes to actually supporting the principles on which the country was founded, adherence to constitution and bill of rights and all (zounds!), given the prima facie evidence that the corp-media have sold us out, we will have to do it the hard way.

In that spirit (tighten those laces), BlueTexan at Firedoglake has a timely reminder for us, ominously entitled, "Memo To Democrats: Don’t Forget The 2004 Republican National Convention" (as you may recall, the corp-media totally sucked up to the powers-that-be and screwed the American people here too):

I hope we haven't forgotten what the Republicans did to John Kerry in 2004. While the Democrats weirdly operated under a "no Bush-bashing" rule -- after weeks of concern trolling about how voters were tired of negative attacks -- the Republicans waited for their turn and watched the Dems week-long lovefest. And then they promptly spent their week tearing Kerry's face off.

While it was rare to hear the word "Bush" at the Democratic convention, the Republicans made their convention an auto de fe for Kerry.

Rudy:

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, John Kerry voted
against the Persian Gulf War. Later he said he actually supported the war. Then in 2002, as he was calculating his run for President, he voted for the war in Iraq. And then just 9 months later, he voted against an $87 billion supplemental budget to fund the war and support our troops.

He even, at one point, declared himself an anti-war candidate. Now, he says he's pro-war. At this rate, with 64 days left, he still has time to change his position at east three or four more times.

My point about John Kerry being inconsistent is best described in his own words when he said, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Maybe this explains John Edwards' need for two Americas - - one where John Kerry can vote for something and another where he can vote against the same thing.

Cheney:

Even in this post-9/11 period, Senator Kerry doesn't appear to understand how the world has changed. He talks about leading a "more sensitive war on terror," as though Al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.
...

On Iraq, Senator Kerry has disagreed with many of his fellow Democrats. But Senator Kerry's liveliest disagreement is with himself. His back-and- forth reflects a habit of indecision, and sends a message of confusion. And it is all part of a pattern.

He has, in the last several years, been for the No Child Left Behind Act -- and against it. He has spoken in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- and against it. He is for the Patriot Act -- and against it. Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual -- America sees two John Kerrys.

Pataki:

George W. Bush says what he means, he means what he says, you can trust him. Senator Kerry, on the other hand… Well, what can we say of Senator Kerry?

He was for the war and then he was against the war. Then he was for it but he wouldn’t fund it. Then he’d fund it but he wasn’t for it.

He was for the Patriot Act until he was against it. Or was he against it until he was for it?

I forget. He probably does too.

This is a candidate who has to Google his own name to find out where he stands.

Frist:

John Kerry remains the personal injury lawyers' best friend. George Bush will put the interests of patients, doctors and nurses first.

Steele:

But this requires strong leadership. Now, Senator Kerry's leadership is illustrated best by the Senator himself when he said, "I actually voted for the 87 billion dollars before I voted against it."

He also recently said that he doesn't want to use the word "war" to describe our efforts to fight terrorism.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to use the words "commander in chief" to describe John Kerry.

Ahnold:

And to those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: "Don't be economic girlie men!"

This is just a small sample. And of course, we all remember Zell.

What was the result of all this? Combined with the Swift Boat attacks, it was devastating. The Republicans spent a week in primetime bashing Kerry and reinforcing the negative attacks of Rove's campaign -- and Kerry never recovered.

Take a look at who's speaking at this year's RNCC. Same crowd. Do you think it's going to be any different?

Let's hope the Democrats learned their lesson.

Frankly, I have limited confidence that "the Democrats" have so learned. The Rahms and leadership counsels and all are fully-subborned to both the beltway those-voters-are-irrelevant-compared-to-these-corporations mentality and their own egomania.

If there is going to be any chance of pulling this juggernaut back from the brink, it will not be because of Dem party machinations, of that I believe we can be assured. It will be because of grass-roots agitation and funding of the sort you and I are in control of.

That is, yes, a call to arms. Please do whatever you can to fund Strange Bedfellows and similar programs supporting actually enlightened progressive candidates, sometimes even at the expense of incumbent dem-in-name-only fogies.

And this great post from dday at Hullabaloo suggests that at least out here (vs. the idiot-box and the corp-media) - there is some actual democracy in the sense of McIdiot being subjected to his own campaign's standards:

Another ad from Barack Obama on The John McCain Show:

Hilariously, the McCain campaign put together a new ad today as well, and it opens with - I kid you not - "Celebrities don't have to worry about family budgets, but we do."

Yeah, I guess when you don't even know how many homes you have, a family budget is hard to set. Who knows how many mortgages you're paying?

The house gaffe made every major paper this morning, and was featured on every nightly newscast. And even a fount of conventional wisdom like Chris Cillizza gets why this matters. And even the "You can't say that to me, I was a POW" defense is ringing stale among the punditocracy.

I never thought I'd see this kind of paragraph in print:

McCain, who has portrayed Obama as an elitist, is the son and grandson of admirals. The Associated Press estimates his wife, a beer heiress, is worth $100 million. Obama was raised by a single mother who relied at times on food stamps, and went to top schools on scholarships and loans. His income has increased from book sales since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Hilarious.

Of course this is ticky-tack, but as I've said, this is how the media works in the modern age, and your choices as a Democrat are limited. Here's Krugman:

First, Republicans always — always — campaign by portraying the Democratic candidate as an out-of-touch elitist, while their guy is a man of the people. Al Gore grew up in a penthouse apartment! (In a shabby residence hotel, but never mind.) John Kerry windsurfs! Meanwhile, George Bush vacations at his ranch (bought as a prop for the 2000 campaign — and he doesn’t ride horses — but somehow that never got brought up.)

Protesting that the candidate is really a wonderful guy doesn’t work. Stupid as it may seem, counterattack is the only option. If the Gore campaign had gone after the fakeness of the Bush ranch, or the cronyism that made Bush rich, the world would be a different place today.

Exactly. I would love a high-minded battle of ideals, but I'm not going to sit around waiting for it to happen.

There was worry that Obama wouldn't be likely to attack in the same fashion as McCain, and would resort to "shame on you" entreaties. But yesterday's action was swift, to the point, and overwhelming, and they've sustained it. The GOP does not make this kind of thing a one-day affair. They continue to mock their opponent in any way possible to cut into them and make them a ridiculous figure. Peter Daou has the blueprint:

Expanding the theme, it's worth noting that the rightwing attack machine has been effective in the past because it serves a singular purpose: diminishing opponents through mockery and marginalization. Bloggers have referred to recent presidential campaigns as "genital-swinging contests" (we're using the clean version). That crude image underlines the strategy: make your opponent look small - or smaller. Shrinkage, for Seinfeld buffs. Think of how Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh and their cohorts operate - it's all about the laughter, the joking, the snide remarks, the scoffing. It's about cutting someone down to size, making them look meek and meager.

Democrats have been stumped by the technique, missing the underlying purpose and getting sidetracked by the minutiae of the attacks. 'Rovian' is an overused adjective, but it is mistaken as a strategy of attacking an opponent's strength as an end in itself, when that's just one tactic in the larger mission of systematically belittling the opponent. Going after their strength is a logical part of reducing their stature.

Democratic/progressive attacks generally run the gamut from negative character association (X is just like Y) to policy contrasts (we can handle the economy better than X) to one-off hits and 'Macaca moments' (X flubbed the name of a country) to impugning the attacker (look how nasty my opponent is). These can be effective, particularly the latter, but they are qualitatively different from the rightwing machine's diminishment of an opponent's character. That's something that Democrats don't do as well. It's less about negative frames, contrasts, rapid response, and all the other mainstays of political strategy and more about making your opponent the butt of a joke.It's not like there aren't additional facts to add into the stew. McCain's net worth is $36 million dollars, almost 40 times that of Obama. McCain has butlers. BUTLERS! The John McCain Show had 9-car entourage at Starbucks to pick up a latte yesterday. There's still the matter of getting McCain on the record about the exact number, and detailing - in excruciating detail - all the homes. There are potential events like ringing keys at the DNC and visits to all the compounds. If McCain does indeed pick rich venture capitalist Mitt Romney, then the whole thing is amplified.

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Moons and Silver Spoons

Am I the only one who struggles to understand these damn lunar transects? My mind wants that orb to stick to a fixed overhead pathway, or at least only vary gradually from season to season, like Sol. I recall about a week ago noticing moon at this time just short of full, beckoning me from the SSE, moderately low in the sky. But here I am tonight seeing moon, about a week past full, actually north of east. Can one of you astronomers help me with this? Paraphrasing Henry Higgins, "why can't a moon be more like a sun?"

Moving on, though, given the wealth of excellent material seemingly pretty much ignored by the media most commonly in your face (i.e., boob-tube and "news" paper), I feel compelled to do a sequel to last night's post.

You will find even a familiar visual, in alternate form.

There's a big story out there today, which I am going to basically dodge here, in the hope of achieving the sleep I desperately need. There are strong murmurs to the effect that we are nearing a compact with the Iraq government for American withdrawal from Iraq on what even bush spokes-monkeys are describing in terms of formerly heinous terms like "timelines." It will be fascinating if this continues to play out this way how McSwine will try to wriggle down off the 100-year war pedestal he climbed up on. Not that he is lacking in equivocation, flip-flopping, and general lying skills from way back. And, not to put too fine a point on it, fully enabled by the assholes who pretend to have journalism as their job but have been failing to show up for the assignment to the major detriment of the American Republic for ever so long. McSame does dishonesty and disreputability as if they were innate in his character and DNA.

Frankly, if we had any real journalists available to ask even half-assed questions, it could be almost Olympically entertaining to watch the dancing from the Bleak House and the sad little McSame sycophant in attempting to explain how they lost this war.

But, frankly classical journalism seems to be more or less dead, with a scant handful of exceptions, and I'm not going there now.

McSame's recent flat-footed admission that he does not know how many houses he owns is pretty fascinating, given his attempts to paint Obama as elitist and out-of-touch. Phoenix Woman (evocative of my recent read of "The Summer of Love") helps out with this great post at Firedoglake:

The recent news that John Sidney McCain III is so frickin' rich he can't keep track of all of his domiciles is really no news to those of us who have been paying attention. This is a man, mind you, who is the Fortunate Son and Grandson of two admirals, and whose great-great-The recent news that John Sidney McCain III is so frickin' rich he can't keep track of all of his domiciles is really no news to those of us who have been paying attention. This is a man, mind you, who is the Fortunate Son and Grandson of two admirals, and whose great-great-grandfather was a Mississippi plantation owner with 52 slaves and 2000 acres in the days before the Civil War. (McCain professed not to have known this when it was brought to his attention in 2000, but his cousin, author Elizabeth Spencer, mentions the McCain family's slaves in her family memoir Landscapes of the Heart, a book John McCain had admitted to reading by the time the 2000 campaign had rolled around.)

It was McCain's silver-spoon background and admiral daddy that got him into the prestigious Navy Air Pilot Flight Training program despite graduating 894th in his Annapolis class of 899. That same background and daddy also kept him flying over the years, even after crashing several planes. Wrecking one plane was often enough for a Navy pilot to lose his wings; McCain lost five, a feat that would earn him the ironic nickname "Reverse Ace McCain" or just plain old "Ace".

But even the influence of a powerful father couldn't fix his stalled Naval career; by the mid-1970s, it was clear to everyone that McCain the Third was not going to make admiral as his illustrious forebears had done. He began casting about for a new career, around the same time that he began casting about for a new wife. He found his new wife in Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a very wealthy beer distributor in Phoenix with ties to organized crime. They married in May of 1980, and Cindy's daddy was quite generous in letting his new son-in-law use his money to run for Congress in 1982 in the heavily-Republican Phoenix congressional district. (McCain essentially served as a placeholder for the powerful Rhodes family: When John Jacob Rhodes Jr. retired from Congress in 1982, he opened the seat for McCain, who then held it for two terms until he left it to Rhodes' son, John Jacob Rhodes III, when McCain ran for the Senate in 1986.)

And then Digby adds just the necessary buttercream frisonne for this egomaniacal fruitcake:

HuffPo:

Facing a Democratic Party positively giddy over his recent admission that he didn't know how many houses he owned, John McCain quickly returned to a political trump card: his POW experience.

Speaking to the Washington Post, aide Brian Rogers, in full damage-control mode, acknowledged that his boss had "some investment properties and stuff," but added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison."

I'm frankly a little bit surprised they are being so cavalier with this. At some point even the somnambulent press corps is going to start rolling their eyes.

The Huffpo article goes on to catalog the many times McCain has rather awkwardly brought his POW history into the campaign even as they insist that he rarely talks about his experience.

The Obama campaign has decided that it's not a good idea to say anything about McCain's Vietnam service, but it certainly does seem like something that would be good fodder for comics and a reasonable line of inquiry from the press. To me, this is one of the most absurd aspects of the campaign --- the idea that he can successfully get away with evoking his POW experience as a conversation stopper when he's criticized for things completely unrelated to the military or national security (and even that's a stretch) is simply mind-boggling.

They may have gone to the well once too often with this one. Using his time in the Hanoi Hilton to excuse the fact that he's such an out-of-touch aristocrat that he doesn't know how many houses he and his heiress wife own may have been the shark jumping moment for his POW schtick.

The Huffpo article goes on to catalog the many times McCain has rather awkwardly brought his POW history into the campaign even as they insist that he rarely talks about his experience.

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I encourage you to finish up your supper by following those links. And of course take full advantage of any opportunity to help your less-advantaged fellow citizens appreciate what a total swine John McSame is.

Straight Talk on McCain

McSlime, the would-be bush understudy, and his supporters, are spending so much on their sewer-level attack ads that occasional catapulting of his own cow-pies back at him seems the least we can do to help out.

Phoenix Woman has that familiar digging instrument properly named in a great post at Firedoglake, including iconic image of just the sort of disciplined, thoughtful chap we would all like to have making foreign policy decisions, eh?:

Hitler accuses Churchill of war crimes. That's the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing notorious silver-spoon hothead John Sidney McCain III say that the legendarily level-headed Barack Obama's getting "testy".

Remember, if you will, who's saying this. John McCain, the guy of whom fellow Republican Senator Pete Domenici once said "I Decided I Didn't Want This Guy Anywhere Near A Trigger."

John McCain, of whom another fellow Republican and former fellow Senator, New Hampshire's Bob Smith, said "His Temper Would Place This Country At Risk In International Affairs, And The World Perhaps In Danger. In My Mind, It Should Disqualify Him."

John McCain, of whom yet another fellow Republican Senator, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, said "The Thought Of His Being President Sends A Cold Chill Down My Spine."

This is the man who is reported to have told his wife Cindy, in front of a group of Arizona reporters, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c*nt."

And that's just for starters.

He's due for a long term in a house, I agree. I just wonder what minor personal affront it would take to have it end up being the "Big House."

And, after the abuse General Clark took for plainly and accurately suggesting that being a prisoner of war did not constitute a useful qualification for the executive office (never mind blank check, as McEntitled would have it), it's gratifying that not everyone has taken a vow of silence. I came across this excellent reportage courtesy of dday at Hullabaloo:

Fellow Naval Academy classmate and POW of John McCain Phillip Butler is saying the Great Unmentionable.

John was a wild man. He was funny, with a quick wit and he was intelligent. But he was intent on breaking every USNA regulation in our 4 inch thick USNA Regulations book. And I believe he must have come as close to his goal as any midshipman who ever attended the Academy. John had me "coming around" to his room frequently during my plebe year. And on one occasion he took me with him to escape "over the wall" in the dead of night. He had a taxi cab waiting for us that took us to a bar some 7 miles away. John had a few beers, but forbid me to drink (watching out for me I guess) and made me drink cokes. I could tell many other midshipman stories about John that year and he unbelievably managed to graduate though he spent the majority of his first class year on restriction for the stuff he did get caught doing. In fact he barely managed to graduate, standing 5th from the bottom of his 800 man graduating class. I and many others have speculated that the main reason he did graduate was because his father was an Admiral, and also his grandfather, both U.S. Naval Academy graduates [...]

John was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for heroism and wounds in combat. This heroism has been played up in the press and in his various political campaigns. But it should be known that there were approximately 600 military POW's in Vietnam. Among all of us, decorations awarded have recently been totaled to the following: Medals of Honor - 8, Service Crosses - 42, Silver Stars - 590, Bronze Stars - 958 and Purple Hearts - 1,249. John certainly performed courageously and well. But it must be remembered that he was one hero among many - not uniquely so as his campaigns would have people believe.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Most of us who survived that experience are now in our late 60's and 70's. Sadly, we have died and are dying off at a greater rate than our non-POW contemporaries. We experienced injuries and malnutrition that are coming home to roost. So I believe John's age (73) and survival expectation are not good for being elected to serve as our President for 4 or more years.

I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button.

It is also disappointing to see him take on and support Bush's war in Iraq, even stating we might be there for another 100 years. For me John represents the entrenched and bankrupt policies of Washington-as-usual. The past 7 years have proven to be disastrous for our country. And I believe John's views on war, foreign policy, economics, environment, health care, education, national infrastructure and other important areas are much the same as those of the Bush administration.

Wow. It's stunning to see someone who knows McCain lay this all out so specifically. And he hits everything - the age, the temper, the flyboy antics, the policies right in line with Bush. It's all there.

He should have some fun with his newfound not-stardom, with all the not-appearing on news programs and not-being cited in the print media.