McCain says that ending the tax cut for the rich is a form of "class warfare". Of course, tax cuts for the poor would no doubt be welfare or socialism in the mind of a man with so many homes that he can't even count them.
Crooks and Liars have produced a video showing the Republican Party's obsession with "Drill baby, drill" during the last election, and their insistence that it was utterly safe.
Here's what Palin said in her debate with Joe Biden:
The chant is "drill, baby, drill." And that's what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into. They know that even in my own energy-producing state we have billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas. And we're building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline which is North America's largest and most you expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets.They have gone awfully quiet recently. Bill Maher had the right idea about what they should now be doing.
Barack Obama and Senator O'Biden, you've said no to everything in trying to find a domestic solution to the energy crisis that we're in. You even called drilling -- safe, environmentally-friendly drilling offshore -- as raping the outer continental shelf.
There -- with new technology, with tiny footprints even on land, it is safe to drill and we need to do more of that.
There is simply no end to the myriad of ways in which John McCain can reinvent himself.
McCain likes being a Senator. That title is clearly very important to his sense of self esteem. But what's disturbing is that he will now, apparently, abandon everything he has previously believed in order to keep it.In 2007, McCain proposed a joint immigration bill with Ted Kennedy that would have opened the path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants in the US. Other Republicans branded it an amnesty and killed it off.
This time, McCain has taken a hard line. He has described the new Arizona legislation, which requires police to stop all people they suspect of being illegal immigrants, as a necessary tool. The border has to be secured first, before immigration reform is tackled, he says; he proposes a six-point plan which includes sending 3,000 National Guard members to the border, a move not so different from the Arizona Cattlemen's Association's 10-point plan.
On the Bill O'Reilly show on Fox News this week, contrary to his previous habit of not demonising illegal immigrants, McCain claimed that "the drivers of cars with illegals in it … are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway".
His U-turn prompted a New York Times editorial, entitled Come Back, John McCain, that argued that no election was worth winning "if you have to abandon what you believe". Columnist Michelle Malkin made much the same point in the National Review, saying: "I need a Dramamine to cover Senator John McCain's re-election bid. With his desperate lurch to the right he's inducing more motion sickness than a Disneyland teacup."
The Republican Party could only have gone one of two ways after their recent presidential defeat. They could have moved towards the centre or towards the far right. They have chosen the worst possible route.McCain's main opponent for the Republican nomination is JD Hayworth, a radio host and former Congressman who has so far raised $1m. Even though Hayworth is a far from formidable candidate – he recently said expansion of same-sex marriage would allow people to marry their horses – and had a poor Congress record, a Rasmussen poll shows McCain on only 47% to Hayworth's 42%, a significant narrowing over the last few months.
The influential conservative website Red State is referring to McCain as Good and Bad. "Maybe Bad John has given way to Good John in the wake of a strong primary challenge from JD Hayworth? Amazing what a little competition will do."
Hayworth's strength is that he is backed by the Tea Party, the conservative grassroots movement. The Tea Party is steadily shifting the Republican party to the right by supporting candidates of a similar persuasion.
Rachel Maddow takes up McCain's recent claim that he never considered himself as "a maverick".
As she points out, "it's the rare politician who will try to disavow the title of his own autobiography. But John McCain is up to the task."
Is there no limit to how many times this man can change his stance and still be regarded as credible?"Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. "I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities."
That's beyond belief. That's like Obama renouncing hope.
I've spoken before about how Lieberman and McCain have decided that, in any conflict of interests between the US and Israel, they will come down firmly on the side of Israel.
The Washington Post appear to have come up with why Lieberman and McCain are correct to do so.
A larger question concerns Mr. Obama's quickness to bludgeon the Israeli government. He is not the first president to do so; in fact, he is not even the first to be hard on Mr. Netanyahu. But tough tactics don't always work: Last year Israelis rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu, while Mr. Obama's poll ratings in Israel plunged to the single digits.Apparently the US president must always keep an eye on the opinion polls of Israel so that he can better judge how he is doing his job.
“In my opinion, the choice could not be more clear: between one candidate, John McCain, who’s had experience, been tested in war and tried in peace, another candidate who has not,’’ Mr. Lieberman said. “Between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not.Apparently, the rules have changed again, and it is no longer one's patriotic duty to put your own country first. Now Lieberman and McCain have decided that it's patriotic to put America second.
Friends of Israel bewailed the timing - though not the substance - of the announcement.That's like saying, "Sorry I punched you on Monday. I promise never to punch you on a Monday again!"
Unbelievable.The man who lost the last election reacts by directly undercutting the victor's foreign policy goals, and does so abroad in the very country Obama is trying to push toward change.
Lieberman, for his part, is effectively telling the Israelis that Obama does not control US foreign policy with respect to Israel, and that he will be prevented by Congress from exerting any pressure. He says this with a certainty, as if the autonomy of the president is simply moot. And remember that Lieberman and McCain often invoke the necessity for sanctions against foreign countries the US is trying to nudge or persuade in one way or another. Here's Lieberman's quote (and the video of his backing Netanyahu against Obama is here):
Message to a foreign government: if the US president tries to pressure you in any way, we will stop him and back you.Any attempt to pressure Israel, to force Israel to the negotiating table, by denying Israel support will not pass the Congress of the United States. In fact, Congress will act to stop any attempt to do that.
The most astonishing thing about this poll is that it comes from Fox News' own website.
81% of people who took part in their poll thought the tea party movement was a fruitless mix of racism and conspiracy theories.
186,097 voted for this option, which is not an insubstantial number.
And this poll comes at a time when some in the Tea party movement have expressed their hope that they can take over the Republican party.
They are demanding, exactly as I predicted after the election, that the reason they lost is because the party is not right wing enough.Phillips: And part of it's gonna end up -- where this Tea Party movement goes, is partially gonna be dependent on the Republican Party. If they're going to keep pushing people like Dede Scozzafaza or Mark Kirk on us, the Tea Party movement is not gonna vote for somebody just because they have an R behind their name. We don't like people like John McCain. We want good conservatives in office.
And if the Republican Party is not going to help us do that, then in 2011 there's probably going to be a pretty big push to set up the Tea Party as a separate political party. I don't think that's the best idea in the world, I'd really prefer to see us take over the Republican Party. But there's a lot of pressure from our people right now because we want conservatives in office.
Meghan McCain is about to be attacked by the lunatic right for her comments regarding the Tea Party Conference. She started by talking about Tom Tancredo's dreadful opening speech, when he stated that voters elected Obama because they couldn't spell "vote" in English and called for literacy tests before voters were allowed to vote.
It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement," McCain retorted on The View.She is bang on the money, but they will turn on her just as they turned on her dad."I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English," McCain added.
McCain, a self-described "progressive Republican," criticized Palin's assertion that President Obama could get himself re-elected to a second term if he launched a war against Iran.
"You should never go to war unless its the absolute last circumstance," McCain said.
As for Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh for using the word "retard" after calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's resignation over the same word last week, McCain said it was a symbol of "exactly what is wrong with politics today.
"We can't placate and say Democrats can say one thing and Republicans can say another thing," she said.
McCain added that the rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement and from Republicans like Palin "will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody who says different is smoking something."
There was nothing in Palin's speech which would have appeared out of sorts in any speech by George W. Bush; indeed, in many ways, her speech was a call for the same kind of policies which the US explicitly rejected at the last election.Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.
The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.
There's nothing new here. If anything, it represents a demand for even greater allegiance to the Bush/Cheney mindset, for a more purist and even less restrained version of the national security insanity, civil liberties assaults, massive increases in the rich-poor gap, control of Americans' lives through "social issues," and endless wars which the Republican Party has long rhetorically claimed to embody. Other than a Medicare prescription plan here and an immigration reform plan there, from what Bush/Cheney orthodoxies do they dissent? None.Palin has hijacked the Tea Party movement and exposed it as nothing other than a bunch of very sore losers who are greatly annoyed that Obama is in the White House.
This movement is nothing more than the Republican Party masquerading as a grass-roots phenomenon. In 2000, the GOP found a cowboy-hat-wearing, swaggering, "likable" Regular Guy spouting "compassion" in domestic policy and "humility" in foreign policy to re-brand itself in the wake of the Gingrich-led branding disaster. Sarah Palin and the "tea party movement" are just the updated versions of that, the re-branding in the wake of the Bush/Cheney-led image disaster. They're every bit as extremist, radical and dangerous as the last decade revealed standard right-wing Republicans to be, but the one thing they're not is new or innovative.
McCain may call this "Blame it on Bush", as he clearly does here, but this was the bit of Obama's SOTU that I enjoyed the most.
He is simply stating facts and reminding us of the awful situation he inherited. The Republicans should hang their heads in shame at the state President Bush left the United States in, but they appear, to me, keener to place the blame at Obama's door than they are about seriously trying to help find a way out of this hole.
Obama is right to blame it on Bush, for he inherited the mess which Bush (and people like John McCain) left behind. And it appears to me, a mere year after Obama was elected, that too many Americans are forgetting that fact.
I am sure the Republicans hate the fact that Obama keeps reminding them of the manifest failures of the last administration, but for the party that continually talks of personal responsibility, it's long overdue that they actually took some.
Lieberman, McCain and Lindsay Graham are never slow to exploit an attempted terrorist attack to imply that Obama and the Democrats are weak on national security, which is why they are now calling for a halt of the transfer of any prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, in the light of the failed Christmas Day terrorist plot.
The White House are pushing back:
A senior Obama administration official pushed back against critics of the White House’s plans to transfer some detainees at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen as it moves toward closing the facility, saying the process for transfers are “consistent with our national security interests.”Anyone released from Guantanamo Bay who ended up working for al Qaeda, was released under the Bush administration, so why isn't there more questioning of why the Bush administration didn't properly vet the people they were letting go?
“I am aware of a lot of people pointing back at the way the transfers were handled under the Bush administration that apparently they have some concerns about that,” said the official, who had not seen the senators’ letter. “I didn’t hear many of those concerns at the time, but there were obviously hundreds and hundreds of detainees that were transferred under the old regime.”
The official explained that the administration’s policy requires that Congress be notified of any transfers, that they are “consistent with our national security interest,” and that each case is reviewed “with a fine-toothed comb.”
“And we believe that each of those that we have done so far enhances our national security,” the official said. “I think that some of us were struck by the fact when Al Qaeda on the Arabian peninsula itself was formed,” the official added, “one of the recruiting and motivational tools that it used in its initial announcement to generate sympathy for its cause for recruits was the facility at Guantanamo Bay.”
President Obama wants us all to know he’s taking seriously the attempted terrorist attack of Christmas Day and that his administration is doing all it can to ensure our safety. But his words would be a lot more convincing if not delivered during time snatched between rounds of golf, swimming and sunbathing. . . .
Returning to Washington would have sent the world a powerful message of a president willing to drop everything and roll up his sleeves -- someone who really means business.As I've pointed out before Bush didn't even bother to comment on Richard Reid's attempt to blow up an airplane for SIX DAYS, far less beat a path back to Washington.
MADDEN: President Obama right now has suffered very greatly in the last few months because of the fight over health care, and he has very little political capital right now. So Republicans feel it is in vogue to criticize this president.
And then lastly, you have to also remember the fact that the president being on vacation in Hawaii, it’s much different than being in Texas. Hawaii to many Americans seems like a foreign place. And I think those images, the optics, hurt President Obama very badly.
You couldn't make that up. It's beyond pathetic.
It's simply hysterical to listen to Mike Murphy deride criticism of the fact that Palin has chosen a white supremacist to co-author her book as "guilt by association".
Em, Reverend Wright? Bill Ayers? I mean, is this guy for real?
And Murphy's notion, that the insane wing of the Republican party don't carry the sway which the media assumes, is simply deceitful, as Maddow points out:
MURPHY: Yeah. No, no, look, she has a constituency. She'll never be the nominee, I totally agree with David. I agree with Steve Schmidt, it would be actually a disaster if she was the nominee. I do wish my friend Steve felt that a year ago when a lot of people were asking John McCain to put her on the ticket. But the truth is--and I'm going to agree with David here, too--the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do. These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination.What planet is Murphy on? Sarah Palin was made the Republican party Vice Presidential nominee precisely to assuage the nutter wing of that party. How can he seriously claim that they have no sway when McCain was forced to put her a 72 year old heartbeat away from the nuclear codes because he was not considered right wing enough by that very section of the party?
At the time I felt as if I was living in a parallel universe. I was reading Bush and McCain talking as if Russia had attacked Georgia, whilst all the facts that I could gather led me to the opposite conclusion.
Well now an EU-commissioned report has come out, laying the blame for the war squarely at the feet of the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
I was stunned at the time at the way which Bush and McCain dismissed the truth and worked from the premise that Russia is our enemy and, therefore, Russia must be in the wrong.But the conclusions will discomfit the western-backed Georgian leader, Saakashvili, who was found to have started the war with the attack on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on the night of 7 August last year, through a "penchant for acting in the heat of the moment".
The war started "with a massive Georgian artillery attack", the report said, citing an order from Saakashvili that the offensive was aimed at halting Russian military units moving into South Ossetia.
Flatly dismissing Saakashvili's version, the report said: "There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation ... Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated ... It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack."
The west has found itself in a bind over Georgia, not wanting to be seen to bow to Russia, and yet unwilling to go to war. Miliband and others are arguing that Georgia should be allowed to join Nato, which is an explicit promise that, should this situation occur again, we would be willing to go to war over it.The truth was, as the EU report has found, that Russia had not been the aggressor. Mikheil Saakashvili, seizing the moment when Putin was sitting with Bush at the Chinese Olympics, decided to strike.
My question is very simple. If there is some great principle at stake here, why aren't we willing to go to war now? Why do we believe that membership of Nato would stop any future Russian response to Georgian aggression? And why should Russia buy this silly illogical premise?
We knew McCain was a dreadful liar during the campaign against Obama, but what this report tells us is that he was not alone.The investigators criticised and condemned Russian conduct and policy in the months and years leading up to the war and its behaviour since. But on the issues of who started what when, the report was unequivocal. The Georgian offensive against Tskhinvali was not justified under international law.
"It is not possible to accept that the shelling of Tskhinvali with Grad multiple rocket launchers and heavy artillery would satisfy the requirements of having been necessary and proportionate."
Sarah Palin, ABC News interview, September 10, 2008:
PALIN: For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep...
GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there.
Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, October 24, 2008:
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
John McCain, presidential debate, October 7, 2008:
[Putin] has exhibited most aggressive behavior, obviously, in Georgia. . . .We have to make the Russians understand that there are penalties for these this kind of behavior, this kind of naked aggression into Georgia, a tiny country and a tiny democracy.
Washington Post Editorial Page, August 28, 2008:
Those in the West who persist in blaming Georgia or the Bush administration for the present crisis ought to carefully consider those words -- and remember the history in Europe of regimes that have made similar claims. This is the rhetoric of an isolated, authoritarian government drunk with the euphoria of a perceived victory and nursing the delusion of a restored empire. It is convinced that the West is too weak and divided to respond with more than words. If nothing is done to restrain it, it will never release Georgia -- and it will not stop there.
George Will, The Washington Post, August 17, 2008:
Now McCain's rejuvenated hopes rest on his ability to recast this election, focusing it on who should lead America in a world suddenly darkened by Russia's war of European conquest. . . . He should ask Obama to join him in a town meeting on lessons from Russia's aggression. Both candidates favor NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, perhaps Vladimir Putin's next victim. But does Russia's behavior cause Obama to rethink reliance on "soft power" -- dialogue, disapproval, diplomacy, economic carrots and sticks -- which Putin considers almost an oxymoron? . . . Until Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it seemed that not even the Democratic Party could lose this election. But it might if McCain can make it turn on the question of who is ornery enough to give Putin a convincing, deterring telephone call at 3 a.m.
Washington Post Editorial Page, August 14, 2008:
YOU MIGHT think, at a moment such as this, that the moral calculus would be pretty well understood. . . . Yet, in Washington, the foreign policy sophisticates cluck and murmur that, after all, the Georgians should have known better than to chart an independent course . . . Part of the blame-the-victim argument is tactical -- the notion that the elected president of Georgia foolishly allowed the Russians to goad him into a military operation to recover a small separatist region of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili says, in an article we publish on the opposite page today, that the facts are otherwise, that he ordered his troops into action only after a Russian armored column was on the move. . . . Moreover, the evidence is persuasive and growing that Russia planned and instigated this war.
Cathy Young, Reason, October 24, 2008:
Last Friday, Salon.com columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the Bush presidency's harshest critics, blasted both major party presidential candidates for perpetuating the "blatant falsehood" that Russia launched an "unprovoked attack" on Georgia last August. . . . There is something puzzling about the sympathy for Russia evident in many quarters of the American left-from Greenwald to Noam Chomsky to Alexander Cockburn and Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation (not to mention numerous commenters at sites like Salon.com and The Huffington Post). . . . Why the sympathy, then? A knee-jerk reaction that equates hostility to Russia with red-baiting? Or could it be that to some on the left, the cause of sticking a finger in America's eye is progressive enough?
Every single one of those people were talking nonsense. Nor was the truth particularly hard to find. Indeed, all they had to do was Google it. But they chose to see this as an act of Russian aggression because (a) that is what they are hard wired always to do, and (b) because they hoped by turning this into an issue that they might be able to expose Obama as somehow "unready" to lead the US in a dangerous world. They also do this because they know they will get away with it.
Republican media consultant Mark McKinnon identifies the problem which the Republicans currently face, as he sees it.“Neither party has an exclusive on whack jobs,” says Republican media consultant Mark McKinnon. “Unfortunately, right now the Democrats generally get defined by President Obama, and Republicans, who have no clear leadership, get defined by crackpots — and then they begin to define the Republican Party in the mind of the general public.
Where I disagree with him is in that this is merely a matter of perception, and that both parties have their fair share of whack jobs. For years the Republicans have been increasingly reliant on the support of the Christian right; indeed, it was to placate them that McCain chose the spectacularly unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate.
And, in many ways, she and Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have become the public face of that party.
The image of the Republicans, as seen through any TV screen, simply couldn't get any wackier:
Here’s Orly Taitz, insisting that the commander in chief was born in Kenya. There’s a flock of town hall protesters, waving photos of the president in a Hitler moustache. Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin warns darkly that Obama is planning “death panels” for senior citizens. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun equates the president’s plans with “Nazi” policies. Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt — last heard calling John Murtha a “coward” — tells a birther: “I agree with you, but the courts don’t.”I understand the point which McKinnon is making. He's arguing that the Taitz's of this world do not represent the views of the average Republican Senator. And he's right.
And then, in the midst of all the catcalls, hand-held signs and “I’m not listening” BlackBerrying, Wilson interrupts Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress by shouting, “You lie!”
“The president was helped more by the optics of House Republicans than by his own speech,” says former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.). “It’s not likely to do any long-term damage, but they need to be very careful how they oppose this president.”
One veteran GOP official puts it bluntly: “The image of a bunch of white guys booing an African-American president is about as bad as it gets.”
McCain disagrees with Holder's decision to appoint a Special Prosecutor, but, as both the Cheney's take to the airwaves to defend the use of torture, McCain makes it very clear that he does not agree with them on this one.
"I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan."He says that it is important that the torture programme is never repeated but doesn't say how this could be achieved without prosecutions. After all, Cheney's argument is that "torture worked" and that the programme should be continuing.
"I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq... I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And I believe that information, according go the FBI and others, could have been gained through other members."
The insane brigade have rounded on Letterman for making jokes about Sarah Palin's daughter. And the most insane of them all, Michelle Malkin, steps up to argue that no jokes of this kind would be acceptable were they to be made about the daughters of the Clinton's or the Obama's.
Perhaps Malkin is forgetting this:
Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."
-- Sen. John McCain, speaking to a Republican dinner, June 1998.
I don't remember Malkin being outraged at that point. But her outrage shows that the insane brigade still harbour hopes that Sarah Palin might be their next candidate. I do hope they are right.
I always said that the Republican base would push itself even further to the right once they lost the election:
"There is a sense of rebellion brewing," said Katon Dawson, the outgoing South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who cited unexpectedly high attendance at anti-tax “tea parties” last week.It's not only the speed at which the extreme right wingers are seeking to grab the reins of power, it's the people that they are turning against.
That same sense is detectable in New Hampshire, where Union Leader publisher Joseph McQuaid – a stalwart of the base – warned in a column last weekend that the push for same-sex marriage in the state legislature was really about “forcing society to embrace and give positive reinforcement to their lifestyle and agenda in our schools and in every other area of public life imaginable.”
Asked about how a presidential candidate urging the party toward the middle on cultural issues would fare, Scheffler said flatly: “They’re not gonna go anywhere.”
Rick Wilson, a consultant to the group, explained the outlook of “real Republicans” when it comes to Obama.
“They think this guy has grabbed the reins of power and that he is racing as fast as he can first off to reshape the economy and the culture in his image – they are mortified at that and they are terrified of it.”
“There is a fever pitch,” he said, dismissing the notion that the party must sacrifice some of the intensely held views of base voters to expand its coalition to include more young and minority voters. “You don’t get a new coalition by abandoning your old coalition.”
In Arizona, Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Project, a group that mounted armed opposition to illegal immigration at the border, announced this week that he’s running against McCain.I mean, wow.... wasn't he their presidential candidate less than a 100 days ago running to overturn, "the elitist establishment in Washington"? And now they tell us that he is actually part of that elitist Washington establishment?
“We’ve had it with the elitist establishment in Washington and John McCain is one of those,” Simcox said.
The Republicans have found their theme regarding war crimes. Any prosecution would be reminiscent of the actions of "a banana republic".
They seem to ignore the fact that it is in banana republics that war criminals are not charged with war crimes. It is in banana republics that the president can ignore the law or state that the law is what he says it is.
If there are no charges brought against these war criminals that will, in fact, be the point at which the US starts to resemble a "banana republic".
The Three Amigos have popped up to beg Obama not to prosecute people over interrogations.
Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent President Obama a letter today in which they expressed strong concern about his decision to leave the door open to the possible prosecution of officials who crafted controversial Bush administration policy on detainee interrogations.As John Cole points out, isn't that the very reason we prosecute people in the first place? To have a "chilling effect" on anyone else who might think of behaving in the same way as the person we are prosecuting?
"Pursuing such prosecutions would, we believe, have serious negative effects on the candor with which officials in any administration provide their best advice, and would take our country in a backward-looking direction at a time when our detainee-related challenges demand that we look forward," the letter said.
It went on to say that such prosecutions would have a "seriously chilling effect" on the ability of lawyers to provide legal counsel to the United States.
It's yet another example, as if one were needed, of the temperament of the man that the Republicans attempted to install in the White House with the inane Sarah Palin as his VP.
But, with his latest outburst, one really does start to wonder if John McCain has a problem with people of colour.
"You people". That's not a million miles away from his comment to Obama during the last debate when he referred to him as, "That one!"“He was angry,” one source said. “He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn’t even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset.”
McCain’s message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama’s pace on the issue. “He threw out [the words] ‘You people — you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,’ ” the source said. “It was almost as if [he was saying] ‘You’re cut off!’ We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that.”
Regarding the use of the phrase “you people,” Buchanan said it was “in response to a question about people in general who had voted for Obama and was not meant to refer to Hispanics.” To imply otherwise is “character assassination,” said Buchanan.That would be easier to believe if I did not already have the phrase, "That one" running through my head.
But one person’s straight talk is another person’s vitriol. “My hands were shaking,” one source said. “I was nervous as no-end.” The senator’s comments went on for several minutes at least. And by the end of the meeting, another participant, who had supported McCain in last year’s presidential election, was so shaken by the display of temper that he decided it is good that McCain isn’t in the White House.Even former supporters are relieved, after meeting him, that this man didn't win the election.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I have never pretended to be a great House of Commons man, but I can pay the House the greatest compliment I can by saying that from the first to last that I never stopped fearing it. And that tingling apprehension that I felt at three minutes to twelve today I felt as much ten years ago and every bit as acute. And it is in that fear that the respect is contained.So I applaud Obama for having the courage to face such questions directly from friend and foe alike, especially as he didn't have to. I really think it would be beneficial if this happened more in American politics, where Bush managed to be mostly interviewed only by people like Fox News, which I have always found a strange way for the president to show his accountability. Let him answer to his peers for his actions.
“Your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) chided.Nicely handled I thought.
“The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” Obama answered, to laughter. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before.”
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"Those who would sacrifice a little liberty for a perceived increase in security, deserve neither - and will eventually lose both." Benjamin Franklin.
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