Celebrity.
We must always remember that celebrity is a bad thing and that the Republicans would never elect one.
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Barack: GOP takes "pride in being ignorant"
Obama sums the Republicans up perfectly. They take pride in being ignorant. And they are laughing at what he said, even though what he said is perfectly true....And let me make a point, let me make a point about efficiency. Because my Republican opponents they don't like to talk about efficiency.
You know, the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plan for investing $15b a year in energy efficient cars, and a new electricity grid and all this ...
Somebody said, well what can I do, what can individuals do? So I told them something simple, I said you know what, you could inflate your tires to the proper levels, and that if everybody in American inflated their tires to the proper levels, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we get from John McCain from drilling right below his feet there, wherever it is that he was gonna drill.
So now the Republicans are going around - this is the kind of things they do, I don't understand it- they are going around, they going around they're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of the idea as if this is Barack Obama's energy plan.
Now two things one, they know they are lying about what my energy plan is. But the other this they are making fun of a step that every expert says will absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4%.
It's like, it's like these guys take pride in being ignorant.
You know, I mean they think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is absolutely true. This is serous business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.
They love nothing more than to reduce complex arguments to purple heart bandaids or tyre gauges, highlighting what a bunch of immature morons they are.
Homor Simpson would be their perfect candidate. And what's so different about what Obama said and what McCain is saying here?
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
O'Reilly: Rebates bad. Voluntary donations good; even though we all know they are never going to happen.
Obama suggests that a $1,000 rebate should be paid to all families and that this should be subsidised out of oil companies record profits.
O'Reilly thinks that this a bad idea because the country has a terrible deficit. Hasn't O'Reilly been defending the Bush administration whilst it ran up this record deficit?
Bill agrees that the oil companies have been "allowed [...] to prosper more than any other concern in the history of civilisation" and yet he thinks that any money they give back should be voluntary.
It's the maddest broadcast he's made in a career of utterly bonkers broadcasts.
He says he's concerned about the poor this winter, but yet he's not concerned enough to ensure that oil companies should be made to give money back as a matter of compulsion. I suppose that would be socialism in Bill's eyes. Let's see how the generosity of the market - that all powerful God that corrects all wrongs - plays out here.
He admits that calling the response from the oil companies to his idea "lukewarm would be kind". He was asking for 2% of their record profits.
Obama says they should be forced to hand over some of these record profits made, as Bill says, thanks to the generosity of "the nation that has allowed them to prosper." Their profits are in excess of $80 billion.
Bill wants it to be voluntary. Obama says it should be compulsory.
The oil companies have given their answer: "Out of my cold dead hand".
(PS. McCain is on the side of the oil companies.)
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Journalist Ron Suskind says Bush ordered forgery linking Saddam, al-Qaeda
President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims.Suskind points out that the people who spoke to him spoke ON the record. It makes no difference now as Pelosi wouldn't impeach Bush if he shot an aide in the Oval Office, but it's interesting that, as the Bush administration comes to a close, that more and more of it's blatant illegality is coming to light.
The charge is made in “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, released today.
Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.
“It was a dark day for the CIA,” Suskind told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Tuesday. “It was the kind of thing where [the CIA] said, ‘Look, this is not our charge. We’re not here to carry forth a political mandate — which is clearly what this was — to solve a political problem in America.’ And it was a cause of great grievance inside of the agency.”
The author writes that Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and suggests it is a crime of greater impact than Watergate. But the White House is denying the allegations, calling the book “absurd” and charging that Suskind practices “gutter journalism".
What do these people at the CIA have to gain by talking about this now when Bush is already a lame duck president? Why would they bother to lie? It can't be too hurt him as his days are already numbered and he has no further to fall in opinion polls.
On page 371 of “The Way of the World,” Suskind describes the White House’s concoction of a forged letter purportedly from the hand of Habbush to Saddam Hussein to justify the United States’ decision to go to war.
Suskind writes: “The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq — thus showing, finally, that there was an operation link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, something the Vice President's office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade.”
He continues: “A handwritten letter, with Habbush's name on it, would be fashioned by CIA and then hand-carried by a CIA agent to Baghdad for dissemination.”
CIA officers Richer and John Maguire, who oversaw the Iraq Operations Group, are both on the record in Suskind’s book confirming the existence of the fake Habbush letter.
When asked by Vieira for further proof of the letter, Suskind said: “Well, the CIA folks involved in the book and others talk about George Tenet coming back from the White House with the assignment on White House stationery, and turning to the CIA operatives, who are professionals, and saying, ‘You may not like this, but here is our next mission.’
“And they carried it through step by step, all the way to the finish.”
If there is any truth in this then it's not enough to impeach Bush and Cheney, they should be sent to jail. How many tens of thousands of people are now dead because of what they have done?
But, of course, Tricky Dickie has already thought of that:
Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”If we can only jail Cheney in the end, I'd still be very happy with that.
“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.
“The key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”
Click title for full article.
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John McCain Mocks Obama on Dollar Bill- In JUNE.
McCain claimed that Obama was playing the race card when he stated, "They will try to say, 'he doesn't look like the rest of the Presidents on the dollar bill.'"
Here's an official McCain ad, which was released in June, which mocks the notion of Obama's face on.... a hundred dollar bill!
And, again, underlining the whole advert is the notion of, "Who does he think he is?"
Hat tip to The Jed Report.
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Obama's Racial Catch-22
There's a wonderful article here by Adam Serwer on the way race is being played in the current American election.
He argues that America is terribly pleased with herself for allowing Obama the Democratic nomination and are taking his nomination as proof that the US has transcended race as an issue, which is why McCain's charge that Obama has "played the race card" is actually the greatest race card of all to play, as most Americans fear being accused of racism far more than they are ever likely to suffer from it effects.
Whenever the subject of race or racism is raised, McCain wins, which is why his campaign rushed to accuse Obama of playing the race card. Which is why Obama needs to keep this campaign about policy and, if possible, on the kind of president the hotheaded John McCain would be.The McCain campaign's apparently race-neutral approach, and its subsequent accusation that the Obama campaign is playing the race card, is a well-thought-out strategy -- it is pure Nixon. In his recent chronicle of conservative political history in The New Yorker, George Packer describes Pat Buchanan's plan for exploiting political divisions, particularly ones of a racial nature. Buchanan's assessment was that they could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."
In a dispute about race, the McCain campaign knows it will end up with the larger half. For the most part, most white people's experience with race isn't one of racial discrimination. They can only relate to racial discrimination in the abstract. What white people can relate to is the fear of being unjustly accused of racism. This is the larger half. This is why allegations of racism often provoke more outrage than actual racism, because most of the country can relate to one (the accusation of racism) easier than the other (actual racism). For this reason, in a political conflict over race, the McCain campaign has the advantage, because saying the race card has been played is actually the ultimate race card.
This is another reason why Barack Obama's unsolicited remarks about how Republicans might use race against him were so ill-advised and a troubling departure from his standard approach to race. Perhaps the endless stereotypes and double standards he faces as a black candidate -- accusations of being a Muslim, of being a black separatist, of being arrogant -- have taken their toll. Directly acknowledging these stereotypes and double standards would be even more dangerous for Obama, because many white people see his campaign as proof that these types of racism no longer exist, which is unfortunately part of his emotional appeal as a candidate. This is why the campaign needs to avoid dealing with race in the context of his rivalry with McCain whenever possible.
McCain, as I have said before, is playing Nixon in this election. Pretending to be above the fray whilst subtly playing the race card as often as he can get away with. Serwer argues that there is nothing for Obama to gain by entering such a fist fight and that he needs to keep this campaign focused on policy:
Democrats have a candidate who is sophisticated in his understanding of policy, and Republicans have a candidate who is still largely running on his biography as a war hero, whose only coherent and consistent remaining policy position is support for offshore drilling. Driving home that point will become increasingly difficult if McCain is re-energized by the presence of white voters who are themselves anxious about being seen as racist. From their point of view, Obama's presence on the national stage is proof that any charge of racism on their behalf is frivolous. This is nonsense, but there's nothing really that can be done about it.It's well worth reading the entire article. Do so by clicking on the title.Presumably, Obama knew that this was a part of the game when he signed up. He had to, because black folks live with it every day. It's probably best for the members of Obama's campaign to do what most people do when confronted with this kind of casual racism -- shake their heads and move on. Anything more is playing into a game they can't possibly win.
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Obama needs to change this script.
There are many mixed signals coming from the US election and yet still I find myself worried.
New data shows that since 2005 there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register themselves as Republicans and a rise in those who see themselves as Democrats and Independents.
While the implications of the changing landscape for Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are far from clear, voting experts say the registration numbers may signal the beginning of a move away from Republicans that could affect local, state and national politics over several election cycles. Already, there has been a sharp reversal for Republicans in many statehouses and governors’ mansions.
In several states, including the traditional battlegrounds of Nevada and Iowa, Democrats have surprised their own party officials with significant gains in registration. In both of those states, there are now more registered Democrats than Republicans, a flip from 2004.
And then there's the fact that a few journalists, who have previously adored McCain, appear to have woken up to the fact that he's not what they seemed.
Joe Klein:
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter:A few months ago, I wrote that John McCain was an honorable man and he would run an honorable campaign. I was wrong. I used to think, as David Ignatius does, that McCain's true voice was humble and moderate, but now I'm beginning to think his Senate colleagues may be right about his temperament. From what I can gather, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican, reflected the views of many of his colleagues earlier this year when he said:
"The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine...He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
In the middle of John McCain’s dopey Britney & Paris attack ad, the announcer gravely asks of Barack Obama: “Is He Ready to Lead?” An equally good question is whether McCain is ready to lead. For a man who will turn 72 this month, he’s a surprisingly immature politician — erratic, impulsive and subject to peer pressure from the last knucklehead who offers him advice. The youthful insouciance that for many years has helped McCain charm reporters like me is now channeled into an ad that one GOP strategist labeled “juvenile,” another termed “childish” and McCain’s own mother called “stupid.” The Obama campaign’s new mantra is that McCain is “an honorable man running a dishonorable campaign.” Lame is more like it. And out of sync with the real guy.So far so good. So why am I still finding myself worried?
I am worried because, as inane and childish as McCain's attack ads have been with their dog whistle hints at racist messaging, the fact of the matter is that McCain has just drawn level with Obama in the polls for the very first time in this election:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when "leaners" are included, it’s McCain 47% and Obama 46%.
This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3 (see recent daily results).
My worry is that Obama is allowing McCain to set the agenda that is up for debate. At the moment McCain is quite successfully defining this election as a referendum on whether or not Barack Obama is ready to lead.
This allows McCain's record to go largely unchallenged.
It allows McCain to portray himself as the Vets choice for leader when this is simply not the case.
It allows him to lie about whether or not he supported Martin Luther King Day.
But those are mere triflings which I bring up only because they happened recently and are therefore on my mind.
McCain's negative ads are having an effect and Obama needs to change the focus from a referendum on whether or not he is fit to lead the US to an examination of what the Republican party have given the US for the past eight years and whether or not the US wants a continuation of those policies.
John McCain was central to those disastrous policies and is being allowed to portray himself as a "Maverick" who was brave enough to stand up to his own party when he disagreed with policy.
That is simply untrue. McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time last year and 100% of the time this year. That's not the record of a "Maverick" and Obama needs to point that out.
McCain's campaign is earning such disapprobation because the press recognise that it is based on lies and below the radar dog whistle racism. But for those who do not follow politics avidly it is, nevertheless, working.
It is simply astonishing to me that a 71 year old man (he turns 72 this month) who wants to continue the Iraq war and deny Americans a national health system could be neck and neck with Obama at this point in the race.
He's able to do so because Republicans are wonderful at attack dog politics and doing and saying anything at all to win elections. They have utterly no principles as McCain's incredible flip-flopping record amply illustrates.
They must not be allowed to define what this election is about. At the moment they are doing so, which is why Obama and McCain are neck and neck despite the fact that support for the Republican party is dropping all over the place.
Obama cannot afford to let McCain set the agenda that is up for debate. He needs to attack and stop responding to McCain all the time. It needn't descend into negative campaigning, but the person attacking is the person setting the terms of the debate, and at the moment that person is McCain.
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Monday, August 04, 2008
Gergen talks about the code for ‘uppity’
STOP THE PRESS!
There is such a thing as an honest Republican. David Gergen recognises that John McCain's campaign is playing dog whistle politics, sending racial signals which they are "scrupulous" about keeping "below the radar".
Gergen says that "as a native of the south" he recognises that anyone from the south would see that McCain's "The One" advert as saying that Obama is "uppity" and that "he ought to stay in his place."
I am currently reading Richard Reeves' biography of Nixon and R.N. was well aware when he said that he opposed busing that most Southerners took that to mean he supported segregation. McCain's campaign is working in a similar fashion, sending signals that play subtly on race.
Perhaps it's the Rovian team that McCain has grouped around him who are behind it, but it's a bloody disgrace that McCain is allowing this under any circumstances.
Good for Gergen for admitting the game that McCain is playing. Now the rest of the media need to follow suit and call this shit what it is. It's shameful that the media are pretending that McCain is not playing the race card. He's playing it. Big time. And from this exchange it appears that he's not as comfortable doing so as the people advising him to play it are.
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McCain's team have played the race card from day one.
Bob Herbert of The New York Times really has nailed the myth that Obama "played the race card" and has, instead, pointed out the numerous ways in which the McCain camp has been playing the race card from the very beginning of this campaign.
Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.I had forgotten all about that initial ad which suggested that Obama was not quite as American as McCain, although we were never actually told what made McCain so especially American and what quality Obama lacked, we were left to fill in those blanks for ourselves.
Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
And, as Herbert points out, McCain's tactics have only worsened since then and are actually repeating an old Republican theme:
Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.
The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”
Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.
Of course, McCain claims that the message they were sending was that Obama was simply a vacuous celebrity, but it is interesting that they chose the two white female celebrities that they did. Are there no vacuous male celebrities they could have chosen? No vacuous black celebrities of either gender?
And, of course, race lies behind that other notion; that Obama somehow is "presumptuous":
I had noticed each of these events individually, but Herbert does a wonderful job of stringing them all together and showing that they are actually part of a pattern that has been just under the surface of McCain's campaign from day one.The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.
Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.
That's what makes his charge that Barack Obama had "played the race card" into such an obscenity. Coming from a man who voted to rescind Martin Luther King Day, that really is an insult too far.
Click title to read the entire article.
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Middle East: Israel's secret police pressuring sick Gazans to spy for them, says report
Physicians for Human Rights claim that the Israelis are pressuring Palestinians to spy for them as a precondition to allowing them to receive medical treatment.
Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, have been interrogating Palestinians seeking permission to travel to Israel for crucial medical treatment and demanding that they spy for Israel. Refusal to do so means that treatment is denied.
Typically, patients are taken to a small, windowless room, underground, beneath the security terminal at Erez, the only passenger crossing that remains open between Gaza and Israel, where they are questioned by Shin Bet agents for hours, the report says.Requests for treatment in Israel have jumped since Israel imposed it's blockade on Gaza once the area had been taken over by Hamas, so the Palestinians in Gaza are particularly vulnerable. And the Palestinian Authority pay for any treatment which the Israelis give to Palestinians, so there is no financial excuse for Israel's behaviour. And yet, we are being told that Palestinians who refuse to co-operate with Shin Bet are simply refused treatment when Shin Bet must realise that any Palestinian caught helping them would face a death sentence.
Refusal to cooperate often results in the denial of medical treatment. Based on the testimonies of more than 30 Palestinians - 11 of which are published - the report says the Shin Bet is using coercion and extortion to force patients to collaborate.
"They took me through underground passages and made me sit in another waiting room for almost 45 minutes. A man approached me and called me to another room for interrogation. He asked me to sit down and presented himself as Moshe," Bassam al-Wahidi, a Fatah-aligned journalist, said in his affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights.
"After all my responses he said to me: 'I want to talk to you openly when you return from Israel so that you will have an acceptable reputation on the Israeli side. Either you make contact with me and agree to my demands, or you will not get any medical treatment which will cause you to be blind and you will become a burden to your family and friends,'" Wahidi said in his affidavit.
But he said he refused and was forced to return to Gaza without receiving any treatment. Now the 28-year-old, who married a year and a half ago, is completely blind in his right eye and losing the vision in his overstrained left eye.
International law forbids the use of civilians in conflict to damage an enemy state, so the Israelis must be aware that what they are doing is a clear violation.
Colonel Shlomi Muchtar has it right. The Israelis may have withdrawn from Gaza, but there is still no state of Palestine which the world recognises in the Gaza Strip and Israel still controls access to the area and much of the water and power supplies. Israel remains the official occupier and, as such, has responsibilities for the health and safety of the people that she occupies.Israel's security services insists that patients are denied entry only on security grounds. It also says that holding Israel responsible for the health of Palestinians in Gaza is "wholly inappropriate and misleading", arguing that it no longer occupies the coastal territory, having withdrawn its troops and settlers from the area in 2005.
However, in a letter to Physicians for Human Rights in June, Colonel Shlomi Muchtar said: "The state's obligations are derived, among other things, from the rules of war and from the scope of its control over border crossings between it and the Gaza Strip."
To make that health and safety reliant on whether or not the patient is prepared to spy for Shin Bet is breaking every humanitarian ethic that I can think of.
Click title for full article.
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Sunday, August 03, 2008
McCain and his $520 shoes.
Here's an attack ad that serves a purpose. John McCain, the man who calls Obama "out of touch" and "elitist", wears shoes that cost $520 a pair. The man has nine homes.
And yet he's calling the other guy "elitist"? Only a Republican would have the sheer brass neck to try and make that stick.
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Obama and the hecklers
Obama shows how to handle a heckler. At first, he promises the young guy that he will have an opportunity to ask a question during the question and answer session.
Then he allows the young guy to ask his question and has answers for him. Firstly, Obama has addressed the issues that he is talking about and secondly, if the young guy doesn't agree he can always vote for someone else or try running for office himself.
It's all a startling change from John McCain, who has people removed from the room simply for holding up a sign which read "Bush=McCain".
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McCain launches the most feeble attack Ad so far.
The McCain camp obviously hope that attacks like this, where they quote Obama out of context in an attempt to make him appear delusional, will be successful. But I have a funny feeling that they are way off base here. This particular ad only succeeds in making the McCain camp seem as if they are very worried and are responding in an infantile manner.
The line that Obama had played the race card actually had some traction, if only because no-one could believe that McCain would be so cynical as to make the charge without merit. However, they seem keen to drop that matter now as, in truth, McCain never looked very comfortable around the subject.
Their latest ad is simply stupid. The Democrats could launch ads warning the country of the danger of electing someone old enough to suffer from dementia and who keeps making mistakes about the Iraq Pakistan border and al Qaeda's links to the Iranians but I am pleased to say that they are too classy to go down such a cheap route.
McCain is not.
UPDATE:
The Young Turks have lots to say about this latest ad. Cenk makes a very good point, Republicans don't have a very good sense of humour. And I agree that Obama needs to stop playing defence and should attack, but he should attack what McCain is offering, four more years of Bush policies, rather than attacking McCain himself.
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Obama: McCain is waging cynical campaign.
Obama has spoken out about McCain's disgraceful remark that he had "played the race card". Obama denied that he had ever played the race card and pointed out that no member of the press had ever imagined that his comments were doing so until the McCain camp decided to interpret them in that way. At that point the McCain camp's reading of things featured on the front cover of The New York Times for two days in a row. Obama lays out the point he was actually trying to make:
"I'm young, I'm new to the national scene,'' Obama said. "My name is Barack Obama. I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is, I am unfamiliar, and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am... So... what has been an approach of the McCain campaign is to say, 'He's risky,' to try to divert focus from the fact that they don't have any ideas for dealing with the economy, or dealing with education...This is the main point. The Republicans are seeking to make this election a referendum on Barack Obama because this is a brilliant way to change the focus away from the policies of both parties. A majority of Americans want troops out of Iraq. A majority of Americans want a national health system. McCain's policies on these and many other issues are political poison.
"The one thing we know about the team that John McCain has assembled, because it's a carry-over from some of the folks who have worked on the Bush campaigns,'' Obama said at a press conference at Cape Canaveral, Fla. "They are very good at negative campaigns They are not so good at governing. If you think about this week, what they have been good at is distracting... (Jobs are being lost) and what was being talked about was Paris and Britney. They are clever about distracting people from the issues that really matter in peoples' lives.
So, as happens every four years in the American election cycle, the Republicans are seeking to redefine what's important. Suddenly it's all about the "character" of the two candidates and not about their policies, and the American press always seem to follow suit, never calling the Republicans for this awful game they always play.
Indeed, one of them had the sheer gall to ask Obama if he too wasn't engaged in negative campaigning:
Not only have the American press seen this movie before, they have had leading roles in it."This is the classic dilemma of politics,'' Obama replied. "We get four or five shots in a row (assertions by McCain), that I would rather lose a war so that I can win a campaign, that I am not willing to visit the troops, that I somehow am full of myself, that I'm an empty-headed celebrity, whatever repeated attacks have been launched this week, so when I say, boy those are kind of silly arguments, the press says, isn't that being negative. Well no, I'm describing what their strategy has been for the last week... I'm just stating the facts....
"Ultimately, what I think we've got to do is keep driving home the essential message of this campaign, that we've got to change business as usual... What we've seen this week ahs been politics as usual... This is the same thing that was done four years or eight years ago... You guys are all familiar with this. You've seen this before. We've seen this movie before.''
Quite how defending yourself from scurrilous accusations and pointing out how dumb they are becomes negative campaigning is simply beyond me, but the American press are clueless when it comes to this stuff which is why the McCain camp are able to get away with shit like this:
Obama never made any such accusation and the press, who had been listening to Obama make the same points for weeks, never thought Obama was making such an accusation. McCain has cynically introduced race into the election and now has the gall to pretend that an accusation which was never made has been retracted."Let me be clear, in no way do I think John McCain's campaign was being racist,'' Obama said. "I think they're cynical,''
To which McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds today replied:
"We're glad the Obama campaign retracted Barack Obama's accusation because it was absolutely false, and we're moving on."
The American political process is poisoned by the fact that it's press allow this shit to be played out in front of them and then have the gall to ask Obama if he's being negative when he defends himself from baseless accusations about his "presumptuousness" or his "arrogance". Qualities which are always in the eye of the beholder rather than anything concrete like policy, which the Republicans always run away from or reduce to mindless, untrue slogans such as "Obama is against offshore drilling and wants us to have high gas prices".
McCain can only get away with this crap because no-one from the press is calling him on it. No-one is asking him to point out what correlation he imagines exists between current high gas prices and offshore drilling which wouldn't deliver any oil for at least ten years. Nor are they asking why, if drilling is the answer, aren't the oil companies drilling in any of the other areas where they have permission to drill.
So we now see Obama having to backtrack because McCain is able to make these utterly bogus points harm Obama's campaign because the press do not question McCain's logic.
When, after the last week of McCain's interminable negativity, the press find themselves asking Obama if he is being negative by defending himself, the fact that the press are giving McCain a free pass becomes simply indisputable. And simply disgraceful.
American politics is so cynical because it's press appear to see themselves as little more than stenographers, dutifully writing down what each candidate says, rather than questioning whether or not what each candidate says is actually true or false.
That is why we find ourselves in the parallel universe where John McCain can accuse a black man of introducing race into the election.
UPDATE:
Here's a perfect example of the shit McCain gets way with:
You'll notice he refuses to define how Obama is supposed to have "played the race card" and then reiterates the lie that the Obama camp have withdrawn this remark. He then astonishingly claims that he backed Martin Luther King Day. This is an amazingly hazy recollection of his actual voting record:
* FACT: McCain Supported Republican AZ Governor’s Decision To Rescind MLK Holiday. ABC News reported, “In Arizona, a bill to recognize a holiday honoring MLK failed in the legislature, so then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, declared one through executive order. In January 1987, the first act of Arizona’s new governor, Republican Evan Mecham, was to rescind the executive order by his predecessor to create an MLK holiday. Arizona’s stance became a national controversy. McCain backed the decision at the time.” [ABC News, 4/3/08]
* FACT: McCain Supported Gov. Evan Mecham’s Decision In 1987 To Rescind Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, “In a vote likely to haunt him for the rest of his public career, McCain voted against 1983 legislation establishing the third Monday in January as the federal holiday marking King’s birthday. Back home in Arizona, he supported Gov. Evan Mecham’s decision in 1987 to rescind an executive order creating a state holiday for King, but later reversed his position.”
[Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/16/08]
* FACT: McCain Voted Against Creating Martin Luther King Holiday. In 1983, McCain voted against a motion to suspend the rules and pass a bill to designate the third Monday of every January as a federal holiday in honor of the late civil rights leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The motion passed 89-77. [HR 3706, Vote 289, 8/2/83; CQ
1983]
Will the press call him on this? I won't be holding my breath.
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Blair slams 'vacuous' Brown in leaked note
A note from Tony Blair to an undisclosed recipient has made it's way into the hands of the Daily Mail in which Blair accuses Brown of 'hubris and vacuity'.
The Blairites do appear to have moved into open warfare against Brown now, and one has to admit that he has not made it very hard for them. There is no bold Brown agenda that the party can unite around and, unlike the claims being made by the Blair camp, he has simply continued the Blairite policies which please readers of the Daily Mail - recommission Trident, extend terrorist suspect detention to 42 days and ask unemployment benefit claimants to clean graffiti in order to earn their benefits - and do nothing to please the electorate in areas like Glasgow East which are utterly vital if Labour are to form the next government.The former prime minister believed his successor had presided over a 'lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy', attacking Blair's record instead of building on it and failing to spell out an agenda for the future, according to the scathing note penned after last September's chaotic Labour party conference. Such tactics would not win the next election, he concluded.
The note leaked to the Mail on Sunday newspaper now threatens to trigger open warfare within New Labour, with its emergence so soon after David Miliband's broadside against the Prime Minister which was seen as part of an orchestrated plot to destabilise Brown by those loyal to his predecessor.
It came as Blair's close ally and former cabinet minister Stephen Byers accused Brown's government of trying to scale a massive electoral mountain with policies more fit for a 'Sunday afternoon stroll', in criticisms closely echoing Blair's own fears about the lack of a forward-looking agenda for New Labour.
Byers told The Observer it was time for big new ideas to capture voters' imagination and claw back marginal seats, adding: 'As David Miliband said, we need to remake our case afresh. That means not just obsessing about the question of Gordon Brown's leadership, but also considering the policies that will re-establish the coalition of support that has won Labour three elections.'
The Blairites have obviously decided that Brown is the problem rather than the policies which Blair promoted. They appear not to understand that what has changed the dynamic is the fact that David Cameron is playing a different game from Hague or Howard.
Cameron is not allowing the Labour Party's right wing policies to push him further to the right and render him and his party unelectable, which was essentially what Blair's game was. Cameron is openly accepting Labour policies and calling them what they are: Tory policies.
So Blair's friends, as I doubt that Blair himself was actually behind the latest leak, are doing real damage to the party by imagining that all that is needed is a change of leader. Labour needs to work out which constituency it best serves, as at the moment it's hard to work out what the party stands for, and this needs to happen before any change of leader.
This, indeed, is one of Blair's main points in the leaked memo:
The memo, in which Blair refers to himself in the third person as TB, complains that defining the new leader as a change from the Blairite era of spin meant that 'we dissed our own record... a fatal mistake if we do not correct it' and also that 'we junked the TB policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place'.On this Blair and I are actually in agreement. For example, Brown moved British troops to Basra airport in Iraq in what appeared to be a clear break with the Blairite policy of always following Bush, but they have literally just hung about there boiling in the sun as Brown lacks the guts to put them on a plane and tell the US that we are out of there.
He hints that he will be the antithesis of Blair but on all the big issues he appears to be still be doing what Blair would have done. Or worse, refusing to follow Blairite policies but simply dithering... which is why we have British troops hanging around Basra airport.
Cameron is not the great new hope that Labour's intransigence is allowing the press to treat him as. He certainly is a lightweight. But, because Brown is failing to set out a clear Labour agenda, Cameron is getting away with simply not being Brown.
It's understandable why so many MP's think a change of leader is all that is needed here, but what is actually needed is a redefinition of policy in a way in which Labour's base can feel that we have a party which represents us.
So Blair's leaked memo, whilst damaging, actually contains the point that I have been making for weeks. Brown was right, in my opinion, to set out to put clear blue water between himself and Blairism, his problem is that he has not found anything to replace it with.
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Saturday, August 02, 2008
US anthrax suspect commits suicide as FBI net closes in
Bruce Ivins, a 62-year-old research specialist at the government's biodefence laboratory in Maryland, 40 miles north of Washington, has committed suicide just as federal prosecutors were preparing to charge him for the anthrax attacks which brought such fear to the US shortly after 9-11.
It is worth remembering how quickly some were to state that the most possible scenario was that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks:
In an excellent article today, Glenn Greenwald points out the role which ABC News had in disseminating this theory:It didn't take long for the hawks to seize on the anthrax scare as a justification for the United States to go bomb Iraq.
"By far the likeliest supplier is Saddam Hussein," The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial on Oct. 18.
James Woolsey, former CIA director, said almost the exact same thing in the Journal's adjacent guest column. After speculating about Iran's involvement, he said: "But by far the more likely candidate for involvement with al Qaeda is Iraq."
Richard Butler, the bellicose leader of U.N. inspections in Iraq in the late 1990s, took to the op-ed page of The New York Times the same day to insinuate that Iraq was behind the attacks: "If the scientific path leads to Iraq as the supporter of the anthrax used by the terrorist mailers, no one should be surprised."
As Greenwald points out, the persons who were feeding this story to ABC News were supposedly "three well placed but separate sources." If they were as "well placed" as ABC News claim then it is not unreasonable to presume that they were connected to the laboratory where the tests were being carried out. If the allegation against Ivins has any merits, then the well connected people that ABC News were relying on were people inside the very laboratory where the attacks were coming from.During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."
ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.
ABC News are currently refusing to say who these "well placed but separate sources" were. How can ABC News continue to protect such persons when the information they were giving was utterly wrong? Indeed, it could be construed that this was some sort of smoke screen to put people off the fact that the anthrax attacks were coming from within the very laboratory which was testing the anthrax used in the American attacks.
Those anthrax attacks - and the implied links to Saddam Hussein made by many people - contributed to the fearful atmosphere which Scott McClellan reminds us in his new book was one of the main reasons that the Iraq war was authorised.
Here's John McCain discussing the possibility that the anthrax might be linked to Saddam Hussein:
It's impossible to overstate how much the linking of the anthrax attacks to Saddam helped to fuel the rush to invade that nation and ABC News are now refusing to name the three "well-placed but separate" sources who helped to fuel the lie - and there really is no other word for what they were disseminating - which helped rush the US to invade a country which had not attacked them.LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?
MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.
LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?
MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.
There are many of us who think the Bush regime were always going to attack Iraq, but ABC News certainly helped them make their case by putting into the American psyche the notion that bid bad Saddam was behind it all.
ABC News are now "protecting their sources" as they call it. But it will be quite astonishing if they seek to hold this line if it transpires that their sources were, indeed, people within the very government laboratory from where the attacks were emanating.
Click title for full article.
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McCain tries to scrub his website: They called him A Political Celebrity
Oh, this is too funny. Look what McCain has recently removed from his website:
So, it's a bad thing that Obama is a celebrity but when McCain was called that very same thing he allowed it to be featured on his own website?!There had been no doubt that McCain would eventually become a full-fledged White House candidate, and he had been expected to make his candidacy official in the spring.
The 2006 midterm campaign had just ended when McCain took the first formal step toward a presidential run in November. He formed an exploratory committee and gave a speech casting himself as a “common-sense conservative” in the vein of Ronald Reagan who could lead the party back to dominance after a dreadful election season by returning to the GOP’s core principles.
A political celebrity, McCain is considered a top contender for the nomination.
The man is simply a very bad joke.
Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.
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Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win
It could be used as a textbook lesson on all that is wrong with capitalism in it's current form:
Henry Ford once said, "There is one rule for industrialists and that is: make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible."Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies -- including Wal-Mart.
In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.
According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.
The latter part of that equation has been changed in modern capitalism to read, "delivering the maximim profit to one's shareholders", and the worker - the person whose labour actually produces the profit - is reduced to simply another unit from which profit can be squeezed.
It would be unthinkable for Wal-Mart to forbid it's shareholders the right to organise and question whether or not the company is properly looking after their interests, and yet when it comes to workers having the same rights we find Wal-Mart bending over backwards to spread fear about unionisation, as if a collective favouring the workers would actually work against them.
The actions by Wal-Mart -- the nation's largest private employer -- reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership. That could lead to higher payroll and health costs for companies already being hurt by rising fuel and commodities costs and the tough economic climate.These same companies that we are being asked to pity because of "rising fuel and commodities costs" have been making bumper profits for years whilst paying their staff as little as they could get away with.
The notion that the staff organising themselves to better their lot is worrying to Wal-Mart for one reason and one reason alone; it might effect their huge profits.
So we now have Wal-Mart telling their own staff not to vote Democrat in case they lose their jobs, which can be the only inference regarding what might happen if wages rise at a time of "rising fuel and commodities costs".
We had all this nonsense in Britain before Blair introduced the minimum wage with the Tories threatening that thousands of workers would be laid off if MacDonald's were forced to pay a decent wage.The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.
"The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.
When the bill passed absolutely bugger all happened. No-one was made unemployed; the only real difference was MacDonald's and companies like it saw a sliver of their massive profits redistributed to the people who made those profits possible: the people who work for them on the shop floor.
But here is the ugly face of capitalism, with Wal-Mart telling it's own workers to fear anyone who might try to better represent their own interests.
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Friday, August 01, 2008
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures.
Rick Davis attempts to defend the recent attack ads that the McCain campaign has launched, especially the charge that Obama is a "celebrity". As far as I am aware there are no tabloid style magazines which actually feature Obama on their covers, but plenty of newspapers and political journals which do. And the charge of celebrity is especially weak when one considers that John McCain has been playing on his celebrity ever since his plane was shot down. There is hardly an ad run by his campaign that does not remind us of his status as a POW.
And while Davis is right that the Germans who cheered Obama do not have a vote, the main point is that the Germans who turned out to cheer him are cheering the fact that here is a man who will reverse the course which George W Bush has set. A course which, as we all know, McCain is campaigning to continue.
I seriously don't think the other implicit charge, that Obama is an elitist, has any chance of sticking when made by John McCain, a man who has married a multi-millionaire and has nine homes.
What's interesting here is that the media are reacting, and not in a way which suits McCain or Davis:
It does, indeed, smack of desperation. And I am pleased to note that so many in the media are calling it what it is.
UPDATE:
This quote is interesting as this appears to confirm the very thing that Davis denies in this interview:What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know,
So, rather than standing up for the troops, it is McCain who is ruthlessly using them for political gain. I wonder if this will become important now that Davis has publicly denied something which might turn out to be provable.
according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that
they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
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US election: Obama accused of playing race card as presidential campaign turns nasty.
"I'll let the American people judge" is the phrase that McCain often uses when he makes a baseless charge and wants to change the subject, leaving the original accusation hanging.
Here, he uses it again, but this time to make the astonishing charge that Barack Obama is playing the race card.
In the last few days McCain's campaign has taken such a nose dive that it's actually become disgraceful.
Having U-turned more than any previous presidential candidate in history in order to please his base and get his hands on the prize, it now appears as if McCain will literally say or do anything in an attempt to become president.McCain's team blamed a speech made the previous day by Obama, in which the Democratic candidate claimed his Republican rival was trying to frighten voters by saying Obama had a strange name and did not look like other presidents.
Obama's campaign team denied it had played the race card and accused McCain's team of "gutter-style politics" over aggressive personal ads this week.
It was not clear last night whether McCain genuinely felt he had been traduced by Obama the previous day, or whether McCain's team is exploiting Obama's comments to get race up and running as an issue.
This is staged outrage by McCain as witnessed in this video. He can't even bring himself to justify the charge that his camp is making.
McCain's team pounced on Obama over a speech in Springfield, Missouri, in which he said: "So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making."
But this is where the McCain camp are heading.
I have been careful never to accuse anyone of racism during this campaign, I think it's simply too cheap a charge to make, but I can't deny that I'm beginning to see traces of something that looks awful like it. Dana Milbank in The Washington Post said:
Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.Presumptuous? That's getting awful near to uppity for my liking, especially as Obama is not doing anything that his Republican rival isn't already doing, Obama simply does it better and more effectively. So why is it presumptuous for Obama to act as if he is going to become president but perfectly acceptable for John McCain? McCain has even launched ad's calling himself, "The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For". Why was that not deemed presumptuous? Why is such a charge only reserved for Obama?
But for McCain to play the race card whilst accusing Obama of doing that very thing is simply a new low in this campaign. And the worst thing is that McCain is an honourable man. You can see that in the way that he can't even bring himself to seriously make the charge. He can't defend Rick Davis's comments with any passion at all, which is not to excuse him, it's simply further proof of the Faustian deal McCain is willing to make.
The Obama campaign has remained as honourable as he promised it would be. McCain is now deep in the gutter.On the campaign trail in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, yesterday, Obama had not yet heard about the race card remark. Instead, he turned on McCain over the celebrity ad. "So far all we have heard is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears," he said. To cheers from the audience, he added: "I have to ask my opponent: 'Is that the best you can come up with?'"
Obama, who has resisted personal criticism of McCain, went on to say that such attacks would not help bring down petrol prices or address other public concerns.
By November there will be nothing left of the honourable John McCain. He will simply have ceased to exist. Rick Davis will see to that.
UPDATE:
Billmon over at Daily Kos has a different theory from mine and I fear his might be more accurate.
And when the "Maverick" returns as "gentle John" in September, will the media forget all the shit that McCain is currently indulging in? Will they allow him to reinvent himself yet again?But McCain and his new team of Rovian handlers now realize they won't have a prayer in November unless they can motivate the conservative base and (to use Lee Atwater's charming phrase) "strip the bark" off Obama. And they have to do it NOW, so McCain can pivot back to a softer, more upbeat message in September.
So that's exactly what McCain is doing – instantly, unapologetically, without shame or embarrassment. His enormous cynicism about the political process and his contempt for the voters – not to mention his vast sense of self-entitlement - have led McCain to take exactly the same low road as the Bush family and its various henchmen (Atwater, Rove): Whatever works; whatever it takes.
Their previous track record suggests that they will do just that.
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