Archive for the 'McCain' Category

Chickenhawk ‘journalist’ Michael Goldfarb used a murderer’s account in an attempt to smear and discredit Beauchamp

Back in 2007, a the New Republic published a series of articles by their ‘Baghdad diarist’, who wrote under the name Scott Thomas. These articles described some abominable and cruel behavior engaged in by American soldiers, including desecration of corpses and running over dogs for sport.

Predictably, conservative ‘journalists’ pounced, accusing the New Republic of fabricating sources and stories. Leading the pack was Michael Goldfarb, a columnist for the Weekly Standard who later served as deputy communications director for the McCain campaign. Goldfarb relied on questionable sources, including a former porn star and a guy who did some temp work at the New Republic. Later, Goldfarb relied on Beauchamp’s sergeant, John Hatley, who said that Beauchamp fabricated his stories.

Unfortunately for Goldfarb’s credibility, Hatley has since been convicted of executing four blindfolded and handcuffed Iraqis. So maybe he was lying when he said that soldiers in his unit never engaged in atrocities.

Brian Beutler has a pretty good overview of the whole sordid affair over at Talking Points Memo.

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Well, the knives are out. After pressing McCain to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate, campaign officials are now blaming Palin for losing the election. And there is a case to be made.

As Shepard Smith points out, the McCain spin that the Campaign was going just fine until a series of bankruptcies and stock market plunges is absolutely false. McCain did need to energize social conservatives within his party, and he did get an initial boost from Sarah Palin. But the campaign went off the rails after a series of disastrous interviews that exposed Palin’s lack of knowledge, days before McCain lost any hope of winning by declaring that the fundamentals of the economy were sound.

McCain aides didn’t stop with the information that they fed to Fox News, though. They’ve been telling everyone who will listen all sorts of embarrassing things about Palin:

* One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd.

* Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

* Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family–clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost.

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McCain had to love getting the coveted Cheney endorsement. But I’ll be what really made his day was hearing that President Bush thinks that McCain and his fellow Republicans “have the right ideas when it comes to the economy”:

This photo doesn’t really relate to the post, but I couldn’t resist (source)

Here’s what McCain had to say about his chances in tomorrow’s election:

The candidate did all he could to stir the crowd’s passions. McCain, who until recently opposed offshore drilling, vowed: “We’ll drill offshore!” (”Drill, baby, drill,” the crowd answered). McCain, who voted in support of the $750 billion financial bailout, declared: “We’re not going to spend $750 billion of your money bailing out Wall Street bankers.” He even invoked a favorite conservative boogeyman, the openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, who he said wants “to cut defense spending by one-fourth.”

Having roused the lethargic audience with fear of Frank and love of drilling, McCain thought it safe to “give you a little straight talk about the state of the race today.”

“Just two days left, a couple of points behind,” he said. “My friends, the Mac is back!”

The Mac then flew up to the University of Scranton, where a third of the college gym was blocked off by a curtain, making the rest of the gym look more full. The candidate read from the teleprompter roughly the same pep talk he had read at his first stop: “I can sense the momentum and the enthusiasm. . . . We’re going to win this race. . . . Americans are figuring it out in the last 48 hours. . . . A few points down. . . . The Mac is back!”

I don’t mind McCain saying that he thinks he’s going to win. It’s expected of politicians, even those who don’t really have a chance. But why did he say that he was giving the crowd “a little straight talk”? That’s not straight talk. That’s blowing sunshine up people’s asses. Straight talk would sound more like this:

My friends, we’re a couple of points down in Pennsylvania, which is a must-win state for me. We’re a couple of points down, by which I mean we’re about 10 points down. I’ve been criticizing John Murtha for saying that a lot of Pennsylvanians are racists, but the fact is that I agree with him. In fact, I’m counting on that. It’s the whole reason I’ve been spending so much time in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that the polls show that I haven’t got a prayer of winning the state.

The fact is, unless Barack Obama is caught within the next 24 hours with either a dead girl or a live boy, I can’t win unless people set aside their concerns about the economy long enough to remember a time when it was absurd to imagine hiring a black lawyer, let alone voting for a black president. So join me in my fervent hope that people fear black men more than they fear losing their jobs and their homes. Let’s all work to keep voter turnout low, especially among ethnic minorities. We can still win, even though the odds in our favor are vanishingly small!

But of course, “straight talk” was always an empty phrase for McCain, no more meaningful to him than “my friends” or “maverick” or “country first”.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

Recently, it’s become evident that the McCain and Palin camps are trying to blame one another for the campaign’s imminent failure. McCain’s people call Palin a “whack job” and say that she’s “gone rogue”, leaving voters to wonder if McCain’s judgment can be trusted. Palin’s supporters complain that Palin has been muzzled by the campaign. And Palin seems determined to show that she has, in fact, gone rogue, by holding unauthorized impromptu press conferences. In the process, she’s demonstrated why McCain wanted her muzzled, straying off message and generally making a fool out of herself.

But now it’s not just Palin who’s off the reservation. The entire social-conservative wing of the Republican Party has gone rogue. Bloggers and political commentators have been blaming McCain for the lost election, saying that he could have won if he had “let Sarah be Sarah”, and if he had been more aggressive about smearing Obama and making up ridiculous charges about Obama’s religion and his alleged Marxism (yes, that’s self-contradictory, but ignorance is a state of mind that allows for self-contradiction). As if that weren’t bad enough, they’re now holding Palin rallies at which there is no mention of McCain:

At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s. the GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.

Members of the audience proudly waved “Country First” placards as Palin delivered her stump speech. Those signs were paid for by the Republican National Committee. The other sign handed out to supporters read “Florida is Palin Country,” but those signs were neither paid for by the Republican National Committee nor the McCain campaign.

It sounds like a lot of Palin supporters won’t be too upset when Obama wins, because they think that McCain’s loss will speed Palin’s ascension by four years.

You know how McCain has been trying to tell voters that Obama is such a hyper-partisan that he never reaches out to Republicans, and can’t work in a bipartisan manner? Apparently, this ad is McCain’s way of saying, “Just foolin’! Obama’s a reasonable guy who’s willing to work with the opposition. And anyone who does try to work with the other party isn’t really a leader.”

Not surprisingly, McCain has actually lost ground in states where the ad is showing. And the wingnuts are furious:

Fabulous. At a time when John McCain needs to show Obama as unready and outside the mainstream — easily done on issues like abortion and the economy — he’s spending money showing how reasonable Obama can be. I understand McCain wants to make the sale with centrists and independents, but this only makes Obama more palatable to the middle.

I suspect that part of the problem that the wingnutosphere is having with the ad is the stark admission that global warming is a problem, and that Republicans ought to be part of the solution. The trouble with that from a political perspective is that green-conscious voters haven’t trusted McCain since the senator made “Drill, baby, drill” into his campaign slogan. It’s too late to pick up the Greens, so it doesn’t make any sense at this point to run an ad that both acknowledges the wrongheadedness of McCain’s proposed energy policy and belies one of his most prominent talking points.

For the benefit of the McCain team, let me show what an effective campaign ad looks like:

Jo-Jo a no show, or

That’s what you get for hiring a scab.

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/30/joe-the-plumber-a-no-show/

Republicans cheer as McCain mocks the idea that nuclear power plants should be safe. There’s no nice way to say this: those people are morons.

Bonus! McCain also mocks the idea that a ban on abortion ought to contain an exception for cases in which the woman’s health is at risk:

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

Having run out of money to produce new attack ads, the McCain campaign is recycling this old ad, despite the fact that it’s already been discredited:

The full Obama quote that this ad butchers was delivered by Obama on May 18, 2008, and you can read it right here. Obama said: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.”

So obviously, Obama didn’t say that Iran doesn’t pose any serious threat, as McCain’s ad pretends. Rather, he clearly said that Iran doesn’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.

These serious distortions are also at odds with Obama’s actual positions on Iran. Obama has repeatedly said Iran is a threat to Israel, and has also clearly said that Iran is a threat in the broader sense that its “support for terrorism” has “increased.” You can read those real-world Obama quotes right here.

Apparently, the McCain campaign is thinking that with just a week to go before the election, people who see this ad might not have time to get the facts before voting.

Lieberman’s words of support weren’t what McCain wanted to hear

Maybe Joe Lieberman has been a loyal Democrat all this time, and has been waiting for just the right moment (the moment when it became clear that McCain isn’t going to win) to plunge his knife into McCain’s back. How else can we explain his assessment of Sarah Palin:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman Friday continued to stand by Republican John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate. But when asked by The Advocate if Palin is ready to be president from day one, Lieberman said “thank God she’s not going to have to be president from day one. McCain’s going to be alive and well.”

Lieberman also seemed to reach out to fellow Democrats, offering himself as a bridge between the parties if Obama should be elected:

“I’m working my heart out for John McCain to be elected our next president,” Lieberman said. “But for whatever reason he is not, I’m going to do everything I can to be bringing people together across party lines to support the new president so he can succeed. What’s at stake for our country is just too serious.”

Sounds to me like a guy who’s trying to make nice after betraying his former party. But Democrats aren’t likely to forget that he called them a bunch of Nazi appeasers just a few months ago.