Under the fold, as we do here every day....
John McCain believes the Vietnam War was winnable. Now he argues that an Obama administration would accept defeat in Iraq, with grave costs to American honor and national security. Is McCain's quest for victory a reflection of an antiquated pre-Vietnam mind-set? Or of a commitment to principles we abandon at our peril? Is there any war McCain thinks can't be won?
Numbers are Fun: McCain/Palin Bankrupts America edition:
To understand what that means in the context of a national campaign, all it takes is a little arithmetic.
For example: One way to look at government debts as something other than just the raw number of the total is to do the simple calculation of how much that debt works out to be for each resident of the jurisdiction paying for a spending spree.
We know how many people live in Wasilla -- just under 6,000 at the time Palin stepped down and left her luckless fellow citizens with the bill. We can thus count her debt not as a total that is hard to place in context, but in units we can compare across the country: debt per person in the jurisdiction -- or roughly $3,600 per Wasilla resident in Palin debt.
Now take that number onto the national stage. By this measure, if Palin/McCain were to achieve a budgetary debacle at the federal level only as bad as that then-Mayor Palin managed for her home town, the total new debt our country would owe (much of it to the Bank of China, most likely) would come to 308 million people times $3,600.
That adds up to $1,108,800,000,000 or more than one trillion dollars.
--------------------------------
All of which to say is that while the media is beginning to focus (at last) on the question of whether you can trust John McCain, his running mate and his campaign say, they might want to pay some attention to another line of inquiry.
Trust them? Hell-can we afford them?
Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch, #79:
You know, it's not doing women any favors by pretending that being vetted by an opponent is akin to being stalked by a pack of wolves. That's what any candidate should expect, regardless of their sex--and asserting that a woman should be excepted from the typical campaign process is the real sexism here, not doing oppo research on her.
Of course, people who don't really pay attention to politics, who will think it's somehow unusual for a candidate to send a team of researchers to check out an opponent's background, who don't realize the GOP's been digging through Obama's history with a fine-toothed comb for nearly two years, will see this ad and shake their heads and tsk tsk at what a horrible person Obama is for mucking around in that poor woman's past.
And because a GOP advert just isn't complete with a Machiavellian appeal to the lizard brain, let's recall the infamous "Wolves" ad that was run by the Bush campaign in the closing weeks of the 2004 campaign, impugning Kerry's defense record, in which Islamic terrorists were conflated with wolves stalking America as their prey. This ad is a clear callback to that ad--terrorists are wolves; Obama is a wolf; Obama is a terrorist.
It's really quite breathtaking it its audacity.
McCain finds it tough without Palin:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain cut short his first public appearance without running-mate Sarah Palin after chanting supporters of Democratic rival Barack Obama interrupted his speech.
EVERY FOUR YEARS, THIS IS WHAT WE DO:
In a country with a responsible news media, the presidential frontrunner beginning a speech by excoriating American journalism as an institution would prompt deep reflection on the problems in news coverage by every newspaper in the country. Every op-ed columnist and editorial page would endorse more substantive coverage, and newsrooms would switch gears and start reporting Obama and McCain's records and policy proposals on everything from nuclear terrorism to urban policy. This kind of crap would be relegated to paragraph-length articles, if retained at all. When Sarah Palin claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, the AP headline would be "Palin Repeats Lie about Infamous Bridge".
Obviously, this isn't a country with a responsible news media, and so none of that's going to happen.
Just to remind you about my reminder, there's still more than one way to win an election.
Leverage the Housing Crisis to Win:
In another desperate measure to make sure they win, Michigan Republicans have come up with a new strategy: Marginalize people who are losing their homes.
The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP's effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.
""We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren't voting from those addresses," party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed."
I hope John McCain doesn't throw his slippers at Sarah Palin's head or get as acerbic as Henry Higgins did with Eliza Doolittle when she did not learn quickly enough. McCain's Pygmalion has to be careful, because his Galatea might be armed with more than a sharp tongue.
For the first time in American history, we have a "My Fair Lady" moment, as teams of experts bustle around the most famous woman in politics, intensely coaching her for her big moment at the ball -- her first unscripted interview here this week with ABC News's Charlie Gibson.
Eliza, by George, got it and brought off the coup of passing herself off as a Hungarian princess rather than a Covent Garden flower seller. Sarah's challenge is far tougher, and that's why she's pulling the political equivalent of an all-nighter. She doesn't have to pass herself off as a different class or change her voice or be more highfalutin. The McCain campaign is reveling in its anti-intellectual tenor.
What you need to know about the Freddie/Fannie bailout:
It's underestimating Sarah Palin to say that her comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a "gaffe" or even ignorance. It's becoming obvious to me that she was accelerated up the Republican pecking order at light speed for the very simple reason that she can lie her ass off without flinching.
Sarah Palin (and John McCain) are sexist:
It's interesting watching right wingers attempt to imitate liberals decrying sexism. Forever and ever conservatives have denied that pointing out sexism is a legitimate thing to do, because in Wingnutland, sexism doesn't exist and anyone who says that it does is a whiny, hysterical bitch who can't cut it with the big boys, and so hides behind sexism. In other words, they argue that the sexism card is generally pulled in bad faith.
So, of course when they pull it, it's in extremely obvious bad faith.
---------------------
If it were me, I'd wake up in the middle of the night, wracked with guilt. But I suspect they sleep like babies. Maybe it has a lot to do with the way right wing politics are built on fantasies---a combination of paranoid fantasies about liberals and weird fantasies about the idealized 1950s. Libertarian fantasies and imperialist fantasies. Once you live your life entirely through fantasies, mere lies probably don't seem like a big deal.
You are an idiot. I will stoke your irrational fears. You will vote for me. :
Here's the thing though, while the McCain campaign cherry picks a word or two from those sources to impugn Obama, those very same articles were much more critical of McCain on education. McCain is hoping you are too dumb, too busy or too lazy to notice.
What's behind Palin's appeal to women:
Said Schroeder: "When they find out that McCain-Palin are for abstinence education, creationism, want the private sector to 'fix' the health care crisis and privatize social security, that McCain has been against every one of the meager gains women have made in the past and that McCain has a terrible record on veterans' issues, leaving families to be their main support, I think those women will come back very rapidly."
Roger Ebert: The American Idol candidate:
I think I might be able to explain some of Sara Palin's appeal. She's the "American Idol" candidate. Consider. What defines an "American Idol" finalist? They're good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented, why, they're darned near the real thing. There's a reason "American Idol" gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, Hey, that could almost be me up there on that show!
My feeling is, I don't want to be up there. I want a vice president who is better than me, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn't repeat bald-faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Someone who doesn't appoint Alaskan politicians to "study" global warming, because, hello! It has been studied. The returns are convincing enough that John McCain and Barack Obama are darned near in agreement.
EXPECT MORE JOINT MCCAIN-PALIN RALLIES:
The McCain campaign is "very seriously considering" having McCain and Palin campaign together more often than not in the next two months, a senior campaign aide said, adding it could be the most a presidential and vice presidential candidate campaign in tandem in recent history.
The aide said the two have developed a strong chemistry together and will likely utilize it through joint rallies. He likened it to the chemistry Bill Clinton and Al Gore had in 1992, suggesting it was instinctive.
Many pundits have labeled John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket as an off-message roll of the dice, based on a hasty vetting. In fact, it was probably the most calculated political move he's made.
McCain has a big problem: How does a die-hard conservative who's championed every failed policy of the last eight years (tax cuts for the rich, the war in Iraq, the power of Big Oil) win the presidency against an inspiring proponent of change? He can't win by relying solely on the conservative base, and yet he can't win without them. He has to keep his mantle as a maverick while assuring the Big Boys he has no intention of bucking them.
His only chance of victory is to appeal to women disappointed about Hillary Clinton's loss, to white working class voters and to independents, without alienating conservative extremists.
One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as.
But over the last ... maybe six weeks, in various conversations with these folks, the change is palpable. Whether it will make any difference in the tone of coverage in the dominant media I do not know. But it is sinking in.
Groping toward the truth but still utterly delusional. MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been doing a pretty decent job being candid and straight-up about the sleazy campaign the McCain camp is running. But he still thinks 'the McCain camp' is doing this behind McCain's back since he's too honorable and straight-talking to stand for this kind of sleaze.
Social Awkwardness, Long Odds & Sarah Palin: A Chat With Curtis Sittenfeld:
Most people who are famous -- and I don't mean the kind of famous where a few people recognize you at the supermarket, I mean people who are known worldwide -- are famous because they have sought the spotlight like particularly aggressive moths. But what about those mostly innocent bystanders who become famous not by choice, but merely by their proximity to those heat-seekers? The Lohans notwithstanding, those adjacent to the famous have an incredibly ambivalent attitude towards their public lives. Though most of the press about Curtis Sittenfeld's acclaimed third novel, American Wife, focuses on the fact that the heroine, Alice Blackwell, is based on the biography and persona of Laura Bush, ultimately it's about the nature of fate, and what happens to those loved ones swept up in the tide of someone else's ambition. In the third installment of our interview series, we talk with Curtis about First Ladies, Sarah Barracuda, and Laura Bush's stealth independence.
Hard Fall: What Happened to NBC?:
But Mr. Griffin's decision, coming as it did on the heels of criticism from his sister-brothers over at the main news division of NBC and from the floor of the Republican National Convention, has taken on more importance than some internecine media squabble. MSNBC has become the poster child of the chastened media, now (finally!) ready to treat the McCain campaign fairly, and to pay its obeisances to the "straight" journalists of NBC (Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw), whose bosses themselves won't sacrifice prime time to put them on the air wall-to-wall during events as uninspiring as the conventions.
I await John McCain's denunciation of scouting. Somehow, I think I'll be waiting for a long, long time.
Watching the testosterone crash in anxious men who lose a contest. [anxious masculinity, as I have blogged many times before, is one of the key fundamentals of ideological/political conservatism]:
Although theory suggests a link between social anxiety and social dominance, direct empirical evidence for this link is limited. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals, particularly men, would respond to a social-dominance threat by exhibiting decrements in their testosterone levels, an endocrinological change that typically reflects pronounced social submission in humans and other animals. Participants were randomly assigned to either win or lose a rigged face-to-face competition with a confederate. Although no zero-order relationship between social anxiety and level of testosterone was observed, testosterone levels showed a pronounced drop among socially anxious men who lost the competition. No significant changes were observed in nonanxious men or in women. This research provides novel insight into the nature and consequences of social anxiety, and also illustrates the utility of integrating social psychological theory with endocrinological approaches to psychological science.
This is what really gets my goat about the media and their relationship to the blogs on the internet: we make them look foolish. Time was, if an anchor on the news reported something that wasn't correct or was a straight-up lie, what were your options in correcting it? A letter to the network? Yeah, maybe they'd get around to that - right before the commercial break in the middle of next week's telecast. Newspapers were no better. Just try finding the corrections in a newspaper.
And in the meantime, whatever got reported spreads like a meme.
Then came the net. Suddenly, everything the media reports - every lie and distortion, every hatchet job in the service of a political figure - gets put on full display, whether on a blog, a dedicated news coverage site like Media Matters or, worst of all, YouTube.
And you'd better believe the media hates this setup. They hate it because it cedes the one ability the media has always had - control of the narrative. Now, a million little voices shape the narrative and call bovine scatology on their stories if they get a whiff that something about it stinks. That's why you always hear the likes of Fox News pinheads like O'Reilly and Hannity rail about the dirty effin' hippies on the intrawebz, and that attitude has bled down into the legitimate news media. That's why you see a dozen different mistakes in your local newspaper and on your TV news, but the media rants and raves about how bloggers need to have standards and attend ethics panels.
The GOP is intentionally fuzzying the distinctions between Obama, DNC, MSM, blogs, etc, fusing them all into an Angry Left. They keep lying BECAUSE that is their strategy - to provoke the media and to show that the "liberal media" is part of the Angry Left. This should energize the base. I don't think they have much base left to win, but they are trying hard. The zero-information voters who are not uber-conservative WILL over-hear the media that says McCain is lying, but they are not the target. These guys will lie as long as that riles up the base.
Note To Barack Obama: Use the Sex Ad to Destroy These Fuckers::
We know the game here, the racial politics, the fear of sex that's rampant on the right. John McCain has finally released his rage and hatred, and it is a sight to behold. Watching McCain unleashed is like watching a starving tiger in a pen of gazelle. It ain't gonna be pretty. The Rude Pundit imagines McCain seeing the faces of his captors in everyone he looks at, and he's got a bayonet.
War of Words; The Critical Middle:
HALPERIN: They knew exactly what he was saying. It's an expression. And this is a victory for the McCain campaign in the sense that every day they can make this a pig fight in the mud. It's good for them because it's reducing Barack Obama's message even more.
But I think this is a low point in the day and one of the low days of our collective coverage of this campaign. To spend even a minute on this expression, I think, is amazing and outrageous.
COOPER: Let's move on.
Steve Benen asks the question that's occurred to every progressive over the years -- what if liberal politicians lied and smeared as shamelessly as conservative ones do? Or, to put it another way, why don't liberal politicians lie and smear that shamelessly. There are a lot of answers to that question, but one thing worth observing is that the process of turning politics into a senseless screaming match about bullshit is not an ideologically neutral development.
The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. had a column four years ago this month that's always stuck with me. He noted, in the midst of the last presidential campaign, that Republicans are not above lying, but Democrats just can't bring themselves to do the same thing. "A very intelligent political reporter I know said the other night that Republicans simply run better campaigns than Democrats," Dionne wrote at the time. "If I were given a free pass to stretch the truth to the breaking point, I could run a pretty good campaign, too."
I thought about the column when I was chatting this morning with a friend who works in Democratic campaign politics. We commiserated over the fact that Obama has become efficient in responding to the constant barrage of deceptive attacks from the McCain campaign, but doesn't launch deceptive attacks of his own against the McCain campaign.
My friend asked me what Atwater/Rove/Schmidt would do if they worked for Obama. What kind of attacks would they make against McCain? It got me thinking.
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil.
New McCain Ad: Obama Favors Sex-Ed For Kindergartners:
"It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls - a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. "Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why."
To continue the dialogue with Marc Ambinder over the press's role in the campaign environment one should concede what I take to be his two main points namely that (a) there are reasons the public is susceptible to deception that have nothing to do with campaign journalism, and (b) it would be difficult to do campaign journalism in a way that wouldn't be open to some form of arguably legitimate criticism from some quarters.
That said, to dial down the tone of accusations a bit is only to leave us with the more fundamental issue -- what is all this campaign journalism for? A few news organizations still maintain large bureaus in Baghdad. They do this, it seems, to inform people about events in Iraq. But if lying works as a campaign strategy, rather than backfiring and getting the liar branded as an untrustworthy character, then what's the campaign journalism for? On some level, like everything else in the media, it's there to make a profit. But what's the intended audience? ESPN News' coverage doesn't have any higher purpose, but it's there for people who want to learn about the day's sports news and it gets the job done. But what's the campaign press doing? It seems to me that if the practitioners of campaign journalism can't figure out a way to make it so that lying is punished, rather than amplified and rewarded, by the press then they ought to pack up their bags and go do something else. Pretty much all the other branches of the press -- from the film critics to the foreign correspondents to the weathermen to the investigative reporters to the "news of the weird" guys -- seem to have a clear role in the ecology.
I think people in the news business ought to ask themselves some questions. If a campaign sends a surrogate to appear on my program and lie to my audience, is that more helpful to the campaign than it would have been to send nobody? If it's more helpful to send someone, then aren't I structuring my program in such a way as to encourage campaigns to send people to the studio and lie to my audience? Did I get into this business in order to be complicit in campaigns' efforts to lie to the American public? Meanwhile, viewers need to take some responsibility of their own. Anyone who has a Nielsen box and watches these kind of shows on cable is doing serious harm to the United States of America and if you can count any Nielsen families among your circle of friends you have a duty to try to make them see the light.
I think that one of the key mechanisms that helps explain the persistence of Nixonland over time is the way in which the media (political reporters and 'neutral' political commentators in the press and cable news in particular) handle political controversies. On the one hand, they perceive their role as entirely above the fray - they cover political controversies but aren't supposed to be embroiled in these controversies themselves. On the other hand (and this is a point that both netroots types and bloggers like Ezra Klein have hammered home again and again), they themselves play a crucial and unacknowledged political role in deciding what is salient news and what isn't - controversies don't usually become controversies until they are described as such in the big newspapers and cable tv talkshows.
This disjuncture - between the fictitiously neutral role of political journalists in covering controversies and the actual, intensely political role that they play in actively helping to generate them - creates both opportunities for outside actors and feedback loops between these actors and journalists. Outside actors - flacks of one sort or another - find or manufacture controversies that they try to feed to the media through conference calls or other means. 'Cultural' controversies are especially enticing for the reasons that Rick discusses. Reporters - who doubtless have their own private opinions on whether or not these controversies are substantive or manufactured - report them because they are 'controversies' and hence 'newsworthy.' Reporters who try too strenuously to figure out whether or not these controversies have any actual basis get punished by being attacked both by the flacks and their own colleagues for not being neutral and being too political. They get denied future interviews, off the record briefings and so on. Reporters who play the game get rewarded with future information and opportunities.
Obama: The Price of Being Black:
Barack Obama can only become president by mustering a turnout that will surpass the votes he is not going to get. This may well mean that more black Americans than ever will have to go to the polls, if only because the electorate is predominantly white, and it isn't clear how their votes will go. Obstacles to getting blacks to vote have always been formidable, but this year there will be barriers--some new, some long-standing--that previous campaigns have not had to face.
How the McCain/Palin Ticket is Going to Win in November:
The same way, more or less, that Bush beat Gore:
- Log in to post comments