Month: August 2008

Funny: McCains Will Have Staff Take Inventory

Trish

I love Borowitz’s satiric take on the McCains’ inability to inventory what should be important things in their lives.

When a reporter asked Mrs. McCain at a campaign stop in Ohio about how many half-sisters she had, she looked momentarily startled by the question before handing it off to a staff member

Presumptive first lady nominee Cindy McCain responded to a reporter’s question today about how many half-sisters she had by saying that she was “unsure” about the exact number but would have “a staff member look into it.”

Ms. McCain’s claims of being an only child were clouded this week by revelations that she has at least two heretofore unmentioned half-sisters, leading to reporters’ queries as to whether more undisclosed half-siblings were waiting in the wings.

When a reporter from the Toledo Blade asked Mrs. McCain at a campaign stop in Ohio about how many half-sisters she had, she looked momentarily startled by the question before handing it off to a staff member.

…For his part, Sen. McCain said that the campaign would provide a “guesstimate” of how many half-sisters and homes the couple has by the end of next week: “Right now, we’re trying to put it all on a spreadsheet.”

A Noun, a Verb and POW: Is McCain Running for President of the Hanoi Hilton?

Jon Ponder

During the Republican primaries, Rudolph Giuliani turned himself into an object of ridicule by harping on his only issue — his supposed leadership in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Here’s how Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) described Rudy’s incessant references to the terror attacks during a Democratic debate:

And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani — probably the most under-qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency … there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11. There’s nothing else.

Similarly, back in February 2007, the Onion ran a fake news story headlined, “Guiliani to Run for President of 9/11.”

For about the past month, John McCain has been pulling a full Rudy by introducing his prisoner of war status seemingly at every turn. As Keith Olbermann put it on MSNBC’s “Countdown” Thursday night, McCain’s campaign has been using “POW as a reflexive non sequitor, a trend now risking self-parody — a noun, a verb and POW.” If he keeps it up, it will also be time to suggest McCain is running for president of the Hanoi Hilton.

Here are three recent and increasingly nonsensical references by the McCain campaign to his status as a former POW:

[…]

Cindy McCain Lied About Mother Teresa

Trish

A mailer used in South Carolina during the primaries trades on John’s anti-abortion stand, recently beefed up, and Cindy’s non-existent relationship with Mother Teresa. The image appears PhotoShopped, with Cindy walking and Mother Teresa standing. Note Cindy’s hair color back then. Also, the mailer claims Bridget was adopted in 1993, which contradicts all other McCain lore. Was that the year Cindy finally met Mother Teresa?

In a whopper rivaled only by Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia snipers and Mitt Romney’s dad marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., Cindy McCain was caught lying about Mother Teresa.

The legendary fable about how the McCains came to adopt their daughter Bridget from an orphanage in Bangladesh in 1991 held that Cindy was directed personally by Mother Teresa to take the little girl to America. Cindy was so moved by the nun that she marched home and handed the bundle to John McCain, saying, “Meet your daughter.”

The McCain sins are being treated like those of George Bush and the members of his corrupt administration, which is to say, pre-emptively ignored

The media ate the tale with a spoon and served it back to us.

A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

Ah, what a story! What a feat! What a woman!

What a bunch of hooey!

None other than the Christian Science Monitor has blown the lid off the Mother Teresa melodrama.

According to biographies of Mother Teresa, in 1991 she was in Mexico where she developed medical problems. From there, she went to a hospital in La Jolla, Calif.

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

Alexandra Marks, who wrote the Christian Science story, says that while most politicians and their peeps either gild the lily or have mental lapses, the important thing is evidence of patterns. As an example, she notes that Barack Obama claimed Kennedy funds financed the airlift that brought his father to study in America in 1959. In fact, the Kennedys didn’t contribute to that effort until 1960.

Obama’s mistake seemed to be an honest one, based on the lack of a pattern of distortion. Which brings us back to Cindy McCain.

Cindy McCain has repeatedly referred to herself as an “only child.” This week came news that she actually has two half sisters, although apparently she had very little contact with them.

But that’s not all.

McCain told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year that on one of her medical missions to Vietnam she was in “the very hospital – and in the very room – where her husband was brought after being shot down and then beaten by a mob during the war.”

A 1992 Washington Times story recounts a different version: “Mrs. McCain asked to see the operating room and her husband’s cell, but was turned down. She took the rejection philosophically. ‘It’s 27 years later. Let’s go on,’ Mrs. McCain said.”

Let’s all pause for a moment and conjure up an image in our minds of the news cycle that would result from Michelle Obama being caught lying about a relationship with Mother Teresa. Can you see the sputum flying from Bill O’Rilley’s livery lips? The gleeful braying from Rush Limbaugh? How FOX News would interrupt regular programming for back-to-back coverage of the unfolding crisis?

And yet, here we are again, with basically nothing being said about Cindy McCain’s flagrant fabrication of a non-existent yet supposedly life-changing encounter with Mother Teresa.

The McCain sins are being treated like those of George Bush and the members of his corrupt administration, which is to say, pre-emptively ignored. Journalists need to stop deciding in advance what we will and will not want to know about, and just report what’s out there, whether it helps or hurts those in power, or those who want to be. We need to take back the White House, but we need to take back the American press too.

McCaca Moment? Will McCain’s Gaffe on the Number of Houses He Owns Resonate With Voters?

Jon Ponder

Olbermann: McCain Campaign ‘Apparently Panicked’

As Keith Olbermann put it on MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, “Elections rarely turn now on deep meaning or intercontinental ballistic missile treaties or even or war and peace. They turn on symbolism, and John McCain just fell into a big, giant, steaming pile of symbolism.”

In a recent interview with Mike Allen of right-leaning Politico.com, John McCain was stumped by what should have been a very simple question:

ALLEN: How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?

MCCAIN: I think … I’ll have my staff get to you. I’m not … [garbled] … It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you …

ALLEN: Okay! Thank you!

The Obama campaign has been taking heat lately for not firing back at McCain, whose campaign has seemed to become slimier and nastier by the day. But Obama’s response to McCain’s pose of ignorance about the number of condos he and Cindy owns was, in a word, rapid:

“This puzzled me. I was confused as to what he meant. Then there was another interview, where somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ll have to check with my staff.’ True quote! ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’ So they asked his staff and he said, ‘at least four.’ ‘At least four.’

Now think about that. I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you’re like me, and you got one house, or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.

By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes. There’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-laureate economist, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of what ordinary people are going through to understand that we can’t afford eight more years or four more years or one more year of the failed economic policies that George Bush has put in place.”

[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc, or convince it hypocritically that he has done so.

— H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American author

With New Anti-Abortion Stance, McCain Shows the Only Purpose in His “Purpose-Driven Life” is Getting Elected

Trish

Jon noted that John McCain’s new “life begins at conception” stance is a move all the way to the extreme right of his previously maverick-esque position. This puts McCain squarely among the wingnuts who declare contraception to be abortion, because many types of birth control keep a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. No doubt his Supreme Court picks will uphold the right of pharmacists to overrule a woman’s doctor and refuse to dispense the pill.

Despite his eight-year support for abortion in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the life of the mother, now that McCain is the party’s standard bearer, the brave iconoclast says he will not rock the boat.

McCain is pandering (quite successfully, according to polls) to this one-issue crowd, and he’s doing it with zeal. Now he’s flip-flopped to the side of those who say the fertilized egg has more right to life than the living, breathing woman in which it is carried.

Despite his eight-year support for adding exceptions to the official Republican party platform that would allow for abortion in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the life of the mother, now that McCain is the party’s standard bearer, the brave iconoclast says he will not rock the boat.

Back in 2000, McCain clashed with then-Gov. George W. Bush over his unwillingness to change platform language that called for a human life amendment [to the United States Constitution] banning all abortions.

McCain implored Bush to join him in wanting to add exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother.

As recently as April, 2007, McCain stuck by that proclaimed belief, embracing the reputation it gave him as a new kind of Republican: a moderate. No more.

McCain’s decision to leave the platform untouched follows a warning from a prominent social conservative.

“If he were to change the party platform,” to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life, “I think that would be political suicide,” Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, told ABC News in May. “I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble.”

At the Saddleback Forum, McCain said exactly what the born-again wanted to hear about the unborn. McCain has shown quite a penchant for saying what others want him to, whether he believes it or not.

With all his references to being a POW in Vietnam and seeing how easily he abandons his principles, it’s hard not to conjure an image of McCain saying whatever the Vietcong wanted to hear, singing like a bird for his captors, just as the rumors claim.

McCain Declares Zygotes Are Entitled to Full Human Rights

Jon Ponder


It has largely been glossed over in the reporting on John McCain’s alleged cheating at the Saddleback megachurch forum on Saturday, but he scored big points that night with Christian nationalists when he awarded full human rights to pre-embryonic fertilized cell masses:

WARREN: Let’s deal with abortion. I, as a pastor, have to deal with this all the time, every different angle, every different pain, all of the decisions and all of that. Forty million abortions since Roe v. Wade. Some people, people who believe that life begins at conception, believe that’s a holocaust for many people. What point is a baby entitled to human rights?

MCCAIN: At the moment of conception. (APPLAUSE). I have a 25- year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate. And as president of the United States, I will be a pro-life president. And this presidency will have pro-life policies. That’s my commitment. That’s my commitment to you.

What struck me when I saw McCain’s answer the first time was that his rapid blinking (at 00:27 in the video above) strongly suggests he’s lying — that he knows the science on this issue rules out any sort of human consciousness until an embryo is very well developed.

After sperm and egg combine at conception, the fertilized cells go through several stages before the embryo is formed. Among the first of these is the zygote, which is comprised of two cells bonded together. Zygotes do not have nervous systems, much less brains, and therefore, logically, they have no consciousness.

Of course, science and logic are not factors in this debate, and, predictably, McCain’s pretense that cell masses are humans completely snookered the hardcore fantasists within the GOP base:

[…]

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones Has Died

Jon Ponder

Early reports that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones had died were incorrect, however her condition appears to be very serious.

Cleveland Plain Dealer at about 1:30 p.m. EDT:

Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress, had a brain hemorrhage and was in critical condition with limited brain function, a doctor said Wednesday.

Tubbs Jones, 58, suffered the hemorrhage while driving her car in Cleveland Heights on Tuesday, said Dr. Gus Kious, president of Huron Hospital in East Cleveland. The congresswoman had been driving erratically and her vehicle crossed lanes of traffic before coming to a stop, police said.

The hemorrhage was in an inaccessible part of the congresswoman’s brain, Kious said during a news conference. A team of doctors who evaluated her determined she has limited brain function.

The Associated Press is reporting that Rep. Tubbs Jones died today at 6:12 p.m., in Cleveland.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

— Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), French statesman, physician and journalist