Year: 2008

McFlipflop: McCain Says He’s ‘Reluctant’ to Talk about Being a POW — Now He’s Released an Ad Focusing on His POW Status

Jon Ponder

Last week, on his campaign plane heading toward Colombia, John McCain all but blew his top when a reporter asked him how his status as a former POW qualified him to be president:

“Please,” he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question.

McCain allies Sen. Lindsey Graham stepped in to rescue him. Graham expressed admiration for McCain’s stance on the treatment of detainees in US custody.

“That to me is a classic example of how his military experience helped him shape public policy in a way no other senator could have done,’’ Graham said.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, also traveling on the trip, expressed admiration for McCain’s wartime service as well.

McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.

“I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences,” he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the “heroes” who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

“I am always reluctant to talk about these things,” McCain said.

Less than a week later, McCain releases a campaign ad, titled “Love,” that focuses on — you guessed it — his status as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Iraq’s Al Maliki Wants U.S. Forces to Leave Iraq

Jon Ponder

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki dropped a bombshell into the American presidential campaign yesterday when he stated publicly that it was time for U.S. troops to leave his country.

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to put a timetable on their withdrawal,” al Maliki said, while on an official visit to the United Arab Emirates.

The U.S. government is currently negotiating with the Iraqis on an agreement that would keep U.S. forces in the country on a long-term basis. But members of the parliament and the al Maliki government are said to be unhappy with the proposal because it would undermine Iraq’s sovereignty.

Al Maliki’s announcement can be seen as a direct challenge to the Iraq policy of George Bush and his presumptive heir, John McCain, both of whom insist that the U.S. cannot withdraw until Iraq is secure. McCain is on the record saying U.S. troops could remain in Iraq for a century or more, if conditions warrant.

Reacting to al Maliki’s announcement, Barack Obama said the Iraqi government is more in sync with his view of future U.S.-Iraq relations.

“I think that his statement is consistent with my view about how withdrawals should proceed,” Obama said to reporters on Monday. “I think it’s encouraging … that the prime minister himself now acknowledges that in cooperation with Iraq, it’s time for American forces to start sending out a timeframe for the withdrawal.

“I hope that this administration as well as John McCain is listening to what Prime Minister Al Maliki has to say.”

If the Iraqis take the next step and officially request a withdrawal, and Bush declines the request, it will shatter the myth that U.S. troops are not forces of occupation in Iraq.

It’s unclear whether the Iraqis will take that step, but no matter what happens, the Iraqi government’s position on withdrawal will make it harder as the fall campaign plays out for McCain and Bush to smear Obama and the Democrats as advocates of “surrendering” and “cutting and running” from the Iraq civil war.

McCain Campaign Staff in Turmoil and Fund Raising in the Toilet; Media Focuses on Obama

Trish

While the mob wrings its hands because Barack Obama is sticking to his moderate stance on most issues, it fails to notice that the John McCain campaign is imploding.

The man has been the presumptive nominee of his party for months; enjoyed weeks and weeks of uncritical media time while Clinton and Obama competed for the Democratic title; knows the Republican convention is Sept. 1; yet he still hasn’t put together a team that works. Worse, according to the New York Times, he surrounds himself with strong personalities he can’t summon the guts to fire, regardless of their performance or ability. Sounds like the Current Occupant.

NYT: McCain is uncomfortable firing people or banishing them entirely. His orbit remains filled with people who have been demoted without being told they are being demoted.

Senator John McCain’s campaigns have long been defined by internal squabbling and power plays, zigzagging lines of command and a penchant by the candidate for consulting with former advisers without alerting current ones, always a recipe for disquiet.

After a period of relative calm on that score, it is becoming clear that his campaign is once again a swirl of competing spheres of influence, clusters of friends, consultants and media advisers who represent a matrix of clashing ambitions and festering feuds…

Mr. McCain is uncomfortable firing people or banishing them entirely. His orbit remains filled with people who have been demoted without being told they are being demoted…

The prospect of a McCain White House, where no one is accountable because no one is responsible, might be one reason fund raising isn’t going so well. Things are especially bad in Florida, once a virtual Republican ATM.

Of the 55 Floridians the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign designated as top fundraisers, either “Pioneers” who brought in at least $100,000 or “Rangers” who raised at least $200,000, only 20 have written their own check to the McCain campaign, a St. Petersburg Times analysis found.

“I don’t recall getting a phone call from anybody from the campaign saying, ‘Where are you?’ ” said Robert Coker, senior vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp. in Clewiston, who raised more than $100,000 for Bush-Cheney in 2004…

That’s because the McCain folks probably aren’t sure whose job it is to make those calls. Even Jeb Bush is MIA. His check to McCain was for $1,000, far short of the $2,300 individual limit.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters debate whether it’s more important to produce a FISA reauthorization bill that would allow fines on telecommunications company for past cooperation with Bush administration mandates, or one that protects civil liberties going forward, as Obama supports. Priorities, I guess, are all in the eye of the beholder.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

— Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), American novelist, journalist, historian and academic

Bush Holds Court Off the Record With Rightwing Columinsts – Big News Is He Will Write a Book

Jon Ponder

The White House propaganda office invited a few of George Bush’s remaining supporters in the media — second- or third-tier rightwing columnists like Jonah Goldberg and Kathleen Parker — up to the Oval Office last week for an audience with his nibs.

During the mostly off the record meeting, Bush apparently doled out campaign-style spin that he purported to be the real stories behind issues in the news — deep background info that would set his critics back on their heels and boost his pathetic poll numbers, if it weren’t, you know, top secret. Classified. Hush-hush.

No, if the public wants to know what Bush has really been up to since Inauguration Day 2001, they’ll just have to wait to read his book — or at least that’s what he told the group, according to Jonah Goldberg, who reported it in his Los Angeles Times column:

“When I write my book,” the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration. I’m sure he’s right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, “if only a fraction” of what Bush has said on the public stage had been “remotely accurate,” he would not be widely considered America’s Worst President Ever.

Kathleen Parker, a columnist who is little-known outside rightwing circles, provided some flavor from the meeting:

Bush is dressed in a blue suit and sits slightly slouched in an armchair. The rest of us, journalists and staff, take seats among chairs and couches that form a loose circle, while a server offers tall glasses filled with ice water or Diet Coke.

As Bush talks, he scratches his head, noisily chomps his ice, and occasionally flutters his lips with a loud exhalation the way horses do. Is that a snort or a nicker? Whatever the technical term, it sounds like frustration mixed with ennui.

As in, how many times do we have to go through this? We’re at war. An ideological struggle. A fight for civilization. Et cetera, et cetera. Despite his insistence that he is “sprinting toward the finish,” Bush seems weary, if also characteristically optimistic.

Is he completely out of touch with reality, as Bush-bashers insist? Or does he know something the rest of us don’t?

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary over the past seven and a half years, it’s a bit shocking that anyone could speculate about whether George W. Bush is out of touch with reality.

On the other hand, Bush dead-enders can’t be blamed for holding onto the hope he’ll prove them right in the end. After all, they put their collective credibility on the line for him — not just cheerleading for him and his policies, but casting aspersions on the patriotism of anyone who dared point out the obvious fact that the emperor, their Dear Leader, had no clothes.

Now they appear to be pinning their hopes for redemption on a book George Bush will hire someone else to write, in which he’ll finally reveal all and set everything to right, retroactively turning all his blunders into brilliant strategies and lies into truths.

It’s more likely his new book will be a sequel to his ghost-written, falsehood-riddled campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep — suggested title, Rewriting History.

McFlipflop: Olbermann Counts Down 30 of McCain’s Greatest Flipflops

Jon Ponder

Earlier today, Trish wrote about the GOP’s concerted efforts to revise a 2004 campaign tactic and characterize Barack Obama as a flipflopper. On MSNBC’s “Countdown” last week, in anticipation of this new line of attack, Keith Olbermann went looking for instances in which John McCain had flipflopped and found 30 instances in which he’d done 180-degree reversals on a wide range of important issues.

Here’s the transcript:

[…]

Finally, Godlessness Comes to Fashion

Trish

Want to make a statement about your lack of faith? Have I got the t-shirts and hats and crap for you.

Hexed Clothing, which you will have to do a search on MySpace to find, offers a variety of apparel with slogans guaranteed to get you tossed out of Young Life camp, including:

  • God+Free Youth
  • F**k Your God
  • I Don’t Believe in God
  • No Gods, No Masters
  • Think, Don’t Pray

Although the 24-year-old founder, who lives in nearby Jacksonville, lists Taurus as his zodiac sign on his MySpace page, he makes a good point in a recent article in Folio Weekly.

“It’s definitely more to make atheist people happy than to make Christians unhappy, but people hate it. They hate it. There’s a Jesus fish on every car in this parking lot, and that’s completely fine, but then I’ll get a message saying, ‘You’re shoving your beliefs in people’s faces!'”

I know what I’m getting you all for Christmas.

2004 Redux: Republicans Try to Sell Flip-Flop Angle

Trish

Republicans, lacking any other strategy, are determined to recycle the one that might have won them the election in 2004.* Sen. Joe Lieberman led the charge on ABC’s This Week, calling Sen. Barack Obama a flip-flopper so many times I wanted to slap him on the back to make his needle jump forward.

Lieberman listed every position Obama has spoken about recently as ones where he flip-flopped in order to pander to voters, even his stand on the death penalty for child rapists. But as Andrew Sullivan and anyone who read The Audacity of Hope knows, Obama, the father of two young girls, has always favored the death penalty in such cases and said so clearly in that book.

“While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes–mass murder, the rape and murder of a child–so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”

Obama’s position on Iraq is not the same as McCain’s. It’s the same as Obama’s and it has been from the get-go.

But it was the attempt to hang the flip-flopper label on Obama about Iraq that really made Lieberman appear ridiculous. With former Army Ranger Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) calmly noting that Obama is departing not in the least from previous promises to end the American occupation of Iraq, wide shots showed Lieberman huffing and puffing and fairly rolling his eyes. When it was his turn to speak, he almost shouted his flip-flop rhubarb. Then George Stephanopoulos asked Lieberman a very good question. Why, if Obama’s position is now truly the same (and therefore correct) as McCain’s, as Lieberman insisted, should people vote for McCain? I thought Lieberman might lose it.

But Obama’s position is not the same as McCain’s. It’s the same as Obama’s and it has been from the get-go.

En route to a speech in St Louis…the Senator told reporters on his plane that the news cycle his comments caused was perplexing.

“I was a little puzzled by the frenzy that I set off by what I thought was a pretty innocuous statement, which is that I am absolutely committed to ending the war,” he said.

Obama reiterated his commitment to his withdraw plan again. “I will call my joint chiefs of staff and give them an assignment and that is to end the war,” he said. “I think what’s important is to understand the difference between strategy and tactics. I have always believed that our invasion of Iraq was a strategic blunder.”

He continued, “The tactics of how we ensure our troops are safe as we pull out, how we execute the withdrawal. Those are things that are all based on facts and conditions, and you know I’m not somebody who, unlike George Bush, is willing to ignore facts on the basis of my preconceived notions…”

Sen. Obama — who plans a trip to Iraq this month — took issue with reporters who “finely calibrated” his statements, and specific words, on his Iraq War plan. “I wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t said before,” Obama said.

“I don’t think in anyway it is inconsistent with prior statements and doesn’t change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I am going to end it as president,” he repeated again.

If only that would end the flip-flop charges. But the Republicans have nothing else — at least not yet — so they’re going to see if they can manipulate us again like they did last time. I’m tired of it already.

* If you believe they won in 2004 despite evidence to the contrary in Ohio.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Says Terrorism in Iraq Is Defeated – So Why Is Bush Sending in 30,000 Replacement Troops?

Jon Ponder

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has declared that his government has defeated terrorism in Iraq.
What this means is that surge is a success only in the sense that flooding the zone with security has tamped down violence and — here is the real point — neutralized Iraq as a domestic political issue in the presidential campaign.
“They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it. But, thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them,” al-Maliki declared, referring to recent government operations against Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.

Violence in Iraq is said to be at its lowest level in four years, a factor that is attributed to the surge of U.S. forces into the country.

So if the surge has been so successful, can we bring U.S. troops out of Iraq and leave internal national security to al-Maliki and the Iraqi military?

Of course not. We’re sending more troops to Iraq. Late in June, the Pentagon was said to be preparing to send in another 30,000 troops to Iraq in about six months to replace troops currently there in order to maintain 15 brigades in country.

What this means is that the surge is a success only in the sense that flooding the zone with security has tamped down violence and — here is the real point — neutralized Iraq as a domestic political issue in the presidential campaign.

Underlying the “success,” however, the morass of internecine religious conflicts, intrigue and power struggles is far from resolved and will undoubtedly raise its ugly head again when U.S. troops come out, if they ever do.

Jesse Helms Dead at 86

Jon Ponder

Former Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, has died on the Fourth of July — just like Jefferson and Adams, although the similarities end there:

Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at the age of 86, a senior congressional source said.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, announced on its website that he died at 1:18 a.m. Friday after having been ill in recent years.

Helms retired in 2002 at the end of his fifth term in the Senate.

When the Republicans were the majority party in the Senate, Helms was chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, where he consistently moved U.S. policy toward the right, especially regarding the United Nations and Cuba.

He also held seats on the Agriculture Committee, where he looked out for North Carolina’s extensive tobacco industry, and on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee…

Helms had an operation in 2002, at age 80, to replace a faulty prosthetic heart valve put in place in 1992, when he also had quadruple-bypass surgery.