Worst Candidate Ever?

John McCain has often joked that he is so popular with the corporate-owned media that he considers Beltway reporters to be his “base.” This decades-long courtship is paying off big time this year, as reporters persistently look the other way as McCain suffers one self-inflicted wound after another.
Imagine the reaction in the corporate media — not to mention among the howler monkeys on rightwing radio — if Barack Obama had offered his wife up for a stripper show.
A prime example of this is McCain’s performance at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota last weekend. As you can see in the video above, especially starting at about 03:15, this was hands-down the most embarassing performance by a presidential candidate since Howard Dean’s purported “scream” at a rally in 2004.

What really happened to Dean, of course, was that his supporters in the room were cheering so loudly that he was yelling into a “hot” mike to be heard over the din. It was clear to most television viewers watching that night, however, that the “scream” would kill Dean’s campaign because cablenewsers would be unable to resist playing it rotation as often as possible for weeks to come. In fact, they still run it when the opportunity arises.

By contrast, other than on MSNBC shows hosted by Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams, the video of McCain’s humiliating performance at Sturgis has barely made a blip in cable news rotations.

McCain’s campaign made an equally egregious mistake at Sturgis, as shown in the video — a little earlier than McCain’s rant, at around 02:35 — when his operatives set him up to offer his wife Cindy as a contestant in the bikers’ annual “Miss Bufffalo Chip” beauty pageant. As we reported earlier this week, the “pageant” is more like a live show produced by Hustler magazine than, certainly, Miss America.

What is important to notice in the clip is that this was not an ad lib gone wrong — McCain was reading from prepared remarks as he pimped his wife out to strip for the bikers.

Imagine how the media would have reacted if any Democratic candidate had turned in a performance as awful as McCain’s in Sturgis. And worse, imagine the reaction in the corporate media — not to mention among the howler monkeys on rightwing radio — if Barack Obama had offered his wife up for a stripper show.

“There are things you can do individually to save energy,” Barack Obama said last week “… Making sure your tires are properly inflated — simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires. And getting regular tune-ups. You’d actually save just as much.”

This week the McCain campaign has been mocking Obama’s assertion that keeping tires inflated conserves gasoline by selling tire gauges, for a $25 donation, labeled “Obama Energy Plan.” They plan to hand them out in California this weekend when McCain and Obama both speak a church in Orange County. A McCain operative laid on the snark:

Rick Gorka, the McCain campaign spokesman, said he helped put together the prop as “just another avenue for us to highlight that Barack Obama’s energy policy is completely out of touch with what Americans need” … “He says inflate your tires and tune up your cars, and we don’t need to drill” for offshore oil.

But it ain’t Obama who is out of touch:

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Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. -Gal. 6:7

Considering the hatred for liberals spewed by the rightwing noise machiners like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael “Savage” Weiner and the rest, it is a miracle there aren’t more terrorist incidents like this:
Police found copies of “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly, in the killer’s home.

Jim Adkisson, the 58 year old man being held in a Knoxville, Tenn., jail on murder charges stemming from a shooting during a children’s musical at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday, is said to have had a array of right-wing political books in his home, along with brass knuckles, empty shotgun shell boxes, and a handgun discovered by police who searched his home.

Police reportedly found books by O’Reilly, Hannity and Weiner in Adkisson’s home:

Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”

Adkisson told Still that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”

Adkisson told officers he left the house unlocked for them because “he expected to be killed during the assault.”

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he stated his “hatred of the liberal movement,” Owen said. “Liberals in general, as well as gays.”

Adkisson opened fire on the congregation while the children’s play was underway, allegedly killing two people in their sixties and injuring seven other adults.

During the Vietnam war, Dick Cheney applied for and received no less than five deferments from the draft. Decades later he told a reporter that he had “other priorities” that outweighed going to Vietnam. So because Dick Cheney sat out the war, another young man went in his place, and that soldier may have been among the 58,000 who died or the 300,000 who were permanently disabled in Vietnam.
During his Senate confirmation hearings as defense secretary in 1989, Cheney falsely claimed under oath, “I would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called.”
This is an interesting historical footnote today in light of news that the Disabled Veterans of American, better known as the DAV, has rescinded its invitation to Cheney to speak at their convention next month because his security requirements would have caused extreme physical strain on DAV members.

Cheney would have required the predominantly elderly veterans, many of whom lost limbs in battle, to assemble in the meeting hall at 6:30 a.m., after which the doors would be closed and no one could leave the room, even to go to the restroom, until after Cheney’s speech. Since Cheney was scheduled to begin his remarks at 8:30 a.m., and probably would have spoken for the better part of an hour, the vets would have been trapped in the room for nearly three hours.

“It was a huge imposition on our delegates,” added David Autry, [a] Disabled American Veterans official.

Autry said vets would’ve had to get up “at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on.”

Once inside, they “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” he said.

A Cheney aide denied that it was his security that caused the rift:

Spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said the two-hour rule is “a recommendation, not a requirement,” and “we always work to make sure the bathrooms are within the security perimeters.”

“The vice president would never let us do anything that didn’t help facilitate the needs of our veterans,” Mitchell added.

Another interesting note about Cheney’s draft dodging is that he apparently lied about it during the Senate hearings on his nomination as defense secretary in the Bush I administration. When asked about his deferments, Cheney falsely asserted under oath that he “would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called.” He was called — five times — and each time he came up with a way to escape service.

Prospects are so bad for Republicans in the Senate that Sen. Mitch McConnell, their embattled leader, has given them free reign to vote against the party and, certainly, their unpopular president, if it will help them save their seats in November.
All in all, it was as sad and sickening a display by the Republicans as we have seen since they lost control of Congress.
In stark contrast, at the impeachment hearing last Friday — which was officially titled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitation” — Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee put on a show of the sort of blind loyalty to George Bush that has put the GOP in these dire circumstances to begin with.

In stark contrast, Republicans in the House are apparently determined to follow Bush in lockstep over the cliff (to mix multiple metaphors), or at least that’s the impression they gave at the impeachment hearing last Friday — which was officially titled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitation” — when GOP Judiciary Committee members put on a show of the sort of blind loyalty to George Bush that put their party in its dire predicament in the first place.

One by one, these pols — all of them the sort of Republicans who give white guys a bad name — took turns lashing out at the proceedings and trying to spin Bush’s crimes as insignificant and morally relative to other president’s misdeeds. At worst, it was a disgusting display of complicit politicians trying to save their own skins by fending off any pursuit of justice for Bush. At best, they came off a bit comically, like vampires in movies clawing and snarling at sunlight just seconds before they meet their doom.

Speaking of horror, a prime example of growling and back-biting — not mention outright lying on the record — was the performance of Rep. Steve King of Iowa (who is not related to the novelist Stephen King).

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Say you’re Al Franken. Your idol was Sen. Paul Wellstone, a man who exemplified what was right with America and with America’s Democratic system of government. But Paul Wellstone died, and his alter-ego from hell took his seat: a man whose only ideas are those placed in his head by the Bush neocons, who voted with Bush on everything — especially everything Iraq-related — but the surge. And he probably only voted against that because he was looking at re-election and knew the subject of the ongoing occupation, which he facilitated at every turn, might come up.

Bad incumbents through the ages have used the same tactic when they have only a poor record of their own (except for bringing back hockey, but that’s another subject) on which to run: ATTACK! It doesn’t get much worse than this ad from Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman:

Coleman’s going the old, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to sound like it is,” one better by keeping his smears so vague it’s hard to even know what the ad is really saying, let alone how to refute it. But it gives people the impression that Al Franken has done some very bad things, especially if your preferred source of news is porky white guys in shirts from three different bowling leagues.

We all know Al Franken had a career before he ran for office. We also know, from listening to him on Air America, that he gets it, and that he could help Congress reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government.

The funny thing is, until 1996, Norm Coleman was a Democrat. When he was 20, Coleman celebrated his birthday at Woodstock. His college roommate, lawyer Norman Kent, recently took Coleman to task for hypocrisy on his past pot-smoking after Coleman toed the Republican line about the war on drugs.

My friend Norman,

Coleman during a Vietnam War protest

Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana…

Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows…yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s advice.

We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint.

You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good…

How about standing up and saying: “I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969.” That “I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal.” How about saying: “I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits.”

How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were?

Norm Kent

Those last words, about standing up for who you were, seem especially relevant. Coleman wants Franken to abandon his famous past, which aside from being in show business, consists of a 32-year marriage to his college sweetheart and fathering their two children, Thomasin, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate and, Joe, a 22-year-old Princeton grad.

If Franken wanted to go after Coleman with nods and winks and innuendo and whispers, it wouldn’t be hard. But then he wouldn’t be Al Franken. We know Franken will find an effective way to push forward, and we know it will take money.

Regardless of where you live, achieving the magic number of 60 Democrats in the Senate is vital. Help Al Franken return the seat once occupied by Paul Wellstone to its rightful owners: us. Please donate to Al Franken, the sooner, the better.