Tag: Fox News

The Associated Press reports that former senator and ex-presidential candidate George McGovern is switching from backing Clinton to backing Obama. Here’s the rather weird AP story:

Former Sen. George McGovern, who backed Hillary Rodham Clinton, is urging her to drop out of the Democratic presidential race.

McGovern said Wednesday he has decided to endorse Barack Obama.

After watching the returns from the North Carolina and Indiana primaries Tuesday night, McGovern says it’s virtually impossible for Clinton to win the nomination.

McGovern says he is calling former President Clinton to tell him of the decision and adds that he remains close friends with the Clintons.

Don’t make me come down there.

A brave voter tossed a question sure to piss off John McCain at the candidate, then crouched back in a genital-covering squat and waited for the response. *

The voter read McCain a quote from Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who said in January that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.”

“He is erratic,” Cochran told the Boston Globe. “He is hotheaded. He loses his temper.”

“I am familiar with the quote,” McCain cracked, as the questioner recounted Cochran’s comments.

The questioner, rumored to have lost a bet with friends resulting in his being forced to approach McCain, but in the most gentle terms possible, * said the Republican’s temper was “something of a concern.”

McCain admitted he gets mad. And you know what really pisses him off? His fellow Republicans.

“Well, I will confess to you my friend, that I get angry,” he explained. “I got angry when I saw a guy named Abramoff that ripped off Native Americans for millions and millions and millions of dollars that ended up putting him in federal prison.”

“I get angry when I see 233 million of your tax dollars going to an island, to a bridge on an island with 50 people on it,” he said [in reference to pork spending from Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)]. “I get angry when I see corruption to the point when we have former members of Congress residing in federal prison [most likely indicating former Rep. “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.)].

Is it me, or was this an odd response? Couldn’t he have taken the opportunity to smear some Democrats there? You know, “I am really ticked off about gay marriage.” Or, “I lose it when the recorded voice asks me if I want to speak in Spanish.” Or, “I want to bite my car on the hood when someone says we need to leave Iraq before 2108.”

But no, all McCain’s ire was directed at those in his own party. And judging from the quote from Republican Thad Cochran that prompted the question, they aren’t too thrilled with him either.

* Well, that’s what I would have done anyway.

Massive retaliation: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s chief spokesperson on foreign policy, confirmed today that if Obama is elected president, he would treat a nuclear attack by Iran on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States. Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” broadcast, Rice made it clear that Obama would continue the United States’ longstanding pledge to protect the state of Israel from aggressors.
For 50 years it has been the policy of the U.S. to respond to a nuclear attack on Israel with “massive retaliation,” also known as “obliteration.”
On Jan. 12, 1954, John Foster Dulles, secretary of state for Pres. Dwight Eisenhower, warned the Soviet Union that the United States would respond to a nuclear attack on Israel with what has come to be known as “massive retaliation”:

Dulles stated that the U.S. would respond to military provocation “at places and with means of our own choosing.” This was interpreted to mean that the U.S. could respond to any foreign challenge with nuclear weapons. Dulles also said that “Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.” This quote forms the basis for the term massive retaliation, which would back up any conventional defense against conventional attacks with a possible massive retaliatory attack involving nuclear weapons.

A similar formulation of U.S. policy regarding nuclear attacks on its allies is “mutually assured destruction.”

It was this policy that Hillary Clinton was referring to when she said recently that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, her administration would “obliterate” Iran.

Despite the fact the massive-retaliation policy regarding Israel has been operative under presidents ranging from Kennedy to Nixon to Carter, Obama characterized Clinton’s threat against Iran as George Bush-style “cowboy diplomacy.”

Apparently Obama’s response caused agita among national security experts and supporters of Israel, so Rice was sent out today to confirm that if Iran vaporized Israel, Pres. Obama would, indeed, respond with massive retaliation.

There’s no question that Hillary Clinton’s win at any cost strategy is drawing some blood from Barack Obama. But could there be an up side to that? Maybe.

GOP operatives are intently watching the Democratic primary fight to see how to push Obama’s buttons. They also hope Obama’s missteps and losses have alienated key general election constituencies – or at least planted negative impressions with them that will last into the fall…

Already, Republicans are testing a theory that Obama could be a liability for Democrats down-ballot, running ads in special congressional races that linked the Democratic candidate to Obama in hopes of helping the Republican candidate.

It didn’t work in Louisiana. The Democrat, Don Cazayoux, won Saturday anyway. Underscoring the GOP’s challenge this year, Democrats won the seat that Republicans have held since 1974.

If being associated with Obama didn’t sink a candidate’s ship, and even helps, then how much trouble was Obama really in? And as the article also points out, it would be unrealistic to expect someone’s first run for president to be flawless. Better to get the Hillary-level crap out of the way now than later.

“It hasn’t been a great couple weeks, but some of these problems were going to emerge anyway, and it’s better that it happened now than in the fall,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked for Kerry’s campaign and is unaligned in the primary. He said Obama has gone through a “learning period” and that will benefit him in fall if he is the nominee.

Added Erik Smith, a Democrat and former aide to Dick Gephardt: “There’s something to be said for getting this stuff behind him, and not having any October surprises.”

I guess we have something to thank Hillary for after all.

Gramps is losing it. John “Maverick” McCain accidentally told the truth and now he’s trying to spin it back into something that doesn’t make Bush look so bad. Good luck with that.

At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver.

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.

“Again”? As in, “We already went to war over oil?” I thought so! But Bush said it was because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I’m confused.

The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said. “But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said…

“The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Oil, weapons of mass destruction, same thing.

The rabidly pro-Obama Huffington Post is calling a video released today smearing informal Clinton adviser Mickey Kantor a fake:
“A review of the original copy of the 1993 film The War Room, from which the excerpt was taken is virtually inaudible. The sound suggests, if anything, that instead of saying ‘How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?’ Kantor says, ‘How would you like to be in the White House right now?'”
— Huffington Post

A former aide to President Bill Clinton, and current informal adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, expressed outrage and shock on Friday after a videotape from 1992 surfaced allegedly showing him describing Indianans as “white n—rs.”

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

“I’ve never used that word in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever,” an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent’s work fighting for civil rights. “I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can’t tell what it is I’m saying in that second sentence, you can’t decipher that.”

Indeed, a review of the original copy of the 1993 film The War Room, from which the excerpt was taken (around the 4:40 mark) is virtually inaudible. The sound suggests, if anything, that instead of saying “How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?” Kantor says, “How would you like to be in the White House right now?”

The director of the film, moreover, says that Kantor never uttered those words. “He does not say that. He does not say that,” D.A. Pennebaker told Ben Smith.

The cropped video, which spread through the Internet like wildfire on Friday morning, shows Kantor with fellow former Bill Clinton staffers James Carville and George Stephanopoulos discussing results from the general election. In the footage, Kantor approaches the two aides and says, “Look at Indiana — wait, wait, look at Indiana. 42-40. It doesn’t matter if we win, those people are shit.” That much seems true, though Pennebaker says Kantor was referring to the George H.W. Bush White House.

Interestingly, the video is no longer available on YouTube.

Update: Ben Smith at the conservative Politico.com has spoken with the director of “The War Room,” who confirms that Kantor never said the words in the doctored video:

[…]