September 11th, 2008
Man, I wish he’d tell us how he really feels:
That interview confirmed what’s become even more clear in the past few days — McCain’s selection was a joke. She (like me) has absolutely no business being a vice-presidential nominee.
Let’s start with the interview, and then I’ll make some more general points about why this is all such a farce (to borrow from Andrew).
Hilzoy has already established that she’s not exactly up to speed on preemptive war (a pretty important point for a president). But to make a more general observation, it’s fairly clear that she’s either never engaged these issues or that she simply doesn’t read the news. Anyone with passing familiarity with the news could have winged answers better than she did.
But the point is not so much the answers, but the more general ignorance (not lack of intelligence) on display tonight. It reveals that she’s never really thought about any of this stuff — she’s never engaged it at the level that presidents should have engaged it. For instance, she apparently contradicted McCain’s position on Pakistan by leaving a unilateral strike on the table. McCain, remember, ridiculed Obama earlier for taking that same position. Second, she had clearly never heard the term “Bush Doctrine,” which means she follows the news on only a cursory level. I’m not saying every member of the public should know — but vice presidential candidates should. Third, she was way too specific on the Russia-Georgia stuff — good politicians and diplomats never say so specifically that we would go to war with . . . RUSSIA!
But even beyond the specifics, the entire interview was like watching a bad actor spit out memorized lines that she had learned only a few nights ago. You could almost hear her mental gears grinding, trying to retrieve the talking points and forcing them into her answers. Nothing came from her — or if it did, she certainly fooled me. Reagan and Clinton — governors both — would never have appeared that ignorant, largely because they weren’t. They were engaged with the issues of their day and wrestled with them intellectually. Today’s interview reflected an unprepared, uninformed person cast into the spotlight far before her time.
And that’s what’s so absurd about the whole thing. The Palin selection is, above all else, a reflection on John McCain’s willingness to let the country be run by an unvetted and woefully unprepared person. And if she’s that uninformed, it means that someone else will effectively be running the country if she’s president — just like Bush and Cheney.
…snip…
The Palin craze is also a poor reflection on the social conservative base, which has so uncritically embraced her. They embrace her not because they know anything about her, but because they think the world is out to get them, and that Palin is “one of them” who also faces liberal attacks. The truth, though, is that they’re just projecting their preferences onto a blank canvas. At the end of day, they’re apparently not all that interested in qualifications or ability to govern.
Hell, McCain might as well have campaigned over the past 2 weeks with a cardboard cutout with a wind-up string that gave the same (dishonest) speech every time. It’s just a joke — no interviews, no engagement with the issues, no qualifications whatsoever. Can you imagine what Drudge/Hannity/et al. would have said if Kaine had been picked and gave that blabbering interview? They’d talk about it for a month.
Quit pulling your punches, dude!
Categories: Foreign Policy, News & Current Events, Politics |
19 Comments
September 11th, 2008
PolitiFact.com has some nice summaries of the attacks made against Barack Obama and the attacks against John McCain, and assesses the relative truth or falsity of those attacks. It has seemed to me, following this campaign, that the attacks made by John McCain and his surrogates are more frequent and less true than those made by Barack Obama and his surrogates, and this gives me a good opportunity to test that theory.
For these purposes, I’m leaving out chain e-mails and PACs. I’m primarily concerned with what the candidates themselves, and their official surrogates and spokespeople (including convention speakers) have said. I’m also starting from the beginning of August, because there are a lot of such attacks, and many of them before the beginning of August actually come from primary opponents. I actually did not start the tally until after I wrote these first two paragraphs, and I vow to post the results no matter how they turn out.
So here’s the score:
Anti-Obama attack breakdown:
1 “True”
0 “Mostly True”
4 “Half True”
8 “Barely True”
4 “False”
2 “Pants On Fire”
Anti-McCain attack breakdown:
9 “True”
3 “Mostly True”
4 “Half True”
5 “Barely True”
2 “False”
1 “Pants On Fire”
Total scored attacks against Obama by McCain campaign and surrogates: 19 (5% “True”; 5% “Mostly True” or better”; 26% “Half True” or better; 74% “Barely True” or worse; 32% “False” or worse)
Total scored attacks against McCain by Obama campaign and surrogates: 24 (38% “True”; 50% “Mostly True” or better; 67% “Half True” or better; 33% “Barely True” or worse; 13% “False” or worse)
So, as it turns out, my impression was half-right: if these analyses are a representative sample, the Obama camp attacks somewhat more often than the McCain camp, but their attacks are much more accurate (or much less inaccurate, depending on your perspective).
Also, chew on those numbers for a minute: Only one anti-Obama attack out of nineteen could be scored better than “half-true.” That’s pretty staggering, even if unsurprising for those of us who have been following GOP politics for a while.
Cross-posted at TennesseeFree.
Categories: Politics |
7 Comments
September 11th, 2008
Interesting piece.
Obama and the Palin Effect
by Deepak Chopra
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision
Look at what she stands for:
a.. Small town values - a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
b.. Ignorance of world affairs - a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.
c.. Family values - a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be needed.
d.. Rigid stands on guns and abortion - a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
e.. Patriotism - the usual fallback in a failed war.
f.. “Reform” - an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.
Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from “us” pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness
Obama’s call for higher ideals in politics can’t be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow - we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.
[Edited by tgirsch to fix horribly annoying spacing. Also, link to original is here, before our self-appointed copyright Judge Dredd gets his panties in a twist. 
]
Categories: General, Politics |
4 Comments
September 11th, 2008
Apparently our very own KTK writes for the San Francisco Chronicle under the pen name “Mark Morford”:
Translation: “clean coal” is not only one of the most insidious, repugnant oxymorons — right up there with “friendly fire” and “conservative think tank” and “Alaskan teen virgin” — it’s also one of the deadliest.
…snip…
Two generic moms, one pouring her kids a big, fat glass of bright red HFCS-laden pseudo-juice, as the other frowns and says gosh golly Susan, you feed your kids that crap? That has high fructose corn syrup in it!
And the first irresponsible mom just smiles an ‘oh you stupid bitch’ kind of robotic smile and says hey, HFCS is really no worse than sugar, it’s natural because it’s made from corn, and it’s perfectly OK in moderation, so shut the hell up and drink your nauseating food-colored crap, Marjorie (please note: I might be paraphrasing slightly).
Isn’t that lovely? To be fair, they have a meager point. Despite its highly processed nature, HFCS might very well be exactly as bad for you as plain ol’ sugar (by the way, thanks to the wishy-washy FDA, “natural” is a completely bulls–t term that means nothing; calling HFCS “natural” is like calling Cindy McCain natural).
…snip…
On it goes. Every major oil company has a pseudo-green, false-front “Let’s take care of our planet” BS campaign underway, whitewashing their evils so insultingly it’s like Dick Cheney wearing a PETA T-shirt to a canned pheasant hunt. Even the king of consumer mediocrity, Microsoft, launched a “Vista: It’s not quite as awful as you’ve heard” campaign to help stifle the low-level groans of 20 million bug-addled users.
…snip…
But perhaps none of these examples can top the scabrous GOP, suddenly being repackaged and resold to exhausted, Bush-ravaged Americans as “the maverick party,” with John McCain desperately trying to distance himself from the worst and most abusive administration in a lifetime, all the torture and warmongering and pandering to the religious right, even as he so obviously plans to continue it all.
It’s a rather sickening marketing ploy, made even more contemptible by McCain’s choice of VP, not someone of sharp political acumen who will challenge his decisions and offer insight and inspire confidence, but Sarah Palin, former mayor of a piddling, eyeblink of a pee-stop town in rural Nowheresville, a shrill woman of zero political accomplishment clearly brought on board to lure both confused white women and the hard evangelical right, a minor state governor who thinks Creationism is dandy and who just got her first passport in 2007 and who would happily pass a law to force your daughter to have the baby if she’d been raped. Charming.
Truly, Palin is that most dangerous of self-aggrandizing right-wing politico, a potentially very powerful woman full of moxie and nerve and intensely intolerant, extremist views who actually hates women. Really, you can’t get much more Republican than that.
And lo, in the spirit of Wal-Mart and the Corn Refiners Association and the clean-coal cretins trying to make their rampant evils seem slightly less, well, evil, we humbly offer to McPalin this new marketing slogan: “The Republicans: An entirely new kind of contemptible you hadn’t even thought of yet.”
I’d recognize that writing style anywhere! If that’s not KTK, he should be suing for copyright infringement!
Categories: Bloggin, Humor |
8 Comments
September 11th, 2008
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been seven years since that terrible day.
The silver lining here is that we can rest easier knowing that Osama bin Laden has been captured, that the Taliban has lost their influence in Afghanistan, and that the newly-completed Freedom Tower on the WTC site stands proudly as a symbol of American resilience.
Oh, crap, never mind…
(Bitter? You bet I am!)
Categories: Terrorism |
2 Comments
