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A Progressive Political Playground |
From the category archives:
Walking down the alley on my way back from the Obama rally this afternoon I passed what appeared to be a U.S. Postal Service truck covered with John McCain signs.
As I got closer I saw another sign in the door of the truck: Democrats for McCain.
This guy was driving it…
Anyone recognize him?
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No, no, no… I said: JOHN MCCAIN IS OLD. And he can’t hear very well, either.
Tim has a post up about John McCain mishearing a series of interview questions and basically threatening to attack Spain, one of our NATO allies.
This kind of supports a theory I have which is: McCain can’t hear worth a shit. It seems pretty likely, actually, given his age.
My first clue came when I saw McCain looking down and turning his head during Palin’s speech in Dayton. He wasn’t looking at Palin’s ass, he was trying to hear her.
Again, it makes total sense that a guy in his 70s would have hearing problems- and it certainly isn’t anything that would prevent the guy from being president. He just needs a better hearing aid.
It’s certainly nothing I would attack McCain on- but I do understand why the campaign would want to hide it. It’s just one more medical problem for a sick, old guy who could die in office and leave the country in the hands of an inexperienced religious nutjob.
Of course, team McCain probably has a response all ready in case this story leaks:
John McCain’s hearing was damaged during his time as a POW. Shame on Barack Obama for leaking this story to the liberal bloggers. Why do they all hate America so much?
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I thought I was in Bizarro World yesterday when I turned on the TV and saw John McCain calling for MORE REGULATION of Wall Street in response to the news that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was getting sold.
It sounds to me like McCain’s call for more regulation goes against one of the basic beliefs of the GOP: free markets solve all problems i.e. less regulation is better.
From this year’s Republican Party Platform:
Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all.
As soon as I heard him say that I immediately thought: Bob Barr better get his anti-regulation, libertarian ass in gear and hit McCain on this hard.
It took Bob a day to get it out, but it was worth the wait!
Politicians in Washington have spent decades creating the mess that we are currently in. More regulation or government intervention with taxpayer bailouts will only serve to compound the problem or create new ones.
…
Americans need to know that our government is incapable of solving our financial crisis as our government caused our financial crisis.Instead, McCain and Obama ask for more government regulation. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig!
Keep it up, Bob!
Oh- and I heard today that, despite a lawsuit by Pennsylvania Republicans, Bob Barr will be on the PA ballot.
I’m almost tempted to send him some money.
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You want to play the ‘take things out of context’ game, bitches?
We can play that one too…
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Labeling the same old Bush-McCain policies as change? Still the same old policies.
Putting lipstick on a pig? Still a pig.
I think the analogy works and the Obama campaign should not be bullied into shying away from it.
Anyone else agree?
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Remember Ken Blackwell’s NAMBLA-supports-my-opponent argument?
It looks like McCain is pulling a Blackwell in his new ad: accusing Barack Obama of passing legislation to teach sex ed to kindergartners…
Obviously the accusation is a lie. Obama’s bill included “‘age appropriate’ sex-education for children as a means of teaching them what was proper or inproper touching, as well as to protect them against pedophiles”. Hardly the same thing as handing out flavored condoms with their milk and cookies.
But hey- why let the truth get in the way of political attacks.
The response from the Obama campaign was pretty good though:
It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.
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Normal people average about 10 blinks per minute.
In this 1 minute interview I count John McCain blinking over 90 times!
According to Wikipedia: “excessive blinking may help to indicate the onset of Tourette syndrome, strokes or disorders of the nervous system” or it maybe just be anxiety.
Do you think John McCain really wants to “welcome” Bob Barr to the race? (I wonder if he’ll invite Mr. Barr to the debates/town halls.)
I’m quite sure McCain is at least a little anxious about Barr stealing 6 points from me in the latest national polls.
Though I’m not ready to rule out Tourette’s just yet.
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This weekend I saw this piece of an interview with Ken Blackwell on CNN. In it Ken claims “John McCain is willing to stand before African American voters and say ‘I care’.”
It’s nice to see that McCain found at least one black Republican to support him.
Unfortunately, Blackwell’s claim just isn’t true. Sure, McCain may stand there and SAY he cares- but if he really did care then he wouldn’t have hired former Jesse Helms cohorts to work on his campaign.
If he REALLY cared, John McCain would dump Republican strategist Charlie Black – who “played a particularly central role” in Helms’ infamous 1990 Senate campaign. And Alex Castellanos, the Republican media consultant who actually made the “White Hands” commercial that Helms ran against Harvey Gantt in 1990…
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Reading the Dispatch blog this morning I came across an interesting piece of information: the Ohio Supreme Court has a mandatory retirement age of 70.
It turns out a mandatory retirement age of 70 is actually pretty common. Even the Catholic Church has a mandatory retirement age of 70 for priests.
Since it seems perfectly reasonable to have a minimum age requirement for a person who is to serve as President of the United States, might not it also seem pretty reasonable to have a maximum age requirement as well?
I mean- if a 71-year-old can’t be trusted to dole out justice or minister to the flock, maybe we should seriously consider if a 71-year-old can be trusted to lead the most powerful military in the world.
Just saying.
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Is it just me or does Cindy McCain come across as kind of creepy and disconnected from reality?
Maybe it’s the botox and the too-perfect eyebrows.
Or maybe it’s her smug, I’m-better-than-you-because-I-adopted-a-brown-baby, I’m-so-rich-I-can-spend-all-my-time-volunteering attitude that seems to permeate every thing she says.
Elitist. I think that’s the word I’m looking for.
Anyway- in another attempt to help Americans “get to know her” she sat for an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America yesterday.
As I watched it all I could think was: the more I get to know her, the more I dislike her.
Most of questions were pure crap- just a chance for Cindy to explain how much she loves spending her oh-so-abundant free time helping poor deformed babies in far off lands.
No questions about the drugs she stole or the recipes she plagiarized.
Actually, all of the questions were softballs, but she still managed to miss a few.
The first was her attack on Michelle Obama’s patriotism: “I don’t know why she said what she said all *I* know is that I’ve always been proud of my country.”
Which is basically the equivelent of saying “I don’t know what’s in my competitor’s product – all I know if that *my* product doesn’t contains rat feces.”
It’s a sideways attack but an attack none-the-less. And I’m pretty sure it will backfire.
But, in my opinion, the bigger strike came when she was asked about her husband’s recent attempts to court women voters.
When presented with the fact that many women think John McCain’s anti-abortion stance is anti-woman she goes off on some rant about how “supporting our troops is very pro-woman” and how her husband isn’t anti-woman “he’s pro-America.”
“Because”, she says, “if America is strong it’s good for all of us.”
Do Republicans actually believe their own talking points?
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The LA Times ran an interesting piece this morning about John McCain’s lack of support among social conservatives in Ohio.
I found it especially interesting that the McCain people are now trying to avoid associations with wing-nuts like Phil Burress – even though they worked hard to get his endorsement during the primary.
After a recent meeting with McCain’s team Burress is quoted as saying “He doesn’t want to associate with us and we don’t want to associate with him.”
Honestly, this makes me like McCain more- mainly because I have nothing but disgust for Phil Burress. But I’m not sure his strategy his going to work.
McCain’s appeal to middle-of-the-road independents is a big change from Bush and Rove’s successful strategy of energizing the social conservative base of the Republican party.
It certainly does make McCain seem like less of a nut but I’m fairly confident it will keep a lot of conservatives home in November.
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So McCain “released” his medical records today.
In case you haven’t been following this, “released” means that he let a couple of reporters review 1,173 pages of medical records for 3 hours. No copies. No pictures. Just notes.
Fucked up, right?
I figured CNN would send crack medical reporter Sanjay Gupta, and I was right.
I just saw Sanjay listing off the medications McCain has been prescribed. The list includes: Simvastatin, Hydrochlorothiazide, Amiloride, Aspirin, Zyrtec, Ambien CR, etc.
Know what I didn’t see?
Viagra.
Supposedly over 70 percent of 70-year-old men have erectile disfunction.
So it’s pretty likely that McCain is in this category.
Kind of leaves me wondering if:
A. The medical records are incomplete
or
B. McCain isn’t getting any
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It turns out John McCain is actually kind of funny.
In this clip from last night’s Saturday Night Live he makes fun of his age and promises to cut wasteful spending on things like gaydar jamming devices…
“I don’t know if it’s anti-gay or pro-gay or if such a device would even work. I just know that jamming gaydar is not a federal responsibility. That’s something best left to state and local governments.”
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In a speech today at Wake-Forest University, McCain “vowed to model his Supreme Court appointees after George W. Bush’s” – i.e. radical, right-wing judges who want to overturn Roe v. Wade and take away reproductive rights from America’s women.
McCain also attacked a 2005 Supreme Court decision that “barred capital punishment for murderers who were under 18 at the time of the crime.”
In essence saying: I want to force women to have a bunch of unwanted babies and then, when those babies grow up to be murders, THEN we’ll kill them.
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The RNC is really worried about the DNC’s new anti-McCain ad. So much so that they are threatening legal action…
“As a legal matter,” RNC chairman Mike Duncan said today, this is a “maliciously false” campaign ad. “The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously” quotes Sen. McCain as saying that extending the war in Iraq for 100 years would be fine with him, and places it in a context of images of combat. “Clearly this ad is just another attempt by the DNC to mischaracterize Sen. McCain’s statements.”
Mainly I think they are afraid because the DNC is finally stealing their tactics!
Remember when John Kerry said: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.â€
Of course you do- because the GOP picked it up and played it over and over and over in their anti-Kerry ads. Claiming this proved he was a flip-flopper – especially on the war.
Of course no one remembers Kerry explaining what he really meant was “that he had supported an earlier Democratic measure that would have paid for the $87 billion in war funding by reducing Bush’s tax cuts.” Not that he changed his mind about the war.
Did the RNC take the Kerry comment out of context? Sure.
Do they plan on taking the Obama comments about PA voters out of context? You bet.
What about taking two or three seconds from the 100s of hours of Rev. Wright’s sermons and playing them over and over? Absolutely.
I’m not saying it’s right. But hey- you started it.
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