“We’ve seen this movie before,’ Obama said at a town hall in Rapid City, S.D. ‘A leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain is refusing to admit that he’s made a mistake.‘” One more from the past week: He already has trouble distinguishing Sunni from Shia. Now, it seems, GOP nominee John McCain is woefully unaware of our current troop levels overseas, and yet — like a certain prez we could mention — even refuses to admit he made a simple error. Uh, been there, done that.
Tag: John McCain
Full Circle. | The “VSC.”
“Tonight, Iowa, in the fullness of spring, with the help of those who stood up from Portland to Louisville, we have returned to Iowa with a majority of delegates elected by the American people, and you have put us within reach of the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.” After winning Oregon 59-41 (with 94% reporting) and, uh, doing less well in Kentucky (although I was heartened to see he took Louisville), Sen. Obama returns to Iowa with a majority of the pledged delegates, thus effectively sealing up the nomination.
It looks like Sen. Clinton has decided to hang around a few more weeks nonetheless (in part, it seems, to expose the “vast sexist conspiracy” which caused her not to contest caucus states or come up with a plan past Super Tuesday), but the focus for Team Obama is now clearly on John McCain and the GOP. “‘I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations,’ Obama’s remarks continued, ‘but the one thing they don’t represent is change.’“
Update: By way of The Late Adopter and sententiae et clamores, The Village Voice‘s Allison Benedikt puts the lie to Sen. Clinton’s grappling with sexism of late: “Currently pregnant with the next generation, let me just say this: There is no greater wish that a mother can have for her daughter than that she will exploit poor people, obliterate Iran, and win rigged class president elections, Putin-style. (Mom, I won 100 percent of the vote!)…This War on Women is just like the War on Christmas: imaginary.”
The Battle Plan.
“Clearly, and I’m being cautious, I think it’s going to be a close race. If Obama wins the 255 votes in the states where he’s favored, then to get to 270 he needs to choose from the following menu: 1) Win Ohio, which takes him to 275; 2) win in the West — Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, for 274; 3) win the three N’s (Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire) for 269, plus one other state; or 4) win two of the three N’s and either Colorado or Virginia.” With the general election begun in earnest, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin surveys the electoral vote terrain for Salon.
So Happy Together… | It’s On.
Meanwhile, deeming Obama’s wry, measured remarks a “hysterical diatribe,” Sen. McCain is now trying to claim that Dubya wasn’t even talking about Obama. He is, of course, lying.
And, hey, don’t look now, but — at long last — the general election has begun!
Wedding Day in California.
“‘In contrast to earlier times,’ the opinion reads, ‘our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation.’ More generally, ‘an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights,’ it says.” A tip of the hat to the Golden State: Joining Massachusetts, the California Supreme Court overturns a same-sex marriage ban, and Gov. Schwarzeneger announces he will honor the court’s decision. [Responses: Obama, McCain, Clinton.]
Naturally, I’d expect the neanderthal, culture-warrior wing of the GOP to try and make some hay out of this, and, as with 2006, I’d expect it to make very little difference come November (give or take some fundie votes in California.) True, anti-gay bigotry may have played in 2004, but, with each passing year, it’s looked that much more antiquated and ridiculous. And, frankly, the fractured, anemic GOP has vastly bigger issues to contend with at the moment than whether or not gay and lesbian Americans are choosing to get married. In any case, congrats to the many couples in Cali who today saw their life-commitments honored by their state as they should be.
Great Borah’s Ghost!
A busy day traffic-wise here at GitM: In a speech before the Knesset today, Dubya compared Obama to Sen. William Borah of Idaho (and not in complimentary fashion, although that case could be made too.) Here’s GWB: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.“
Now, as it turns out, Sen. Borah was the subject of my undergraduate thesis and features prominently in my dissertation. So, notwithstanding the self-serving idiocy and sad invoking of Godwin’s Law in Dubya’s words, I do want to take a moment to defend Sen. Borah, before — just as Philip Roth Cheneyed up Burton Wheeler — he disappears down the memory hole and is reinvented as simply a kneejerk reactionary. (I know Dubya brought him up to bash as a weak-kneed surrender-monkey, but I’ve also read several left-leaning comments out and about today that make note that Borah was a Republican, and thus belongs in Dubya’s camp. He really doesn’t.)
However wrong he was about Hitler in his final years, and obviously he was very, very wrong (although not perhaps as wrong as George Prescott Bush), Sen. Borah is neither the apostle of appeasement nor the GOP stooge that Dubya and folks pushing back would respectively make him out to be today. With La Follette and Johnson, Borah was one of the leading progressives in the Senate for decades, and one of its strongest civil liberties advocates in the years after World War I. In fact, if Dubya wants to ponder aloud the words of Borah, may I suggest the following?
The men who are destroying American institutions and who are a menace to American principles are not the ‘reds,’ nor the anarchistic…but rather the men who, professing like Augustus the Great, to preserve our Constitution, are subtly and with sinister and selfish purposes, undermining them.
” — Borah to Frank Morrison, 1921.But, civil liberties aside, what should we take from Sen. Borah’s unfortunate remarks about Hitler (which he made at the age of 75, less than a year before his death?) Well, to me, it might suggest that age can cloud the judgement of all of us, even long-standing Senate mavericks much-beloved by the media. It’s just a good thing that ancient, venerable lion of the Senate didn’t win the election of 1936, eh?
On the Couch, In the Attic.
Some amusing pilfered links: Via The Late Adopter, watch every opening Simpsons couch gag, in just under 5 minutes. And, by way of all over the place (see Ted, The Oak, Supercres, Web Goddess, PCJM, etc.) do you know what Velcro, slinkies, Alaska, and Scientology have in common…?
Don’t Cry for Me, Archie Bunker.
You know, just when I thought Sen. Clinton realized she had been decisively beaten, and thus that it was time to beg off and let the healing begin, we get garbage like this: With West Virginia and Kentucky on the docket (and no more sizable African-American populations left on the calendar), Clinton toys dangerously with the race card yet again. “‘I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,’ she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article ‘that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.’” Uh, riiiight. Because, as we all know, black Americans aren’t hard-working at all, but rather “shiftless” and “indolent.” “There’s a pattern emerging here.” That there is, Sen. Clinton, and your campaign seems to be on the wrong side of it.
I get it — She was probably trying to make the same old point about her support among the white working class, and for whatever reason it came out disastrously wrong and inadvertently (I hope) conflated white and hard-working. But, even allowing for an unfortunate gaffe, this riff further illustrates the Clinton campaign’s troubling penchant for denigrating African-American votes as less important than those of white folk. Simply put, they’re not — a vote is a vote is a vote, and Obama has more of them, eggheads, African-Americans, you name it. Nor do I agree with the dubious contention that white working-class voters who have backed Clinton in the primary will go for McCain in the general en masse. As I said here, when it comes to primaries and generals, we’re talking apples and oranges. Past performance is no indicator of future success, or failure.
Our Five-Year Mission…
Do you remember the Iraq War of 2003? Remember those heady days of euphoria when it ended two months later, with only 139 American lives lost? Journey back with me — TIME-LIFE style, if you will — to the scene of our triumph: “Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a ‘hero’ and boomed, ‘He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.’ PBS’ Gwen Ifill said Bush was ‘part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.’ On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, ‘The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a — on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.’“
Well, today marks the five-year anniversary of our glorious victory, the day that “splendid little war” came to a close. Among those honoring the day, and the remarkable achievement of our Commander-in-Chief:
The Petrol Pander.
“I don’t think it’s brilliant economics; unfortunately, it may be good politics. The smart people say ‘It’s stupid,’ and the people who aren’t as schooled say ‘At least it will do something for me,’…I don’t know that anyone connects the dots: that there have been a series of politically expedient decisions…that have added up to an economic picture that is not at all rosy and in fact fairly disastrous.” In an A-1 story this morning, the WP joins the recent general calumny against the Clinton-McCain gas tax cut (which Clinton is now campaigning heavily on in IN and NC — Obama is now pushing back on TV.) “‘You are just going to push up the price of gas by almost the size of the tax cut,’ said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.” Indeed, it’s apparently such a dumb idea that even diehard Clinton cheerleader Paul Krugman is forced to concede thus. Of course, the reality of the situation hasn’t stopped Bill Clinton from entering full-Pander Bear mode on the issue.
Update: Clinton doubles down, and introduces legislation promoting McCain’s lousy idea in the Senate. Responded Obama: “It’s a Shell game, literally.”