Tag: William Ayers

The Old Man and the Plumber. | Enough.

“Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full.” Have you ever seen that old Far Side cartoon? That basically sums up my overpowering sentiment during last week’s third and (mercifully) final presidential debate at Hofstra University. [Transcript.] Now, I think I usually enjoy following politics more than the next guy, but something about that debate gave me the urge to run screaming into the hills (or at least flip over to the NCLS.)…Hence, one of the reasons for the tardiness of this post. I didn’t switch over to baseball — My fellow prisoners, I sat through the whole durned thing — but the event still left a sour taste in my mouth.

Why such an adverse reaction? I mean, McCain’s campaign has been making disturbingly stupid arguments aimed at the lowest common denominator for awhile now. What’s another 90 minutes of it? Well, for one, the endless paeans to that ostensibly most American of Americans, “Joe the Plumber” (nee “Sam the Not-a-Plumber“), got seriously old. Now, I know we’re all meant to enjoy wallowing in our appreciation for the “real” Americans — as opposed to us egg-headed surrender-monkey lefty types — but perhaps we can find a genuine, working-class Joe to discuss next time who isn’t yet another obvious McCain plant. (And bonus points if they’re not tied to the Keatings.) The McCain team has already force-fed us one one fake working class hero in Sarah Palin. Piling on another one at this point is really pushing it past my (admittedly low) threshold for right-leaning, poor-little-rich-folk. (That being said, I’ll concede that the McCain camp could probably really use a good plumber right now, backed up in swill as it is.)

And, hey, speaking of seriously old, McCain’s “Crotchety Old Man” routine was jacked up to eleven the whole night, making his usual indefensible contentions that much more irritating. What with all the hemming and hawing and scroonchy faces McCain was making throughout, he made the sighing-Gore of 2000 seem a model of forbearance. (Conversely, I thought Obama’s slightly bemused smile, which seemed to suggest that he was getting as sick of all the sideshows as we were, spoke highly of his presidential temperament. In this day and age, a sense of irony about the idiocies of media-driven politics is not a bad thing.) In short, the mythical maverick was a complete mess last Wednesday. Endlessly spewing contrivances and inanities about William Ayers, socialism, and/or the dangers of eloquence, McCain got himself so bizarrely worked up and angry during the debate that I thought he might set off his Life Alert.

If I sound a bit glib, well, I apologize. Just as I eventually grew tired of the inanities of the Clinton campaign, which lingered on for months after its fate was mathematically sealed, I’ve lost my patience with the sad remnants of the right-wing freak show attending John McCain at this point. This is not to say this election is in the bag, and we can now just sit back and play the Fill the Cabinet game — Far from it. (Unlike the primaries, there’re no points on the scoreboard just yet, and who really wants to wake up a few Wednesdays from now with a President-elect McCain?) But the GOP’s Hail Mary strategy has gotten so pungent and idiotic at this point that I’m hard-pressed to treat them with anything but contempt.

Serving on a Republican-financed education committee with an old Weatherman does not make one a terrorist, and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy is not the solution to every economic problem. What’s more, repeating these two obviously stupid contentions over and over again, more and more loudly, does not make them any less false. End of story. If that’s all the McCain team has got, which would seem to be the case, then it’s time for them to get swept away into the dustbin of history like they deserve. Hey, news flash to the right: We tried governance along the lines of your idiotic talking points, and look where it got us? It’s time for a change.

The Imaginaverick. | Dispatch War Rocket Keating.

Well, that didn’t take long. As Garrett noted in the comments below, an increasingly desperate Sarah Palin is already namedropping Wright and Ayers whereever she can. But the good news is Team Obama isn’t going to take this sort of garbage lying down, particularly from a candidate as compromised on issues of character as John Sidney McCain III. Witness Keating Economics — It’s about time somebody brought that up.

Here Come the Dirtmongers.

“‘We’re going to get a little tougher,’ a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. ‘We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,’ said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

In related news, why just lose when you can lose and forsake your dignity? Confronted by the fact that their guy just isn’t connecting these days, the McCain team gets set to take the low(er) road. (Indeed, their ad buys across the nation are already almost universally negative.) In other words, expect a lot of Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers from now until November.

Weathermen Blowback. | Mr. Wu.

“In an interview yesterday, Hillary — whose connection to President Clinton’s 2001 sentence commutations for two members of the Weather Underground has become an issue since she tried to raise questions about Obama’s acquaintance with another ex-Weatherman — told ‘Inside Edition’ that she ‘didn’t know anything about’ the 2001 clemency case…If it’s true, it means that she got the worst briefings in the world when she was running for Senate in 2000 and the clemency issue was hot in Rockland County, and it means that Chuck Schumer didn’t even bother to mention the issue to his fellow NY senator-elect/ First Lady after promising the widows of two dead cops to fight against one of the clemencies.” Following her recent attempt to make hay from the Weathermen, Sen. Clinton gets caught in another obvious lie. Oops.

Meanwhile, following on the two he picked up yesterday, Sen. Obama scores another superdelegate in Oregon rep David Wu. “‘We need new policies both at home and abroad,’ Wu said in a statement. ‘Like Americans, the international community wants to see real change in America and I believe that Senator Obama embodies that change.’” As you probably know, Sen. Clinton needs the superdelegates to break 2-1 her way from now herein for the comeback math to make any sense at all. So, since Pennsylvania (1 for Clinton, 3 for Obama), she’s already 5 down on where she needs to be.

Stop them before they debate again.

You don’t need The Weathermen to know which way the wind blows: This thing is over, and has been for weeks and weeks now. But, ABC held a debate tonight in Philadelphia anyway, and, man, it was a tough slog. [Transcript.] Moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos endlessly trafficked in inanities. (The Weather Underground? Really?) Sen. Clinton found no level she couldn’t passive-aggressively sink beneath: Cringeworthy throughout, she name-dropped Farrakhan and channeled 9iu11iani whenever possible (see, for example, her answers on Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and she got in Ahmadinejad’s recent remarks as well.) And Sen. Obama seemed tired, a bit rusty, and, after 45 shallow minutes of idiotic gotcha, (justifiably) ticked. (But I thought he still came through in the clutch anyway.)

The only news made tonight? ABC is rather terrible at this whole debate thing. Tonight was basically a fiasco. From Stephanopoulos questioning Obama on flag pins to the tut-tutting about affirmative action to George getting questions from Sean Hannity to Gibson trying to wrest a “no new taxes” pledge from the candidates, virtually every minute tonight was occupied with trite Republican nonsense. Oh, and Gibson’s dim remark at the Manchester debate that two-professor families make $200,000 a year was not a fluke. Apparently, the guy knows less about the economy than John McCain. Tonight he informed us that there “are a heck of a lot of people” making between $97,000 and $200,000 these days. If by “heck of a lot” you mean 14% of the US, well, ok. But some might consider 1 in 7 a rather small minority of the total population, and thus argue that our tax policy should keep the other, more-likely-to-be-struggling 6 out of 7 in mind. Sheesh…less than a week and our friends in the pundit world have already abandoned their newfound blue-collar bitterness.

At any rate, no news or game-changers to speak of. Sen. Obama is still our nominee, Sen. Clinton is still grappling with that fact. If you didn’t watch this tonight, you chose wisely. Update: Having run ABC’s gauntlet of idiocy, Obama brushes his shoulders off, puts distractions on notice, and says no to more debates.