Discourse.net: Friday McBush Bashing (Olympic Edition)

August 15, 2008

Friday McBush Bashing (Olympic Edition)

Turns out McCain’s approach to foreign policy is rather more bellicose than anyone (other than a hard-core neo-con) imagined in their most horrible dreams.

Phoenix New Times, Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know — and loathe. Keven Drum has reactions at John McCain and the Low Road
Too long for TV, but “The High Road,” independent grassroots pro-Obama ad truth squadding McCain is pretty good:
Another day, another gaffe, ThinkProgress, McCain Gets His Hamdan Facts Wrong, Falsely Claims He Was Found Guilty Of ‘Supplying Weapons’ In Afghanistan
TalkLeft, McCain’s Lobbyist Problem. It won’t go away.
Crooks & Liars, McCain’s Latest Lie: Obama is the ‘Big Oil’ Candidate
Carpetbagger, McCain’s DHL problem may cost him Ohio
Carpetbagger, A tale of two affairs
John McCain has a problem telling the truth
Reading Adam Nagourney & Jim Rutenberg’s NYT article, Embracing a Free-Form Style, McCain Leads a Camp Divided, you can’t help but conclude that this guy’s management style is a disaster and he has a short attention span.
Kos, John McCain & the Opening Ceremony at the Olympics suggests a certain tone-deafness
Brooks Jackson, Newsweek, Fact Check: More Tax Deceptions — McCain misrepresents Obama’s tax proposals again. And again, and again. “Summary McCain released three new ads with multiple false and misleading claims about Obama’s tax proposals.”
Crooks & Liars, FNS: Rick Davis Brags On McCain’s Maverick-ness; Facts Be Damned
From Jesus’ GeneralInvesting in McCain:
Las Vegas Sun, McCain’s attacks on rival fall flat with vets group
DeLong, The McCain Campaign Makes Up Its Own Facts on Health Care
TPM TV, Dazed and Confused:

And then Crooks & Liars goes ~~one~~ two better at, John McCain’s Greatest Campaign Hits
Carpetbagger, Russia, Georgia, and McCain’s reckless belligerence; Cosmic Iguana, McCAIN - READY FOR WAR … WITH RUSSIA?
Slightly unfair but likely effective ad being run in Ohio called Job Killing John

Unfair because no one could keep them all in America, so for once McCain is being honest here.
Taegan Goddard, Political Insider, Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis? — and from Wikipedia???
TPM says, if McCain gets elected, You’re In Danger (Why? Because as Kos writer smintheus says, McCain on Georgia: Even Cheney isn’t bellicose enough
Obama goes negative on TV (in a ‘me too’ fashion?) with “Embrace”:
DNC Ad, Exxon John

Pretty good parody of the infamous John Cornyn commercial (which also got this good response from Rick Noriega).
Kos, Vote Boredom. Vote Apathy. Vote McCain
Greg Sargent, TPMEC, McCain Supports Tax Breaks For Oil Industry — But Not For Wind Power
The Hill, McCain ignoring calls to cancel controversial fundraiser
Kos, The McCain Myth: Abortion Rights
Did Scheunemann Engineer McCain’s 2005 Nobel Prize Nomination Of Georgian President For Financial Gain?
OpenLeft, McCain Prepares to Hand the Internet Over to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T
Crooks & Liars, The Olympic Ad Wars: Obama vs. McCain
Mark Adams, The American Street, Uhm, So What Century Is McCain Living In?
NYT, In Split Role, McCain Adviser Is Sometimes a Lobbyist. And who, dare I ask, could possibly object to that?
On the 73rd anniversary of the Social Security program, FDR’s grandson, James Roosevelt Jr., attacks McCain for wanting to privatize Social Security:
ThinkProgress, U.S. Troops Deployed Abroad Reject McCain’s Iraq Plans, Donate 6:1 To Obama
Joe Klein, at TIME’s Swampland blog, is so disappointed in McCain that he seems to be bidding for membership in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill,
But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the “putting America first” front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action…you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn’t confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama’s patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary—and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We’ll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency—what sort of country—that will produce.
AFL-CIO brands McCain as a plutocrat willing to trash Social Security.
Is this (“Approval Ratings: The Public v. McCain”) the best anti-McCain ad ever? It could be. It’s a grass-roots production by cartwrightdale.
Ellroon, The American Street, Is that why Mikheil Saakashvili made a direct appeal to John McCain?

Posted by Michael : August 15, 2008 12:00 AM | Politics: McCain | TechnoLinks

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Comments

This is all well and good, but Mac clearly dominated in Rick Warren's forum tonight.
Best things for Obama to do to improve:
1. Be quicker off the block. Obama pauses and seems to think before he answers. Mac could hardly even wait until Warren was finished asking the question. Who do you think Middle America would want as Commander in Chief? Thinking is like pissing - it must be done, but please, not in public.
2. Stop it with the "uh, um" etc. See above.
3. Sit up straight. Obama has this habit of cocking his head when he's talking to someone, which makes his body language seem closed. Sit up, confront, engage. Dominate. You're not talking to a student in office hours, you're running for biggest pr*ck in the world.
4. Tell a story. Mac has all these gripping stories about being a POW. There's no way Obama can compete with that, but he doesn't necessarily have to. Stories make people connect with you in a very visceral way, but it's the form of the narrative itself, and not the fact that they now know an additional biographical detail about the storyteller, that does the trick. A story is a shared experience, independent of the event or theme depicted, and shared experience is the most reliable method of building trust. Think about it - last time you heard someone telling a really compelling story, did you come away with the impression of a lying bastard? And come on, Obama wrote books! He must have some good stories about community organizing in Chicago, or something.

People agree with a lot of Obama's politics, and I think would agree with him even more if he was more dominant about them. Here's the problem: people will vote for the person who will lead them. McCain may shift, change, equivocate, and lie with the best of them, but he never looks like he has to think about it, or like he doesn't believe 100% of what he's saying. Obama should learn from that, and learn to be blunt and knee-jerk once in a while. He can save the thinking for later. It's like any dysfunctional relationship - the screwed up person making unreasonable demands always gets their way.

The simplest way to put it is: right now, Obama's captain of the chess team, Mac's a dude with a leather jacket and a motorcycle, and America's a teenage girl.

Posted by: AndrewD at August 16, 2008 11:24 PM

Andrew proves the point that obama's supporters see in him whatever they want. Andrew's post is full of analysis so naturally he concludes that obama is a chess master. He must have "good stories about community organizing".

Obama has demonstrated no tangible brilliance at any point in his career, nor has anything of substance been found regarding his "community organizing". If by chessmaster you mean political chessmaster, then fine, he beat the clinton machine, good for him. But what did he accomplish in the senate? Nothing. What did he accomplish prior to office? Nothing. Chessmaster? More like hustler.
Sure, he slithered away from his comments about his pastor and his wife's afro-leninism, he can play the game. But again, what has he ever done for you or me?

Ok, he gives you hope. Good for you. Vote for a demagogue you see as a "chessmaster". See how that's working out for russia under Putin.

McCain is equally as worthless. Ask yourself how it could be in your mind that one is so great and the other so bad. That's not very likely, now is it?

In short, the emperor has no clothes.

Posted by: name at August 19, 2008 11:11 PM

Seems to me that winning the Democratic nomination over the well-financed and seemingly inevitable Clinton juggernaut is a fairly impressive achievement, no?

Posted by: Michael at August 20, 2008 01:55 PM

Well said "name". Couldn't agree any more.

Posted by: carl at August 21, 2008 04:48 AM