Month: July 2008

Hewitt Award Nominee

by Chris Bodenner
It’s a few days old, but worth pointing out:

[McCain] also said Obama had the “most extreme” record in the Senate. Asked later if he thought Obama was an extremist, McCain said: “His voting record … is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.” Does McCain think Obama is a socialist? “I don’t know."

Obama’s Green Screen

by Chris Bodenner
Noam Scheiber spots an irony:

These trips are about atmospherics, with the foreign locales serving as sophisticated props. And maybe not so sophisticated, come to think of it. A rough analogy for the Obama overseas extravaganza is The Daily Show’s international "coverage": A correspondent stands in front of a green screen, the Eiffel Tower or the West Bank appears in the background, and voila!, a foreign dispatch is filed. Yes, Obama’s actual backdrops will be more authentic. But I doubt we can say the same for his experiences.

Obama, as is his wont, actually lodged a version of this complaint during the primaries, when the topic was the knowledge Hillary had supposedly gleaned from her own globe-trotting: "You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance." Replace "ambassador" with "chancellor" or "prime minister" and you have a reasonable summary of this week’s itinerary.

Still More Maliki

by hilzoy

From the AP:

“Iraq’s government welcomed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday with word that it apparently shares his hope that U.S. combat forces could leave by 2010.

The statement by Iraq’s government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, followed talks between Obama and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki — who has struggled for days to clarify Iraq’s position on a possible timetable for a U.S. troop pullout.

Al-Dabbagh said the government did not endorse a fixed date, but hoped American combat units could be out of Iraq sometime in 2010. That timeframe falls within the 16-month withdrawal plan proposed by Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day as part of a congressional fact-finding team.

“We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq,” al-Dabbagh told reporters, noting that any withdrawal plan was subject to change if the level of violence kicks up again.”

TPM has video of al-Dabbagh’s comments here. That would seem to settle the question whether Maliki was mistranslated.

Spencer Ackerman thinks that this leaves McCain only two options:

“There’s nowhere left for McCain to go here. Either he endorses a timetable for withdrawal, which he has consistently said would be a disaster, and cedes his only big issue to Obama — and more importantly, concedes that Obama’s judgment is sound — or he deliberately ignores the concerted, expressed wishes of the Iraqi government in order to prolong an unpopular war.”

But McCain proves him wrong by coming up with a third:

“Vieira: “Senator Obama’s timetable of removing U.S. troops from Iraq within that 16-month period seemed to be getting a thumbs up by the Iraqi prime minister when he called it ‘the right timeframe for a withdrawal.’ He has backed off that somewhat, but the Iraqis have not stopped using the word timetable, so if the Iraqi government were to say — if you were President — we want a timetable for troops being to removed, would you agree with that?”

McCain: “I have been there too many times. I’ve met too many times with him, and I know what they want. They want it based on conditions and of course they would like to have us out, that’s what happens when you win wars, you leave. We may have a residual presence there as even Senator Obama has admitted. But the fact is that it should be — the agreement between Prime Minister Maliki, the Iraqi government and the United states is it will be based on conditions.”

That’s right: by simply asserting that he knows what the Iraqi government wants better than they do, and that we should trust his take on what they think over theirs, McCain can avoid the need to respond at all. It’s a pity that this strategy requires that he look like a complete idiot, and adopt an insulting attitude towards the Iraqi government and its people that would surely not serve him well were he elected President, but them’s the breaks.

(Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.)

Framing Obama On Iraq, Ctd

By Patrick Appel

Here’s part of a post on McCain’s offical blog:

Barack Obama promises to bring the troops home within 16 months, an unconditional timeline we reject not only as being dangerous but infeasible, John McCain promises to bring the troops home with victory secured. If there is a "growing consensus" to withdraw American troops, that consensus only exists because the American people now recognize that victory is at hand and our presence will not be required in Iraq for much longer. But Barack Obama has always supported withdrawing troops, regardless of the consequences for Iraq, the region, and American national security. At some point, we will be 16 months away from leaving Iraq, and then Obama will be claiming he was right all along. But even a broken clock is right twice a day.

What would have happened if we withdrew earlier is unknowable, as is what would have happened if we never invaded in the first place. Both campaigns have their arguments about the past. Each argument has its merits. But McCain talks about "victory" in Iraq in the same way Bush does, as a fully functioning Iraqi democracy somewhere way off in the distance. Obama talks about victory as a imperfect, non-totalitarian Iraqi government. We’re approaching Obama’s definition of victory but not McCain’s.

Snarkiest Lede Ever

by Chris Bodenner
From the AP:

If Sen. John McCain is really serious about becoming a Web-savvy citizen, perhaps Kathryn Robinson can help. Robinson is now 106 — that’s 35 years older than McCain — and she began using the Internet at 98, at the Barclay Friends home in West Chester, Pa., where she lives. "I started to learn because I wanted to e-mail my family," she says — in an e-mail message, naturally.

I’m sure Andrew’s posted it before, but this Onion classic is worth another laugh:

The popular search engine Google announced plans Friday to launch a new site, TheGoogle.com, to appeal to older adults not able to navigate the original website’s single text field and two clearly marked buttons. … "All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type ‘thegoogle.com,’ and press ‘return’—although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and ‘THEGOOGLE’ typed into a Word document."