Month: September 2008

What a free country it is. Well: you had an hour. I will keep you posted.

He’s sticking by the McCain he says he knows. He wants to separate the despicable lies and insane ploys that this man has been throwing into the mix in this election season as some kind of aberration. Please. He knows what he is doing: lying and lying and offering the most reckless, cynical gambits I can ever remember in a political campaign. His contempt for his oppponent is as obvious as it is unmerited. Brooks: "He was an unfailingly candid man." So why the stream of bald-faced lies now? To give one simple example, he said on live television that Sarah Palin never received federal handouts for Alaska as governor. He lied. He has not apologized or retracted that lie.

Brooks: McCain is "a humble man".  Is Brooks really saying that a humble man would come back from Vietnam and among his first actions write a massive piece about his heroism in US News and then "write" five memoirs detailing his own heroism?  Does a humble man bring up the Hanoi Hilton even when discussing his own many houses today? Real heroes never talk about their war records. McCain has milked and milked and milked his shamelessly for political advantage from the minute he got home. Men of the Greatest Generation wouldn’t dream of this disgusting exploitation.

Brooks cites his legislative achevements but omits the fact that this torture victim was critical in putting into American law the first legalization of torture of prisoners by the American government in 2006, a betrayal of ancient principles so deep only a man without any integrity at all could have agreed to it. Someone somewhere is being tortured right now because John McCain made it happen. Standing over the shoulder of the torturer is the presence of McCain, as the pain and terror of the torture victim is milked for false confessions, then used for political purposes. That is integrity?

And Brooks, of course, omits Palin: the worst act of political judgment in my lifetime. She is indefensible. By any standards and by any reasonable person. No candidate with an ounce of concern for his own country would have selected her with such insouciance, cynicism and incompetence.

Obama says "McCain’s debating skills are unparalleled…and the expectations for him tonight are sky-high." The McCain camp doesn’t launch into hyperbole but also tries to set expectations by calling Obama’s debating skills "pretty good."

Mickey agrees with me.

I polled readers three weeks ago. With writers at NRO now contemplating Palin bowing out it seems like a good time to revisit the question. For the record, I voted yes the first time around and you guys voted 2:1 no. So let’s see what you feel now:

The NYT rightly slams Obama:

In all, Mr. Obama has released at least five commercials that have been criticized as misleading or untruthful against Mr. McCain’s positions in the past two weeks. Mr. Obama drew complaints from many of the independent fact-checking groups and editorial writers who just two weeks ago were criticizing Mr. McCain for producing a large share of this year’s untruthful spots (“Pants on Fire,” the fact-checking Web site PolitiFact.com wrote of Mr. Obama’s advertisement invoking Mr. Limbaugh; “False!” FactCheck.org said of his commercial on Social Security.)

Obama doesn’t need to engage in this sort of mud-slinging. It’s good to see the NYT calling him on it.

Yep: it’s here. You have to endure this dude yammering on for a 50 seconds but after that, Sarah Heath, now known as Sarah Palin, takes the stage in the Miss Alaska Pageant:

Eventually, yes:

…while debates rarely prompt immediate, measurable change, post-debate evaluations can. In 1992, right after the first debate, 24 percent of viewers said Ross Perot had won. By the very next night, amid positive reviews of Perot’s performance, that perception had grown to 37 percent among people who either had watched it, or heard or read about it. And Perot’s support did advance, from 6 percent before the debates to 17 percent after them.

 

Jesse Walker harps on Obama’s general counsel trying to get an anti-Obama NRA ad off the air:

As a political move, this is stupid. Not only does it cast the campaign as a bunch of speech-squelching bullies, but it makes the ad itself into a story and thus guarantees that more people will see it. (A trivial example: I wouldn’t have stuck it in a blog post if it weren’t for the controversy.) But of course there’s much more on display here than poor political judgment.

Together with similar efforts elsewhere, the incident says something about how a President Obama might approach media regulation….while Obama says he won’t restore the Fairness Doctrine, he isn’t opposed to other, more subtle ways the authorities can influence what is or isn’t said on radio and TV. For those of us who are repelled by John McCain’s lousy record on First Amendment issues, it’s important to remember that his opponent might not prove to be any better.