Month: September 2008

Cillizza explains.

Alex Massie is disappointed by my relentless vetting of Palin, specifically the bizarre facts in the public record about her fifth pregnancy. For my part, I stand by my skepticism of everything Sarah Palin says. To my mind, her constant public lies about almost anything, large and small, and the proximity of this strange, unvetted blank slate of a candidate to the Oval Office render all usual assumptions of good faith on the part of a candidate moot. The refusal of the McCain campaign to allow her to hold a press conference – unprecedented in modern American history – reinforces this skepticism. It is simply incredible that a vice-presidential candidate who is the governor of a state cannot hold an open press conference to clear the air on any number of issues of fact that are out there. Worse than incredible: dangerous. When we have six weeks to go and we still know very little about someone who could technically be president next January, I don’t think we should lean on the side of complacency and "deference". So how do we respond to Palin’s series of outright lies and total refusal to face the press outside of two, negotiated interviews? Alex’s assumption – and I totally understand it – is that we have an unqualified but credible, reasonable politician. If that is your assumption, my obsession with fact-checking everything she says, even about her own pregnancy, must indeed seem weird and bizarre.

But it is not my working assumption. This is not an attitude I started with. In fact, I’m on record saying within the first few hours of her selection that, even though I thought the selection was unserious with respect to foreign policy, I liked her and even thought this former pot-smoking friend of the gays (got that wrong) was a great thing. Here’s what I blogged at 12.09 pm on August 29:

The more I read the more I expect to like her a lot.

Here is what I wrote an hour and a half later:

It makes me like [McCain’s] empathy for gutsy young women, even former beauty queens (is there footage of her contest out there?). But it also makes me less comfortable with the idea of him as commander in chief.

Again, minutes later, offering my first take:

She named two daughters after television witches, and smoked pot when it was legal in Alaska, and inhaled. She’s also very gay-friendly. It makes me like her. I’m not so sure how the most devout in the base will respond. Her Down Syndrome baby will help, I’m sure – and her decision to bring him into the world is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I thought she was unqualified and unserious as a veep candidate in wartime but my first impression was to like her personally. It never occurred to me that she was a pathological liar. But blogging in real time is about honestly assimilating new data and new facts. And I have learned a great deal in a couple of weeks. And my working assumption now is that she is a pathological liar – even about things that are objectively checkable.

A pathological liar simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth about herself, even on a subject as routine as a pregnancy and infant son. I can’t believe I’m asking these questions either. But in the absence of any answers, what am I supposed to do?

I know this puts me out of the mainstream of acceptable Washington opinion. But let me just remind Alex that doubting the existence of Saddam’s WMDs put some people out of the mainstream of acceptable Washington opinion. Would the world be a better place if those people had refused to be silenced or intimidated? Would America be a better place if reporters and bloggers resistant to the universal consensus brought all their questions to the table and refused to shut up and kow-tow to the forces of Rove and his acolyte, Schmidt?

There is far too much at stake to be intimidated into silence or to pretend I can accept this absurd pick as anything other than a farce masking too many lies to count. All I am doing is exposing as many facts and arguments about this Manchurian candidate that I can find. I am committed to putting the truth out there, especially when it debunks my assumptions and have done so promptly on the sole occasion when some clear evidence rebutted a question I was raising. I am airing all sides of the issues. But I will not relent until we have a better idea of who this person is. And I offer no apologies or regrets for persistence.

If you really think you now know all you need to know about her, read someone else.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Ross responds to Poulos’s comment on McCain’s tactics:

It’s possible, as James goes on to write, that "Obama’s the softest landing the GOP is likely to get, at a time when a hard landing could smash it into a fiery wreck of pieces," and that a McCain Presidency would be the equivalent of John Major’s PMship – the victory snatched from the jaws of defeat that sets you up for a longer exile later on. That’s a scenario I’ve been wrestling with all year. But being something of a cynic about "honor" among competing political campaigns, I’m very, very resistant to the notion that the degree of truthiness on display in McCain’s late-summer attack ads provides anything like a dispositive resolution to the question.

Megan is stunned that the Fed "just basically bought AIG." The Economist:

They may have had no choice. Markets did not completely fall apart after Lehman’s bankruptcy, as some had feared, but they were highly agitated. The rate that big banks charge each other for short-term money jumped to three times the level in June, and the cost of protecting against their default broke records. Officials worried that the collapse of AIG, with its $1 trillion balance sheet and operations in 130 countries, could send the financial system into a tailspin.

I know it’s terribly elitist to believe that a potential president might actually have a single coherent public statement on foreign policy before her selection as veep-candidate; it’s unforgivably snooty to believe that someone who had no opinion on the surge except that it should be an exit plan is self-evidently unfit to be John McCain’s running mate; I know that it’s now hyper-lefty and condescending to believe that a candidate should actually care whether what she says is true or not.

But what does it say about a candidate whose sole alleged expertise is energy and whose sole experience is in Alaska … that she cannot get a basic fact right about the only area where she is supposed to know anything? And then keeps repeating a lie about it? Remember how John McCain introduced her:

Gov. Sarah Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone in the United States of America." – Sept. 10

Just no more than a ten year old with access to Google.

A great column by Ruth Marcus, rebutting the insane notion that there is any serious equivalence between the venial campaign sins of Barack Obama and the massive moral sins of John McCain:

McCain’s transgressions, though, are of a different magnitude. His whoppers are bigger; there are more of them. He — the easy out would be to say "his campaign" — has been misleading, and at times has outright lied, about his opponent. He has misrepresented — that’s the charitable verb — his vice presidential nominee’s record. Called on these fouls, he has denied and repeated them…

Are there any corners left for McCain? Is there any reason to trust that a man running this campaign would go on to be an honest president?

No, he wouldn’t. He’s a fantastic and shameless liar. We all make mistakes and in a heated campaign, some fibs and lies will emerge. But the mark of a morally serious person is not their occasional failures, but their response to them. Does he correct and apologize? Does he ultimately care about the truth, about reality? Or does he refuse to acknowledge his lies and keep repeating them, even after they have been proven beyond the slightest doubt?

McCain has failed the most basic of ethical tests. He is morally and ethically unfit to be the president of the United States.

Doulglas Kmiec, another conscientious dissenter from the lies, corruption and immorality of today’s GOP, suffered the full consequences of crossing the theocons and their allies in the Catholic hierarchy. He was denied communion because of his publicly stated intent to vote for Barack Obama. Here’s his account of that day. Money quote:

With no further appeal possible and with my wife exiting in confusion, tears, and offended embarrassment, I returned to my place alone. My place? Did I have a place any longer? Was I expected to leave?

The double significance of losing the body of Christ–of not having ingested and no longer standing among "the body"–was suddenly all I could think of. Condemned for announcing to the world that I intended to vote for a man who I thought lived the Beatitudes. A black man; a caring man; a talented man. A man different from my conservative self and yet calling me to find the best of that self. A man who, in so many ways, asks to care for the least advantaged as he seeks the public responsibility to carry with him, as if it was his own burden the plight of the marginalized and unemployed worker, the uninsured, the widowed mother grieving over a son lost in Iraq. Their hurts, far worse than mine. It was wrong to be damned; to be excluded from the grace of the sacrament of the Lord Jesus Christ, and all I could think was the old Tolstoy folk wisdom "God knows the truth, but waits."

We may not have to wait much longer.

The New Scientist publishes the results of the calculations of a team of scientists who tried to determine how much faster Usain Bolt could have run the 100 meters last month had he not started celebrating 20 meters from the end. Their answer: 9.55. (Bolt ran the race in 9.69, which set a new world record.)

The Guardian reports on Ukraine’s potential South Ossetia, and the government does not seem in a position to shore up its support at the moment.

Will Saletan ponders our use of drones in Pakistan. A few reasons why this is becoming more common:

Why the increase? Media reports from the ground and military sources indicate several factors: 1) Pakistan isn’t really helping, so we’ve taken the killing into our own hands. 2) We don’t want to literally use our own hands, since our ground forces might be captured. So, where possible, we’re using drones instead. 3) Drone attacks cause less friction with Pakistan than ground incursions do, since U.S. personnel are never at the scene. 4) We’re sick of our troops being picked off in Afghanistan, so we’re using drones to even the score. 5) We’re relying more on drones to spy in Pakistan because we’ve failed to develop informants on the ground. 6) Or maybe we’re getting better ground intelligence, which is giving us more hot targets to shoot at.