Month: September 2008

Some great video clips exposing Sarah Palin and John McCain as full metal liars:

Another absurd ad repeating the absolute lie that Sarah Palin stopped the "Bridge To Nowhere." As everyone knows by now, she lobbied for the bridge to nowhere, and the federal Congress killed it, and then she kept the money for other projects anyway. But McCain is still airing ads telling the same lie.

He has also still not retracted his lie on The View when he point blank said that Palin has refused all earmarks as governor. I cannot remember a candidate for president telling such a bald-faced lie on national television and not retracting. And I cannot remember a press corps so pathetic they cannot badger his campaign for a retraction after two days.

US President George W. Bush(reflected), with a map of Gulf Coast oil pipelines in front of him, makes remarks to the press after receiving an update on Hurricane Ike from administration officials on September 14, 2008 at the White House in Washington, DC. By Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty.

We may be seeing a natural peaking in McCain’s post-convention numbers:

Overall, the landscape has not changed very much since the Republican convention – we’re just collecting different evidence about where the bounce might or might not be in different states. Arguably, however, there are a few signs that McCain is beginning to come off his peaks. Between the four national tracking polls, McCain now leads by an average of just 0.25 points, his smallest margin since the convention.

My MSM take on the total absurdity of the Palin nomination is in the Sunday Times today:

For the past two weeks serious commentators and columnists have been asked to take the candidacy of Sarah Palin for the vice-presidency of the United States seriously.

Formerly sane people have written of the McCain campaign’s selection of this running mate as if it represents a new face for Republicanism, an emblem of can-do western spirit, a brilliant ploy to win over Clinton voters, a new feminism, a reformist revolution, and a genius appeal to the religious right.

I’m afraid I cannot join in. In fact I cannot say anything about this candidacy that takes it in any way seriously. It is a farce. It is absurd. It is an insult to all intelligent people. It is a sign of a candidate who has lost his mind. There is no way to take the nomination of Palin to be vice-president of the world’s sole superpower – except to treat it as a massive, unforgivable, inexplicable decision by someone who has either gone insane or is managerially unfit to be president of the United States. When, at some point, the hysteria dies down, even her supporters will realise that, by this decision, McCain has rendered himself unfit to run a branch of Starbucks, let alone the White House.

The announcement of Palin was made more than two weeks ago. It took a fortnight for her to agree to sit down for an intimate interview of the kind usually reserved for Hollywood stars instead of the press conference typical of a new vice-presidential candidate. This has never happened in American political history. Even Dan Quayle, the least qualified vice-presidential nominee before Palin, and a man who did not know how to spell “potato”, gave a press conference a day after the convention in 1988.

There have been two explanations for this astonishing Putin-style decision to keep a vice-presidential candidate from the press. The first was that the press would be too mean to her and needed to show, in campaign manager Rick Davis’s word, sufficient “deference” before they would be allowed to ask her a question. Deference? Is 21st-century America an 18th-century monarchy? The press owes such a total unknown who could be president next January deference?

The second explanation is that she needed time to cram for the exam. The McCain camp knew she had never expressed any views about foreign policy. And the only time she had on record was to oppose the surge that is the centrepiece of McCain’s campaign. They knew she knew nothing and was utterly unqualified to be president at a moment’s notice. And so she spent the last week furiously prepping. As Maureen Dowd noticed, she is Eliza Doolittle to John McCain’s Henry Higgins.

But at the end of last week we were granted an audience with the Princess of Alaska. It was painful. She had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was – the central and most controversial foreign policy innovation of the past eight years: the doctrine of preemption against states with WMDs. Moreover, in her speech the same day, she described the war in Iraq. She said her eldest son, who has just enlisted, would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans”.

Does Palin believe that the men who planned and carried out the 9/11 attack are in Iraq? The hijackers are all dead, but Bin Laden and Zawahiri and the rest of the gang are, as far as we know, in Pakistan. Nobody believes they are in Iraq.

Continued here.

Yes, the man who has orchestrated some of the most disgusting and dishonest campaigns in American history thinks John McCain’s series of massive lies, smears and distortions is too much:

"McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far," he told Fox News, "and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the ‘100 percent truth’ test."

But, of course, Rove manages to insinuate that Obama’s ads are in the same truth zone. They aren’t. Some of Obama’s ads have been too crude for my taste, but there is simply no comparison with the outright lies of McCain.

Isn’t history poignant at times? John McCain who once prided himself on not being Karl Rove will now, in fact, go down in history as too disgusting and despicable for even Karl Rove to support.

Anthony Lewis takes on the war crimes of the Bush administration:

Conservative commentators have already warned against any future US prosecution, arguing that—reprehensible as the treatment of some detainees was—those responsible did not have criminal intent. The argument is unpersuasive on the facts, because Secretary Rumsfeld and others were warned by senior Pentagon civilian and military lawyers, including the navy general counsel, Alberto Mora, that their policies would violate the law.

And it is unpersuasive on the law, because a mistaken view of the law is not a defense under the principles established at the Nuremberg trials. The Nuremberg precedents also dispose of Dean Edley’s argument that lawyers cannot be prosecuted for advising officials that they can commit what are in fact crimes. German lawyers were convicted at Nuremberg as enablers, in their legal advice, of Nazi crimes. President Bush said, "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it."

Prosecutions are not a likely course for a new US administration. But there are steps that should be taken to confront the horrors our government has perpetrated. At a minimum we must lift the cloak of secrecy from what was done and from some still-classified legal opinions that purported to legitimize these acts.

If you want to know why I cannot bring myself to call the base of the Republican party Christians, and instead use the term Christianist, a new poll helps explain why:

A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.

The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.

Southern evangelicals are therefore the mainstay of the torture regime in this country. The only point at which they even balk at torturing people who haven’t been subject to minimal due process is when they are reminded that this could come back to hurt Americans. The idea that torture is immoral in itself seems alien to a majority of the millions who lined up to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. Since the South was built on torture-slavery, this is not that historically surprising. Many ancestors of today’s Christianists tortured African-Americans routinely. But the extent of Southern evangelicals support for violating one of the core moral absolutes of Christianity is striking.

Southern evangelicals always cite Scripture when arguing that homosexuals should be jailed or sent to therapy or denied basic rights in their marriages. But on torture, they don’t cite Scripture:

The new poll found that 44 percent of white Southern vangelicals rely on life experiences and common sense to determine their views about torture. A lower percentage, 28 percent, said they relied on Christian teachings or beliefs.

The one sliver of good news is that even the Christianist base knows that George W. Bush is a liar on torture:

Pollsters also found that 53 percent of white Southern evangelicals believe the government uses torture in its anti-terrorism campaign, despite claims by government officials to the contrary. About one-third, or 32 percent, said the government does not use torture as a matter of policy.

These people are not in denial. They know what their beloved president is doing – to other human beings and to American honor. And they love it. And guess what? 65 percent of them support the now pro-torture candidate, John McCain. They know what they’re doing.

(You can buy a t-shirt with the WWJT logo here. Courtesy of Betty Bowers.)

Kobe, Japan, 5 pm.

A new survey of global public opinion [PDF] reveals the appalling truth. Americans are now among the people on earth most supportive of government’s torturing prisoners. The United States is in the same public opinion ballpark as some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet:

Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%).   In five countries either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture:  Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%).  South Koreans are divided.

So America’s peers in the fight against torture, in terms of public opinion are Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, and Iran. This is what America now is: a country with the moral values of countries that routinely torture and abuse prisoners, like Egypt and Iran. Even the Chinese, living in a neo-fascist market state, oppose torture in all circumstances by 66 percent, compared to Americans where only 53 percent do! More horrifying: a higher percentage of Americans – 13 percent – believe that torture should generally be allowed than in any other country save China, Turkey and Nigeria. And in the last two years, as the American president celebrates and authorizes the torture of people who have not been allowed a fair trail, support for torturing terror suspects has increased from 36 percent to 44 percent.

The only other countries where support for torturing terror suspects has grown are India, Nigeria, Turkey, South Korea and Egypt. In all other developed countries, support for an absolute ban on torture has actually risen in the past two years. America is now leading the way in legitimizing and celebrating torture as a legitimate tool for governments.

This is the Bush-Cheney legacy – to be continued under McCain-Palin. McCain was once a torture victim, but since 2006 has supported the torture of prisoners by the CIA. In fact, prisoners across the world who have been tortured by the CIA in the last two years can, in the terror of their cells, know that John McCain made it possible, by caving into the war criminals in the White House in 2006.

How can the country that pioneered the Geneva Conventions now be a nation more supportive of torture than any other developed nation on earth? Of course, it matters that we have had a president and vice-president actively endorsing and campaigning for the use of torture, and torturing prisoners routinely in jails where there is no escape and no due process. But the key segment of the pro-torture enthusiasts are evangelical Christians. Yes: evangelical Christians are now the greatest supporters of doing to prisoners what was once done to Christ.