Month: September 2008

If McCain were a blogger, he would have had to retract by now. But he’s running for president of the United States, so he can say anything, lie about anything and not have to answer for it. Yesterday, John McCain lied on national television about something that no one disputes in the public record. He was challenged by the only serious journalists on television right now – the hosts of "The View" – about the large number of pork barrel earmarks Sarah Palin sought and secured as governor of Alaska, including the "Bridge To Nowhere" that Palin and McCain lied about and are still lying about in public. Here was his clear and irrefutable statement:

Palin’s comments came after McCain sat for a feisty grilling on ABC’s "The View," where he claimed erroneously that his running mate hadn’t sought money for such pet projects. "Not as governor she didn’t," McCain said, ignoring the record.

It has now been a day since McCain lied this explicitly in public. And he hasn’t yet retracted his lie. This AP piece is dated as of this afternoon. Why not?

Because if he has to retract this lie, he will have to retract his multiple other lies? While the media demands that Obama respond to things he never said and never meant, McCain is not even asked to retract a bald-faced, massive, obvious, refutable lie.

In the last month, McCain has become the biggest liar in the modern history of presidential politics. He makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington.

After bugging ABC News, they have now provided a simpler, easier way to read the full interview between Sarah Palin and Charlie Gibson. It’s here. I’m going to be fisking it throughout the weekend. I mean: it’s all we’re allowed to examine. So I better do my job, right?

Why do I feel the McCain campaign is treating the press’s legitimate need to interview Palin like an audience with the Pope?

Yep: my time on the Cape is coming to an end and I’ll be a guest on Real Time next Friday night.

Virginia Postrel proposes:

To someone who thinks "glamour" means movie stars and designer dresses, the idea that terrorism is glamorous sounds bizarre. But Rushdie is wise to the deeper meaning of glamour, as a form of magic and persuasion. Glamour is in the audience’s eyes, and the phenomenon long preceded Hollywood. Jihadi terrorism in fact combines two ancient forms of glamour–the martial and the religious–with the modern promise of media celebrity.

Glamour can sell religious devotion or military glory as surely as it can pitch lipstick or island vacations. All promise a way to transcend our everyday circumstances, to experience more and become better than ordinary life allows.  All invite us to imagine escape and transformation.

I cannot quite keep count at this point of the bald-faced lies that the McCain-Palin campaign has been telling to a pliant, pathetic, useless excuse for an American press corps. But here’s the latest. We were all told by the McCain-Palin campaign that Sarah Palin had visited Iraq earlier this year:

Following her selection last month as John McCain’s running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a "military outpost" inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin’s foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

This was another simple lie. Not a distortion, a lie. But, as we know, the McCain-Palin campaign tells massive lies and when called on them, first try a dodge, rather than the truth. And so when asked to give more details about her trip to Iraq, we were first told:

Asked to clarify where she traveled in Iraq, Palin’s spokeswoman, Maria Comella, confirmed that "She visited a military outpost on the other side of the Kuwait-Iraq border."

So not far into Iraq, but definitely Iraq, right? Wrong, according to "Lieutenant Colonel Dave Osborn, commander of the 3d Battalion, 207th Infantry of the Alaska National Guard, who was in charge of the 570 local troops serving in Kuwait and Iraq."

Here’s the truth:

On the second day of the trip, he said, Palin was flown to the border crossing, about 100 miles north of Camp Buehring, where she spent the morning meeting with troops and presiding over a ceremony in which an Alaska National Guard soldier extended his enlistment. But she did not venture into Iraq, Osborn said. "You have to have permission to go into a lot of areas, and [the crossing] is where her permissions were," he said. Palin did not stay the night in Iraq, and spent the rest of the second day at Camp Virginia and Ali Al Salem Air Base, Osborn said.

Her alleged visit to Ireland was also, it turns out, a refueling stop. She didn’t leave the plane. I swear to you I’m not making any of this up.

Hilarious:

Democrats Need to Shake The "Elitist’ Tag

By Lynn Forester de Rothschild

As Mickey puts it, you lost me at "de".

For some reason I cannot find the transcript of the third Gibson interview, although I watched it slack-jawed online this morning. In my judgment, she is close to a parody of a politician who cannot tell the truth and has nothing substantive to offer on policy whatsoever. When she isn’t lying, she is bullshitting. I’ll deal with that over the weekend, examining in close detail her actual answers and how they don’t tell us anything substantive about what she would do as vice-president. I’m going to fisk the interview thoroughly. But it seems to me that, before I do that, I should put on the table what I think was the real news in the interview. On two occasions, she said:

"When you’re running for office, your life’s an open book."

Thanks, governor, for being a lone voice of sanity in this, at least. What you are saying is that what the McCain camp is intimidating the press (including Gibson) from examining is a perfectly legitimate line of media inquiry. Palin has said that her life is an "open book." She has therefore pulled a Gary Hart in inviting the press to examine her life in full.

And she’s surely right: when you agree to run for vice-president of the United States, you surrender any zone of privacy. Al Gore’s sometimes wayward son; Dick Cheney’s daughter and now granddaughter; Dan Quayle’s wife; George H. W. Bush’s extensive clan: all these families have been an "open book" to the press. In saying yes to John McCain, Palin said yes to the natural inquiries that come with it. I don’t mean utterly gratuitous stuff, like the Starr Report’s detailing of the precise positions Lewinsky and Clinton enjoyed sexually. I don’t mean by the standards of the Republican party. I mean by the standards of a robust and inquisitive and fair press. Vice-presidential candidates have long been treated as an open book. As far back as the deferential pre-web 1970s, a vice-president’s confidential medical history was made public, forcing him to withdraw. Eagelton’s bipolar history in no way disqualified him for the vice-presidency in the way Palin’s own record clearly disqualifies her for the vice-presidency. And the most obvious contemporary example is former vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards. The Edwards story – showing stunning recklessness in a potential president – legitimized the reporting of the National Enquirer, and made their reporting in this news cycle legit. And the story – subsequently reported and endorsed in the New York Times and every mainstream media source – was less relevant to public life than Palin’s. Because by the time the story broke, Edwards was out of the race. Palin is not just in the race, she’s ahead – and we have six weeks to go. It is, I’d argue, the duty of the press and the blogosphere to ask any factual and fair questions to which there can be clear and factual answers. 

And this open book is all the more important when a candidate has been foisted on the national scene as a total unknown, and the public has been given almost no time to understand who might be the next president of the United States. The idea that we should give "deference" to this candidate, unlike any other candidate or vice-president in modern history, is simply nonsense, when it isn’t chilling. In 2008, in mid-September, we are not even allowed to ask questions about Palin’s real and actual life as a mother-as-governor? That notion is as absurd as the Palin candidacy itself, in my judgment.

Of open books, any sincere and legitimate factual question is askable. I notice too that a leading Alaskan politician, Andrew Halcro, a former state legislator who ran against Palin for governor, is now on record saying:

"I used to think that ‘family’ [sic] was off-limits, as far as politicians go. But Sarah Palin uses her kids as campaign props. Her son Trig has his own page on the state website. Her daughter Piper gets her travel paid when she goes to state events."

It seems to me that if you are on record saying that your life is an open book, and you have a state-run web-page about your infant son, and your own children’s travel is paid for by the state, and you presented your infant son at a convention televised across the entire world, and you sent out a press release outing your own daughter’s current pregnancy, then it is not despicable, evil, vile or outrageous for the press to ask factual, answerable questions about Sarah Palin’s experiences as a pregnant and non-pregnant mother and about her marriage and about her parenting of her children. Palin herself just said so.

Please email me and tell me why I’m wrong about this. I want to air all possible views and dissents. I want to do the right thing, to learn as much as we can about this woman. All I want is to know more – about this new, unknown, clearly dishonest person who is asking to be elected a potential president of the United States by next January.

Robert Burton sits down with neurologist Jerome Goldstein to talk about the science of homosexuality.

I disagree with almost everything Joe Carter writes in this article, but I commend him for this point:

We religious conservatives must take a firm stand against the practice of torture. Yes, there is a legitimate debate to be had about what exactly is meant by that term. Let’s have that debate. Let’s define the term in a way that consistent with our belief in human dignity. And then let’s hold every politician in the country to that standard. As John Mark Reynolds notes, "Like slavery, it debases two people and one culture: the tortured loses his soul liberty, the torturer claims to be a god, and the culture condones an ugly and wicked act." Our silence on this issue has become embarrassing; our apologies for such practices has become disgraceful.

I don’t believe there is a legitimate debate about what torture means. It was defined in the 1994 Convention against Torture, which was signed into US law, as an “act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” But at least Carter recognizes the complacency of the religious right on this issue. That Rick Warren did not bring this question up at Saddleback was equivalent to a preacher in the 1850s not bringing up slavery.

Christopher Flavelle assesses the political climate in Canada. Not pretty.