REPORTER: Let me begin by asking you about Governor Palin. It has been nearly two weeks now since you announced that she would be your running mate. She has yet to take any serious questions from either reporters or regular voters. Why not? Why can’t she take some questions?
MCCAIN: Actually I believe it was last week when she uh had her acceptance speech for the nomination of my party. But the fact is that she’s coming out in the next couple of days with uh inteviews with uh numerous people she’s uh, she’s very well versed at that. She’s been a governor She’s one of the most successful governors in the country, and the most popular one so…She’ll be doing a lot of conversations with uh the uh media. But we wanted to touch base with the American people first. And the turnout and enthusiasm of these crowds is just remarkable. And I’m very proud to have a real reformer on the ticket.
REPORTER: Let’s talk a little bit about the reform issue. You are, of course, a fierce critic of pork barrel spending. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Governor Palin has billed taxpayers as governor for 312 nights spent in her own home, charging a state per diem allowance. and she charged that while traveling for state business in her own home. What does that say about her credentials as someone who’s going to attack wasteful government spending?
MCCAIN: Well, uh, of course, she uh uh disclosed that online uh transparently and explained uh why she had to do that, because of the travel back and forth uh, why she did it, because of the travel back and forth. But most importantly, she sold the executive jet, she uh fired the chef she uh reform past ethics and lobbying reform. She took on the old bulls in her party. She took on an incumbent. She has uh given money back to the taxpayers uh This is a real reform uh governor and it is not an accident she is the most popular governor in America. Senator Obama has never taken on a single, his party on a single issue. She’s taken them on, and she is…I’m proud of her record of ethics, and lobbying reform and good government.
REPORTER: Let’s move on to what you say is the number one issue facing the United States in our time, that is the challenge of addressing Islamist extremism. What credentials does Governor Palin have in national security, diplomacy, foreign policy, that qualify her to be your partner in that on that issue – the fight against Islamist extremism?
MCCAIN: Well, obviously the economy is also a major challenge…
REPORTER: No, I’m using your words, Senator McCain
MCCAIN: Sure
REPORTER: You had said that
MCCAIN: No, I said that
REPORTER: this summer that the number one challenge of our time is Islamist extremism.
MCCAIN: I said the great I’ve said that the greatest challenge of our time is national security threats, and I’ve also said that jobs and the economy are the number 1 issue facing America, so. But the point is that Governor Palin is right on the issues. She understands energy, which is one of the fundamental issues of our nation’s security. her, she is responsible for a $40 billion dollar pipeline that is going to bring natural gas to the lower 48. She was right on Iraq, Senator Obama was wrong. She has more experience than Senator Obama does. She uh was right on Russia, he was wrong as he made moral equivalency between Russia and Georgia at the time Russia attacked. He said that She was right on Iran, when he’s been wrong on Iran. She doesn’t want to sit down to face to face negotiations with Akmedinajad or the other leaders She’s right on foreign policy, Senator Obama is wrong and she hu I’m sure she has the experience and the judgment to lead this country and I’m confident the American people agree with her as well.
REPORTER: Well, you say you’re sure she has the experience What experience does she have in the area of national security?
MCCAIN: Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in America. And we all know that energy is She’s well versed on this issue She also happens to represent state that’s right next to Russia aggressive behavior which is also something to be concerned about
REPORTER: Do you realistically think that you have any chance of winning Maine?
MCCAIN: Oh, I’d like to think so It has a tradition of independence I’d sure love to come there, so I’ll make an effort I’m going to be President of all Americans.
REPORTER: Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe has been in Congress even longer than you have
MCCAIN: I respect Olympia and Susan great Senators It just came down to some very close calls on this issue I think one of the Just one of the important aspects I have the greatest respect and affection
REPORTER: The issue that you’re pushing right now is change Does it really make sense, after 8 years of a Republican administration, Senator Obama If I can achieve in the Senate
MCCAIN: Senator Obama has never his party on any issue. If I can achieve taking on both party in Maine, excuse me in Alaska
REPORTER: Do you support that amendment?
MCCAIN:
REPORTER: So you do not agree with your own party, with your own party’s platform
MCCAIN: Safe and secure America, that’s my party, and that’s what I’m proud of.
REPORTER: Alright, we’re going to let that be the last word.
In a just amazing Time interview, McCain managed to answer hardly any of the questions he was asked. Of the ones he did, well, you be the judge.
Q: Some members of the [Iraqi] government have made it clear in the last month or two that they might want to withdraw before complete stability, before totally secure borders, before some of the completeness of victory as you described. Is there any change, do you think there is some wiggle room there because what you described with Petraeus was an end point that was rather complete — a peaceful, stable country.
From a story in the Dallas Morning News, McCain advisor John Goodman has proposed a novel solution to the problem of uninsured Americans: reclassifying as “insured”, based on how their bills will be paid. Not having anybody to pick up the bill, we can just create a name for that and call it “insured”! Story
Meanwhile it looks like Halliburton has been using slave labor to construct the US Embassy in Baghdad. Story
And the half-sister that Cindy McCain denies having, the one who inherited nothing when Cindy got the fortune, she’s pissed. She and her son are voting for Obama. Story
Nice details, and even interview footage from both John and Cindy. It’s not enough to say, “I take full responsibility,” when you haven’t yet accepted what it was you did.
John McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser and his business partner lobbied the senator or his staff on 49 occasions in a 3 1/2-year span while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The payments raise ethical questions about the intersection of Randy Scheunemann’s personal financial interests and his advice to the Republican presidential candidate who is seizing on Russian aggression in Georgia as a campaign issue.
McCain warned Russian leaders Tuesday that their assault in Georgia risks “the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world.”
Wait a minute. The Georgian government has apparently paid $800K to campaign insiders (and their associates) to lobby John McCain on this issue. And all they got was a tepid little denouncement and a speech cribbed from Wikipedia? Aside from all the impropriety on the part of the lobbyists who were working this angle, I’d say that the Georgians didn’t get much for their money. You’d think $800,000 could buy a real speech and influence somebody’s opinion, wouldn’t you?
We are in big trouble. McCain plagiarized parts of a foreign policy speech from Wikipedia.
You didn’t expect him to know anything about Georgia, did you? He still doesn’t know about the differences between Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
In a related story (background), Cindy McCain’s own “family recipes” recipes turned out to have been lifted directly from the Food Channel. Plagiarism must run in the family. Maybe that’s how he managed to squeak his way out of the Naval Academy fifth from the bottom.
Which brings us to the dangers of not knowing what you’re doing, food, and Wikipedia…
This video would not play for me on Youtube or the site I found it on. I hate the new Firefox, which grinds to a halt after a few hours. But I downloaded the video, because it is way too important not to show. Watch as John McCain’s grand unifying solution for everything is explained.
“There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it. That’s just a fact.” – Donald Rumsfeld
Yeah, I know the guy is way older than his opponent, and we don’t want to discriminate against somebody based solely on his age, but cripes. He started out at the bottom of his class, and since them he’s done nothing that he couldn’t have done without a lot of friends in powerful places and a ton of his wife’s money. If being a “regular guy” means you’ve got brain damage, then I don’t want a regular guy running this country. It’s about time we had a President who doesn’t have cognitive impairment. Is that too much to ask?
I’ve been reading this one so much this morning that I had to check to see if I posted on it already. Nope, so here goes.
In an interview on CBS, McCain was asked about the relationship between the escalation, err…”surge”, and how this was related to the “Anbar Awakening”, which has resulted in Shia and Sunni leaders working together for peace.
There are opinions. There are lots of right answers, and there are lots of wrong answers. McCain got this one completely wrong, and CBS edited it it out for him and made up a new answer for him out of cutting-floor footage.
But we have the original here in a little Keith Olberman YouTube. Enjoy! If you can’t enjoy, get mad as hell and do something about it. We do not need yet another incompetent puppet in the White House. Don’t forget, McCain has said if he is in the White House, Dick Cheney will be working for his Administration.
Let John McCain explain his position himself. Err… positions? He seems to have some sort of a running amnesia about his own actions and opinions on this thing.
“Would you be in favor of a referendum amongst the Iraqi people to make a decision whether US troops should stay or leave?”
“No, no more than I should have a referendum in the United States of America.”
“We talked about the majority of Americans wanting out of Iraq. At what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?”
“Well, again, I disagree with what the majority of American people want.”
The other day I got a recorded call about the McCain rally today in South Portland. The recording said that persons of all political persuasions were welcome, so what the heck, I pressed ’1′. The next day I got a call from a nice lady who gave me the specifics. She sounded a bit disappointed that I wasn’t bringing a crowd of supporters with me. McCain’s not the most popular guy in this part of the state. He’s not all that popular anywhere in the state, which always seems to go Democratic as a whole anyway.
I was surprised I was the only democratic mole at the rally, not to mention being one of the hated “bloggers”. Inside the yellow tape, my IMPEACH CHENEY baseball cap would undoubtedly have blown my cover had I worn it. The protesters were occupying their assigned space on the sidewalk above, while the cozy (<500 supporters) rally took place on the grounds of the new Maine Military Museum, in what looks to have been a converted pumping station.
I got a bunch of photos, as you can see. There wasn’t anything to video, but people were polite and allowed me to move around until I got the shot I was looking for.
We milled around not very long, and the bus showed up about 20 minutes early. It drove around the crowd, down below the platform. They started about 20 minutes early and finished just before the rain.
Olympia Snowe, Republican Senator, introduced Susan Collins, other Republican Senator, who bragged about how she traveled “everywhere” with McCain, including Antartica. Or was it the Arctic? She was a little confused on that point. That makes two of them, since McCain is really fuzzy on geographical distinctions, too.
I guess she’s been missing those important votes then? Because McCain has missed 51 votes in a row in the Senate.
I got to hear him say repeatedly that we “succeeded” in Iraq, past tense. Over. Done. Mission accomplished, I guess. What surprised me is that I heard him say that our “success” in Iraq has resulted in our limiting Iran’s influence in the region. What? Did somebody forget to tell him that Iran and Iraq are two different countries, Iran being the one we’re supposed to still be worried about?
And then he told this amazing story about patriotism and bravery.
‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ – by Senator John McCain
‘As you may know, I spent five and one half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. In the early years of our imprisonment, the NVA kept us in solitary confinement or two or three to a cell. In 1971 the NVA moved us from these conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as 30 to 40 men to a room.
This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change and was a direct result of the efforts of millions of Americans on behalf of a few hundred POWs 10,000 miles from home.
One of the men who moved into my room was a young man named Mike Christian.
Mike came from a small town near Selma , Alabama . He didn’t wear a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old. At 17, he enlisted in the US Navy. He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967. Mike had a keen and deep appreciation of the opportunities this country and our military provide for people who want to work and want to succeed.
As part of the change in treatment, the Vietnamese allowed some prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing.
Mike got himself a bamboo needle. Over a period of a couple of months, he created an American flag and sewed it on the inside of his shirt.
Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike’s shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event.
One day the Vietnamese searched our cell, as they did periodically, and discovered Mike’s shirt with the flag sewn inside, and removed it.
That evening they returned, opened the door of the cell, and for the benefit of all of us, beat Mike Christian severely for the next couple of hours. Then, they opened the door of the cell and threw him in. We cleaned him up as well as we could.
The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept Four naked light bulbs hung in each corner of the room.
As I said, we tried to clean up Mike as well as we could. After the excitement died down, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath that dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was my friend, Mike Christian. He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag. He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to Pledge our allegiance to our flag and country.
So the next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you must never forget the sacrifice and courage that thousands of Americans have made to build our nation and promote freedom around the world. You must remember our duty, our honor, and our country.’
Now, mind you, when I say “amazing”, “incredible”, or “unbelievable”, I am not using it to flatter. All these are adjectives that literally mean that it is not believable, not credible. The word “apocryphal” came to mind. So I thought it would be good to go to the internet and check on it.
When Snopes reported on the story in 2001, it was in response to a query about whether John McCain had used this story. The answer was, yes. He used the story, which is not to say it was true.
So we have to go back further. Two interesting facts in the story were that there were 28 or so men in the cell at the time it happened, so surely there would be some corroboration to its truthfulness.
In fact, there was. The story appeared almost verbatim in the following speech, and had previously appeared in a book of stories of Vietnam POW’s.
Honoring the American Flag
From a speech by Leo K. Thorsness, recipient of The Congressional Medal of Honor.
You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts an American Flag, accompanied by the words “These colors don’t run.”
I’m always glad to see this, because it reminds me of an incident from my confinement in North Vietnam at the Hao Lo POW Camp or the “Hanoi Hilton,” as it became known. Then a Major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from 1967-1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal.
After three years, however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket.
One day as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young Naval pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran under the prison wall. Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag. Over time, we all loaned him a little soap, and he spent days cleaning the material. We helped by scrounging and stealing bits and pieces of anything he could use.
At night, under his mosquito net, Mike worked on the flag. He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on the stars.
Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, “Hey gang, look here.”
He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it as if in a breeze. If you used your imagination, you could tell it was supposed to be an American flag. When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears.
About once a week, the guards would strip us, run us outside, and go through our clothing. During one of those shakedowns, they found Mike’s flag. We all knew what would happen. That night they came for him. Night interrogations were always the worst.
They opened the cell door and pulled Mike out. We could hear the beginning of the torture before they even had him in the torture cell. They beat him most of the night.
About daylight, they pushed what was left of him back through the cell door. He was badly broken; even his voice was gone.
Within two weeks, despite the danger, Mike scrounged another piece of cloth and began another flag. The Stars and Stripes, our national symbol, was worth the sacrifice to him.
Now whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then, thousands of miles from home, in a lonely prison cell, he showed us what it is to be truly free.
You see, the other thing that jumped out at me in the story was the part about him going right back in to sew another flag of red, white, and blue fabric. And since I’ve read books about the POW experience, I wondered, why were the guards giving them red fabric?
Well, of course, they weren’t. The part of the war that John McCain is saying that “POW’s” were held in solitary confinement is the time when he was in solitary, due to his family connections and political importance. The rest of the story more or less happened, more or less was true, except for the part about McCain being there. He wasn’t. It was a lie, rather like the stories increasingly-senile Ronald Reagan used to tell about his war experiences, which were actually just scenes from movies he had acted in.
