In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”
John McCain is “proud of people who come to his rallies”? Like the guy with the monkey doll labeled ‘Obama’?
I suspect that the reason the McCain campaign was not particularly concerned about racist and threatening shouts from the crowd—”Terrorist!” “Kill him!” “Off with his head!” (Who says that?) and “Defenestrate him!” (Okay, I made that one up…) is because the shouters were plants. I saw a “heckler” take the mike from McCain and then carry on a discussion with him and the crowd, clearly scripted.
But the warmup speakers that were screaming “Barack HUSSEIN Obana” at Palin’s rallies and her crazed Hitleresque whipping up the crowed into a foam-at-the-mouth frenzy—that was not just a little bit of theater. Only once did McCain respond to someone who said something untrue, and Palin has never tried to calm down her crowds.
But remember what McCain said during the debate about people at Obama rallies shouting threats about him and not being told to stop… proof, please. As they say on digg.com, Video or it didn’t happen. Does McCain live in a different reality from the one I live in? You know what I think the answer to that question is…
While we’re at it, here’s a link to a story about how Cindy McCain, tired of not getting cell phone reception at the ranch, which is in the middle of nowhere, asked Verizon and AT&T to do something about it, and they got two cellphone towers! Free! Just like if you and I complained about our reception, right?
While I’m on a roll here, here’s the deal with ACORN.
And speaking of plants, hmm. Here’s what “Joe the Plumber” had to say today on TV:
“It floored me. It’s not something I expected, ever,” Wurzelbacher told “Good Morning America” on ABC. Though he wouldn’t say for whom he was voting, Wurzelbacher said Obama had a “very socialist view” of taxes “and that’s incredibly wrong.”
And then there’s the flag pin controversy. Earlier in the campaign, the McCain camp was snarking out rumors that Obama was unpatriotic based on the fact that he was not always seen in public wearing a flag pin on his lapel. Then, come the first debate, who was the one not wearing a flag pin? McCain, of course. How did his handlers miss that?
And then after last Friday’s VP debate, Fox News made the ultimate flag pin comparison.
Palin won the debate because of the size of her flag ‘pin’! And since it was a brooch, not a pin, it also qualified as a ‘shiny object’!
Unfortunately for Palin, the pin doesn’t seem to have scored enough points to have won the debate with any of the independent voters she was trying to snag for the campaign. Probably the flag pin was not large enough, and maybe it wasn’t sparkly enough. But we can fix that for her. She needs a placard to hang around her neck. Do you think that would help?
So McCain was supposed to be in the “Cone of Silence” during Obama’s questioning, but actually he was sitting in a limousine en route until just before showtime. At first his campaign admitted as such, and then they denied it and accused the journalists who they agreed with in the morning of making it up later in the day.
So why was McCain in the limousine when Cindy was already in the audience?
I have heard people say that watching the show as it unfolded would have given him the questions and enabled him to put together those on-the-tip-of-his-tongue answers. You have got to be kidding. John McCain? Compose those scripted answers in the time it took to hear Obama’s candid responses?
No, not possible.
Does anybody think his team might have been listening to Obama and prepping John over the phone? I think they were probably doing that, but face it. McCain’s answers didn’t seem to be countering what Obama had to say. It was more like a stump speech somebody had adapted.
Both parties knew the topics that were going to be covered. But clearly McCain knew exactly the questions that were going to be asked.
Relevant section: minute 2:00 to 2:56. Please watch and see for yourself. Take note of the hand chops, he is answering three questions. Watch Warren’s facial expressions, he looks surprised. Watch McCain’s face when Warren makes his comment about answering so fast and about poker, he sure looks like the kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar.
Yes, there are some below who call this speculating. McCain’s old, who cares if they gave him the questions? He needs a little help. It does us no good to cry foul. Let’s give him a pass. This makes us look bad. There is no proof. And on and on. To which I say: grow some and open your frickin’ eyes! If they both had the questions, fine. If only one of them did, then that is cheating, pure and simple. I simply want to find out. And so should you.
And Warren knew that McCain had not been sequestered anywhere. He’d been in a limo that serves as a full communications center.
Now here is is the “off the cuff” performance we normally expect from McCain, the one that results when he has to digest a new question before responding:
We’ve already covered the Solzhenitzn plagiarism and fabrication. (Well I thought we did, but I guess it was in a comment I wrote someplace last night. I covered the Mike Christian plagiarism I caught on a stump speech, and the “Wikipedia wonder” speech.) Here‘s the link to the story, which some people say this whole “Cone of Silence” brouhaha is supposed to cover. But as has been pointed out, the “Cone of Silence” itself was stolen from the 60′s comedy spy show “Get Smart”. Hmm, do you suppose the McCain campaign inserted that into the event itself, in addition to planning the entire event?
Not to mention the fact that the Cone of Silence never worked in the tv show, either.
Time to call a lie a lie. Just because Sean Hannity thinks that McCain should get a lifetime “get out of responsibility” pass for having been a POW doesn’t mean electing a guy with no ethics for president is a good idea. Again.
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?
Ivins, of course. Bruce E. Ivins, not Molly, who is also dead and sadly missed.
It certainly appears that one researcher working alone could have done all the technical stuff involved with this. They decided that before they spent untold millions of dollars focusing on the wrong guy, who is now $5.2 million richer for the harassment.
Maybe they have evidence proving he was the one who wrote all the little terrorist letters and notes that pointed to Islamic terrorists.
But it’s kind of hard to figure how he could also be the four separate highly-placed officials who were feeding disinformation to ABC during the panic, the network’s broadcasting of which was undoubtedly a major part of the cause of the anthrax panic, as well as the subsequent investigative focus on pinning it on somebody, anybody.
I’d like to rank some of the possibilities, but we have multiple threads here. So it’s not a simple “either/or” situation. Let’s just see what is probable (according to my limited knowledge here) and I’ll suggest alternatives where the probabilities seem to require them.
I’m really only trying to make you think and do your own research, not cover such a vast topic comprehensibly.
Did Ivins work alone on the Anthrax-handling part of it?
Could be.
Did Ivins work alone making and mailing out those terrorist notes and letters?
Could be.
Did Ivins carry off the impersonation of four different highly-placed government officials that served up false information to ABC News, which they turned around and fed to the public?
Nope. Didn’t happen that way.
Okay, so what might have happened?
Did government officials use this as a cover for disseminating propaganda intended to convince the public Iraq was involved, even though they had no idea what was going on?
Maybe, but it seems a little far-fetched, considering that the truth might be uncovered at an inconvenient time and come back to bite them.
Did ABC make up their informants after getting tips from Ivins?
Now there’s a possibility. How much do I trust the journalistic integrity of ABC? Not a whole lot. Let’s mark that “strongly possible”.
Did the government participate in the incident fully, guiding the development of propaganda and working to keep the investigation looking in the wrong place, while knowing that if that failed they could probably pin it on him and claim he was a crazy loner? And if worst came to worse, he could be found dead, so as not to turn evidence?
Umm…He did turn up dead, didn’t he?
This should sound like fiction, but unfortunately it does not sound nearly enough like fiction. Is there anyone working in the current Administration who has no ethics, no limits, and no respect for the American public, someone who might have participated in something like this?
I don’t like “conspiracy theories” that dig deep and throw a wide net in an effort to explain something that has a very simple explanation. But this does not have a simple explanation.
The case is made that this is plausible. In the absence of an apology by ABC for making it all up, I’d have to put my money on the last one. And even if ABC did apologize I’d have to take their apology with a grain of salt, since we have to consider the possibility that they might have been knowingly in on it, too.
The Jed Report has posted comments on a Think Progress analysis of McCain campaign claims about health care. I was going to write something about comments about this report, but then I got around to reading it.
Gah. Everybody should read it.
McCain’s health care “proposal” is vague at best. But in the absence of anything solid, this looks like a reasonable analysis to me. However, the more I thought about it, the more I figured a flow chart would be better.
I’m pretty impressed. A while back I made a few political lolz, but there was only so much time in the day and I stopped. Now I find there’s a GIANT SITE of progressive political lolz. I’m going to be there for weeks catching up. These are even better than lolcats if you’re left-leaning.
It looks like the disgraced former Attorney General is having a bit of trouble finding work in the legal profession. The Presidents former hatchet boy has been reduced to giving speeches for universities that pay lip service to freedom of expression by bringing in the occasional lightning rod neocon crackpot speaker. Not that it’s a bad living, but it’s a major step down from being in line to be the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court.
Times are tough all over. But nobody will touch him. Between the fact that he’s under investigation—and undoubtedly will continue to be under investigation when the regime change happens—and the fact that his excuse for his apparent lies seems to be memory loss—again, not a characteristic valued in lawyers, no reputable law firm that cares about its reputation will touch him. And as a wag put it, he isn’t even good enough at lying to work on Wall Street.
There’s just something unreal about the situation, since his reputation is so bad that any firm that hires him is going to look like they’re just doing it as a sleazy favor to repay him for his loyalty, ie, his willingness to break the law for the President.
Times are tough all over. But nobody will touch him. Between the fact that he’s under investigation—and undoubtedly will continue to be under investigation when the regime change happens—and the fact that his excuse for his apparent lies seems to be memory loss—again, not a characteristic valued in lawyers, no reputable law firm that cares about its reputation will touch him. And as a wag put it, he isn’t even good enough at lying to work on Wall Street.