Remember when John McCain admitted that he’s computer “illiterate“? Now his tech guys are trying to defend the fact that their candidate isn’t familiar with the most culturally significant communications medium in our lifetimes :

Pressed again on McCain’s tech savvy, he defends his candidate.

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” he says.

“You actually do,” former Edwards blogger Tracy Russo responds, suggesting he try to explain Twitter to his grandmother and then ask her how that applies to governing.

“John McCain is aware of the Internet,” says Soohoo. “This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues.”

The fact that McCain would consider the internet one of a range of “issues” is hilariously out of touch. That’s like bragging that Richard Nixon was familiar with the television “issue” in 1960 or that FDR’s fireside chats were panders on the radio “issue”. I don’t expect John McCain to start his own blog or have a personal Facebook account, but a lack of experience with a communications medium this ubiquitous is pretty revealing. After eight years of a president with zero intellectual curiosity, I find it astonishing that we have a prospective leader who wouldn’t want to get a little hands-on time with what has amounted to a communications revolution. I know if I was alive a hundred years ago and everyone around me was gushing about this new-fangled invention called the telephone, I’d probably put down the telegraph needle and give it a shot.

In other words, the medium really is the message in this case, and John McCain doesn’t seem to be interested in either.

I was pretty sure Newsweek’s poll from last week showing a stunning 15-point lead for Obama was an outlier, but I guess not. The LA Times is showing a 12-point lead. Apparently the “running on a platform nearly identical to the most unpopular President ever” strategy isn’t working out as well for John McCain as he’d hoped. Even worse for him is the alternative, changing his positions for politically-safe ones, plays right into the “McCain is a flip-flopper” storyline (which has the added advantage of being true).

Democrats don’t like McCain. Independents sorta like McCain, but they like Obama much more. And Republicans don’t really like McCain, but are grudgingly supporting him because they accidentally made him the nominee. Not exactly the sort of trends you can use to win elections.

Y’know it’s funny that all of the Republicans who are wetting themselves about Barack Obama rejecting public financing seemed to have no problem with huge financial disparities when they were the ones outspending the Democrats in 2000 and 2004. Hell, at the time, they were the ones who were the loudest opponents of campaign finance laws, insisting that giving corporate interests the ability to buy elections was a “free speech” issue. Now that the tables are turned, however, they can’t complain loudly enough about Obama’s apparent “hypocrisy” for rejecting public financing after previous expressing support for it. Needless to say, it’s hard to take someone’s complaints of hypocrisy seriously when they’re committing and even more egregious form of insincerity by conveniently failing to mention that John McCain not only backed out on a binding promise to accept matching funds in the primary, but that in not binding himself to the public financing commitments that he made, John McCain’s campaign is breaking the law.

Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama is under no legal obligations to accept public financing. Does that mean Obama’s ability to raise more money gives him an unfair advantage in the general election? Welcome to our world, Republicans. Boo-frakkin-hoo.

I hate to put myself in the minority here, but I can’t agree with DailyKos, Open Left, or MyDD about the new MoveOn ad. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that it’s “borderline shameless”, but it’s really bad. Overly-precious, ham-handed, cheezy…uggh…just really bad.

I agree that the ad raises issues that are perfectly in-bounds, does it have to do so in such a cloying way? The only positive thing I can say about the ad is that it’s so obnoxious and potentially controversial that it might get tons of free airtime.

That said, I’ll take mildly annoying liberal activists over noxious shit like this any day.

If you know any Clinton supporters who are still threatening to vote for McCain due to some perceived sexism from the primary, feel free to point them to one of these buttons from the same group :



Ugghh…

Recently Barack Obama promised “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” We’ll see if that pans out, but his online supporters certainly aren’t shy. In response to recent reports that conservatives are planning to bash Michelle Obama into the ground, 23/6 has a new campaign :

So as a public service, from now until the second Tuesday in November, every time Michelle Obama is unfairly attacked or portrayedby the media or a Republican-backed 527 group, 23/6 will remind you of this terrifying and true fact about Cindy McCain.

For at least the second time in this campaign, John McCain has had a YouTube-moment in which he accidentally tells the truth about his position on Iraq :

Every time he gets caught advocating a permanent American presence in Iraq, the same exchange seems to happen :

Democrats : John McCain wants to stay in Iraq forever.

McCain : I never said I was for endless war.

Democrats : Neither did we. We want to bring the troops home. You, apparently, do not.

McCain : As long as casualties are down, it’s okay. We’ve got troops in Germany and Korea…

Democrats : Ummm…yeah, but we’re against that too.

In short, John McCain’s strategy is to distract people from his moment of inadvertent candor by claiming he was being misinterpreted or taken out of context, but it’s pretty obvious where he stands. John McCain favors having a permanent presence in Iraq, similar to what we have in other parts of the world. In Korea, our presence is there to enforce the stalemate, while our bases in Germany and Japan are remnants of WW2 intended to keep those countries from getting any ideas. And that’s the whole point of the McCain/Bush plan for occupying the Middle East. They want a permanent presence in the region as a launching ground for other wars.

Needless to say, the reason John McCain continues to downplay this position and try to use diversionary tactics every time it’s brought up is because Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to permanent occupation of Iraq :

“From what you know about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, how much longer would you be willing to have large numbers of U.S. troops remain in Iraq: less than a year, one to two years, two to five years, five to ten years, or as long as it takes?”

Less than a year 42%
One to two years 21%
Two to five years 9%
Five to ten years 1%
As long as it takes 20%
Should leave now (vol.) 3%
Unsure 4%

That’s only 1 in 5 who would support McCain’s hypothetical 100-year occupation of Iraq. To put things in perspective, the centerpiece of John McCain’s plan for Iraq, an issue in which he apparently excels, has a lower approval rating than Dick Cheney (”Hell Yeah!“).

Is it any wonder why John McCain keeps trying to change the subject every time his plans for Iraq pop up? If he was truly candid, he’d lose the election in a landslide.

This will be fun while it lasts :

There’s more than enough reasons to oppose John McCain, so I hope as the general election goes on, we can avoid joining conservatives in delving into this muck :

Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. “There’s evidence, evidence, evidence,” Perot claims. “McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.”

Oddly, this was the second time I’ve seen the POW issue pop up in the past week. Earlier, I saw it mentioned in the last two minutes of this video created by a Ron Paul supporter (via JedReport) :

I’m not being disingenuous when I say that attacks on John McCain’s time as a P.O.W. are unseemly and should be avoided. Any mentions of John McCain and Vietnam are a rabbit hole Democrats would be ill-advised to jump down. I don’t mention this because I’m trying to be high-minded, but because these assertions are largely unprovable and only highlight the military record that John McCain hides behind to help distract people from the fact that he’s a hot-headed, ethically-challenged, war-mongering phony who doesn’t know his ass from a hole the the ground. The “he said, she said” accusations about McCain’s time as a P.O.W. won’t really settle anything and are overshadowed by his three decade record of being a shameless panderer and faux moderate who, despite his self-righteous rhetoric about working across party lines, has an overwhelming record of voting with Republicans and helping dig the hole we’re stuck in now.

The Democratic primary in 8 minutes :

Battlestar Galactica in 8 minutes :

For all of the vitriol that I’ve thrown in Hillary Clinton’s direction, it’s nothing compared to my contempt for John McCain. I don’t know if he’s been a millionaire in Washington D.C. for so long that it makes him completely tone deaf to the experiences of others or if he’s just a world class dickhead, but it takes a superhuman level of gall for him to go to New Orleans, which still hasn’t fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina, and say this :

The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas. Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us. That type of change doesn’t trust Americans to know what is right or what is in their own best interests. It’s the attitude of politicians who are sure of themselves but have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people. That attitude created the unresponsive bureaucracies of big government in the first place. And that’s not change we can believe in.

Here’s a shining example of what happens when McCain is called upon to break with his party and fix the “unresponsive bureaucracies of big government” (via Mark Ambinder):

That was McCain in 2005, two weeks after the destruction of New Orleans, voting in lockstep with his party to avoid investigating just what went wrong. The same John McCain who had the temerity to use New Orleans as a backdrop to bash Barack Obama joined George W. Bush in his opposition to a plan to “examine the Federal, State, and local response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina…and make immediate corrective measures to improve such responses in the future”.

Two and a half years later, in general election mode, John McCain changed his tune :

“We know we didn’t have the right kind of leadership … where government agencies were getting information from watching cable television rather than have a flow of information,” McCain said during an event at Xavier University in New Orleans.

“It was not only a perfect storm as far as its physical impact … it was a perfect storm as far as the federal, state and local governments’ inability.”

“Never again will there be a mismanaged natural disaster,” he said, later assuring the crowd that “it will never happen again in this country; you have my commitment and my promise.”

John McCain has always had the “guts” to break ranks with his party and say the obvious when he’s being flattered by the media and if it’s politically convenient, but when the people of New Orleans needed him, he refused to take a stand against his President and party and demand answers. Of course, holding the President’s feet to the fire might just invite unpleasant reminders about what both men were doing while the people of New Orleans were drowning and the rest of us were glued to our televisions :

While citizens in the Gulf Coast were begging for help, John McCain had a birthday party. Two weeks later, when the American people demanded answers, he joined his fellow Republicans in helping protect the President. Now that he’s running for President, he finally recognizes the “perfect storm” of governmental failure, but do we really want a President who stands in the way of government accountability?

John McCain is in the midst of trying to give voters the impression that he, like Barack Obama, is an agent of change, but when the American people needed him to show some leadership, he failed. If John McCain was the great leader he claims to be, he would have supported the Clinton-sponsored and Obama-supported efforts to examine the failures at every level of government in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I suppose we should be grateful that John McCain eventually realized what a monumental disaster Katrina’s wake represented, but as far as I’m concerned, changing your mind long after you could have made a difference is the “wrong kind of change”.