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”.

I didn’t expect Hillary Clinton to concede and/or endorse tonight, but I certainly didn’t expect her to use her speech as a big “fuck you” to Barack Obama. It’s customary to use the final big speech of a campaign to thank supporters and reflect on the campaign’s themes and accomplishments, but tonight’s speech went beyond that. The ways Clinton used her speech tonight to further divide the Democratic party makes it seem as if my last post was written with the help of a time machine. I wrote about Clinton using rhetoric to give voters the impression that “Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate”, now take a look at her speech :

Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.

You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story. You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House, and because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.

In all of the states you voted because you wanted a leader who will stand up for the deepest values of our party. A party that believes everyone should have a fair shot at the American Dream. A party that cherishes every child, values every family, and counts every single vote.

On the very night when Barack Obama sealed the nomination, she couldn’t even be humble enough to acknowledge the fact. Instead, she used her speech to once again insist that she won the popular vote, insist that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain, and make a thinly-veiled jab about Florida and Michigan.

Even worse is that her insistence that she wouldn’t concede was just another plug for her website :

Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.

As Kos notes, rather than be magnanimous tonight, she chose to stir up her supporters even more and end the night with a fundraising appeal. Even as she’s laying off staff and becoming more obvious about her desire for the VP slot, she’s trying to squeeze every last dollar she can out of her supporters to pay off her campaign debts (to herself). And she has the gall to follow up the plug for her website with this :

In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.

Yeah, and I’m sure the reminders about her “18 million” supporters aren’t implicit threats to take her voters and go home. If she truly cared about her party, rather than just HER campaign and HER supporters, she wouldn’t have picked tonight to pour salt the Democratic party’s open wounds and exploited her supporters passions (and disdain for Obama) to try to weasel her way into the VP slot and re-fill her bank account.

Embarrassing. Pathetic. Classless. Disgraceful.

With the superdelegate endorsements coming in fast, it’s looking like even a lackluster showing tonight in Montana and South Dakota will be enough to push Obama over the delegate threshold. All eyes now seem to be on Hillary Clinton. I don’t know if she’ll concede or not, but it would be nice if she at least started the process of unifying the party by cutting out all of her bullshit rhetoric that’s had the effect of subtly implying that Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate.

Hasn’t that been the whole point of Clinton’s campaign over the past few months? There was the insistence that caucuses are “undemocratic” and that Obama’s wins were in small states that “don’t count” and the insistence that Obama was trying to “disenfranchise” voters in Florida and Michigan and finally their long-standing obsession with the popular vote. The clear impression here is that Barack Obama may have technically won the nomination, but that Hillary Clinton is the true choice of the American people.

Which is a load of crap. If caucuses didn’t count, the Obama campaign would have diverted their organizational energy into other contests. If the small states didn’t count, they would have concentrated their resources in large states like Clinton did. If Michigan counted, Obama wouldn’t have removed his name from the ballot like many of his fellow candidates. And if the popular vote was the metric by which the Democratic party chose its nominee, both candidates would have completely ignored sparsely populated states (like SD & MT). Obama’s campaign has been about accruing delegates wherever he can get them, not winning the race according to some hypothetical rules that come out of the Clinton campaign.

By insisting that there’s something unfair about the way the Democratic party is choosing its nominee, Clinton has undermined Obama’s victory and has done more to weaken the party going into the convention than McCain could dream of. While I happen to agree with many of the points the Clintons make (caucuses are undemocratic, popular vote better metric than delegates), the relative unfairness of these particular points is trumped by something that’s even more unfair, changing the rules mid-game. In order to make her case to undeclared superdelegates, Clinton has exploited some of the legitimate grievances that some have about the nominating process (grievances that she only seems to have found religion on when their outcomes prove to be politically expedient), and in the process has fanned the flames of division within her party.

So if Hillary is truly serious about bringing the party together, it’s not enough to simply concede the race, but to reiterate to her supporters that the Democratic nomination is decided by delegate count alone and, more importantly, that Barack Obama won a fair fight to gain the nomination. In other words, she needs to have the humility to put her party ahead of her own ambitions.