I'm tired of the 'spin' spin

It is getting pretty ridiculous when we can claim innocence for blatant lies by suggesting that we intended (A) but had no idea that (B) might go along with it.  That has been the entire defense of Iraq, the Swiftboat attacks in 2004 against Sen. John Kerry and seems to be Sen. John McCain's entire platform.

So that's what comes to mind when I heard this incredible news:  that a shadow group is sending out DVDs through the New York Times that are a racist, anti-Islam documentary.  According to Ali Gharib, these DVDs will reach 28 million Americans and the company that produced them, the Clarion group, suggests that they aren't trying to influence the election.

I'm sorry, but what else are you doing just over a month before the election, by sending out vile fear-mongering?  What else is there than that?  Are you next going to claim that it is coincidental that the DVD's subject mirrors some of the more disturbing elements of John McCain's platform?

It is funny, that the same week that McCain trashes the paper for being "in the tank" for Obama, they would except money for an "advertisement" of this sort.  It is funny that McCain is trying to play the refs when the refs aren't even paying close enough attention to how they are being played by anybody.  Oh, what craziness is this?

McCain's "base" no longer sharing the love

I found this today with the best headline ever: "Press Frustration With McCain Bubbles Over: 'Has Your Bus Become the No Talk Express?'.

We let Bush get away with this in 2000 and continued to let him manipulate the press (he is currently doing it over the $700B bailout).  But here is the press finally getting tired of being played.  And it just may cost him...

Racism and the Irish?

This is an interesting note. Senator John McCain has had many different positions on immigration reform, sometimes supporting undocumented workers and other times not. His position was most prominently changed after that recent immigration debate.

So now, the presidential candidate is in favor of giving immigrants a "path to citizenship" (ie. amnesty)...as long as they are Irish.

Irish.

McCain supports the Irish immigrants but no longer supports immigrants from Mexico and Latin America? Are you kidding me? What could possibly be different about immigrants from Ireland and Mexico? Hmmm...

So when can we actually deal with the racist elephant in the living room?

The scourge of the purge

In Michigan, as elsewhere, we are seeing the further advancement of the election tactic known as purging the voter rolls.

In advance of the 2000 election, the state of Florida passed an incredibly undemocratic law removing the rights of convicted felons to vote. This allowed the secretary of state (remember Katherine Harris?) to purge millions of voters from the rolls. They did it again in 2004, bringing their total purged well over 5 million.

This, as well as the broad discrepencies in exit polls and inconsistencies in many Florida districts brought the nation's attention to election procedures. This, of course, is a good thing. Republicans, however, turned their attention away from fixing the voting problems and turned instead toward caging and purging--two acts intended to bring down the number of people voting. These acts also disenfranchise the poor and the unrepresented in our culture. This action seemed to have the added effect of appearing to be the needed "election reform" that we wanted after watching the 2000 recount. They passed this off as the needed changes (because inconsistent voting machines should be blamed on having too many people voting?).

Now we have this coming to Michigan. This article here outlines the problem. It is illegal to purge voter rolls based on returned mail, and yet, the secretary of state (a Republican) is doing just that.

The problem, as with everything else, is that there is little time to do anything about this through the legal system. Urging Secretary Terri Lynn Land hasn't worked, and we are just over a month from the election. Even if a lawsuit by the ACLU gets a positive result before the election, it stilly may be impossible to get those individuals purged from the list back on it--and state law prevents them from reregistering that close to the election. Not to mention that the only way most of these people will learn that they have been purged from the voter rolls is when they show up to vote.

This is the height of unethical and immoral (not to mention illegal) procedure. True election reform must happen before the 2010 midterm elections, but if the last 8 years are any indication, I don't expect to see that happen. We must have the political will to make it a priority or injustice will be the standard.

Paul Reiser gets it.

In my last post, I decried McCain as a monster.  Here's another way to look at it supplied by Paul Reiser (yes the comedian), posted on the Huffington Post.  McCain as the childhood bully.

Adding to this the way the Right frames their discussions, there is a certain blogability to the infantiling of the American people by their Republican "Fathers"...perhaps that's next!

McCain: I’m being an ass because Obama said 'no' to me

Senator John McCain has revealed himself over the last few months to be something truly different as a presidential candidate. No, not a maverick. I'm talking more like, say, a monster or the political version of a serial rapist. Here's what I'm thinking. McCain has said several times, including in Thursday night’s forum on service that had Sen. Barack Obama agreed to tour the country doing joint town hall meetings, the campaign would have a different tone today. It is an interesting suggestion, and probably half-true, since McCain wouldn’t be an ass with Obama on the stage with him. But this forgets political advertising, the very thing that has set this negative tone. I can’t imagine the Republican National Committee and their surrogate 527s running feel-good ads in any event.


The simple problem with this argument is that McCain is comparing Xs and Os. Apples and oranges. Or better yet, Xs with 4s. Town hall meetings—like any in-person campaign event—is a time of conversation with people. Political advertising, on the other hand, the source of tremendous negative mudslinging by the McCain campaign, are one-sided attacks beamed directly into people’s homes without any opportunity for rebuttal. Doing the former in no way precludes the latter. If Obama and McCain did a town hall meeting every night together, we would still have political ads.


And this leads to the grotesque underside of McCain’s argument: if you examine McCain’s comment from the other perspective you see that he is suggesting that because Obama did not acquiesce, he was forced to attack him viciously with lies and slander. The heart of McCain’s argument is, essentially, “she shouldn’t have worn that dress”. He is saying 'I was forced to become a monster because a) I didn’t get my way and b) Obama was allowed to exercise his own judgment.'


This, more than anything I have seen, exposes the darkness within the heart of McCain. It shows how he deals with failure, disagreement, and disappointment. It shows how cynical he is and how little he trusts others. It demonstrates not only an unwillingness to work with those with which he disagrees, but an unwillingness to deal with them humanely and decently. Like the recent article that encourages us to tilt our understanding of McCain to who he was before he was a POW (a bomber pilot, eager to kill thousands of civilian Vietnamese in collateral damage and direct attacks), the recent weeks have exposed John McCain—and the true monster that resides in his soul.

McCain Campaign: A House of Cards

The truth of the house of cards is that it always looks sturdy. It looks like a regular house. Or at least like a strangely-patterned one. It looks like it is strong, well-built, and of appropriate significance—until you blown on it, sneeze near it, or say, walk on the floor within a 20 feet of it.

The truth of the Republican smear machine is that they’ve built the McCain-Palin ticket like a house of cards. Our brains tell us to not trust them (for so many reasons, but let’s just say this: hypocrisy), our guts tell us to worry about them, and yet our hearts seem won over by the tails of gallantry, self-sacrifice, and “realness”. At least that’s what most of us are left with. The corporate media feels comfortable pretending as if they play no part in this, even though they spent the entire Democratic convention trying to expose some underground plot by Hillary’s secret army and the entire Republican convention fawning over the supposed “Tina Fey lookalike”. And this week we had the first public interview by Gov. Sarah Palin, which will do more to inspire confidence in the status quo than it will expose Palin’s true character. A letter circulating around the Internet, written by a Wasilla, Alaska native that knows her, is certainly doing a better job of that than Charlie Gibson seems capable of.

In truth, McCain-Palin are offering us very little reason to support them. In fact, in last night’s event, John McCain was asked about the negative tone of the campaign so far, with the moderator stopping short of nailing McCain on setting that tone. McCain then proceeded to put the blame on Obama, as he has over the last week and a half saying “if he had only agreed to the town hall meetings I suggested.” I don’t think I would have gotten away with that at home if I made a mess and blamed it on my sister: who was in the other room at the time. But the worst of it is that McCain actually stated that the way we know how tactics work is the way people vote; that the winning strategy determines future campaign strategies. What McCain all but admits is that he is running an almost entirely negative and schizophrenic campaign this year because a) it worked in the past and b) if it works again, Republicans will use it in 2012.

But here is where the house of cards analogy comes in: the media is obsessed with polls showing McCain and Obama in a dead heat (despite ample reason to doubt the veracity of the polling, especially an over-representation of Republicans polled in the recent batch) and with the Palin and convention bump. At the same time, they are reluctantly reporting on Palin’s baggage and occasionally pointing out one of McCain’s lies. BUT, they seem to be tied to this need to not be seen as picking on McCain, so they have to either tread lightly or makeup a story to run about Obama to “balance” it out. As of today, the corporate media are the unwitting accomplices to McCain’s lie, lie, suck up, and lie some more strategy. The pessimists in us want to give up—the corporate media isn’t going to do their jobs…unless they do.

What happens to the McCain campaign when somebody gives him the tough questions and makes him answer them, not with lies or pander (The McCain robot’s seemingly only two settings) but with accountability for what he says and for what those around him say. What happens if reporters are actually allowed access to Palin in the way expected of any other candidate? She’s been in the spotlight for a week and a half and has already lied enough times to fulfill an entire term in the House of Representatives under Tom Delay. What happens when the corporate media actually wakes up? All it would take is the slightest movement and all of the cards come crashing to the table.