The Ayatollah Would Approve!

Since when does U.S. citizenship hinge on church membership? Margaret Doughty must wonder "what happened to her country" .....the one she's lived in for 30 years.  The Huffington Post fills us in.

McNasty: Not This Time!

We have all heard John McCain and Sarah Palin's personal, scurrilous attacks against Barack Obama.... trying to tie him to terrorists, accusing him of being somehow not like us. You know, the usual GOP Swiftboat Rovian tactics of personal destruction that have scarred the presidential-campaign landscape the last eight years.

Obama asserts in his campaign speeches that those tactics will no longer work with American voters.... "Not this time." Seems as though he is right. "Poll Says McCain Hurts Bid By Using Attacks." (NYTimes)

"The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found.... Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 percent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain."

And, something else those sharp personal attacks of McCain's have done, they have sobered the former fawning soft-ball journalists who rode the Straight Talk Express who hadn't really vetted McNasty and caused them to look more deeply into McCain's own relationships.

For example, today the Huffington Post reports that "McCain Transition Chief Aided Saddam in Lobbying Effort." Now this goes way beyond an Obama acquaintanceship with someone who has no input or influence on his campaign. THIS IS McCAIN'S CHOSEN TRANSITION CHIEF!

In an exclusive, the HP explains: "William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government."

Yes, McCain is pointing fingers when in reality he should be questioning his own judgment when it comes to those with whom he surrounds himself.

But then McCain evidently is staying true to his real nature.... at his campaign stop in Virginia a couple of days ago before he started his stump speech he recognized a couple of people in the crowd, including, to quote: "My dear friend George Allen is here today."

That's right. His dear friend George "Macaca" Allen who was caught on tape a couple of years ago ridiculing someone in his audience who looked different, to him, than a real American. Allen lost that campaign.

Evidently McCain didn't learn a thing from what happened to his dear, dear, friend.

November 4.

McGrumpy vs. O"bam"a

In last night's first presidential candidates debate, John McCain wiped away any doubt that he is the Man of the Century.... the last century.

As Jacob Heilbrunn opines, "For someone who purports to represent change, McCain offered muddled arguments that are almost as old as he is himself. By focusing so narrowly on the unpopular Iraq War, McCain is almost surely speeding up his own inevitable decline in the polls. It was Barack Obama who came across as the insurgent seeking change, while McCain represented the Republican establishment.

Obama landed the crushing blows by pointing out the obvious: the Bush administration's, and by extension McCain's, obsession with Iraq for the past eight years has only succeeded in crippling American power and security. McCain, he noted, has been wrong, over and over again, in predicting that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that there would be no real ethnic enmities inside it. As Obama announced that he would target and kill Osama bin-Laden, McCain could only stare in mute stupefaction." (Huffington Post)

Unable to look Obama in the eye, the nasty-old-man routine, and warmed-over stump speech lines by McSame were the stuff of an unpresidential temperament and a third-rate mind.

Heilbrunn points out that McCain's "grandfatherly tone was supposed to provide reassurance that he would guide the American foreign policy tiller with a sure hand, while Obama would capsize. But whether it's Russia or the Middle East, McCain's unctuous tone tonight could not disguise the fact that he's even more bellicose than Bush himself. Obama, by contrast, wants to begin the overdue job of restoring America's image abroad. All McCain proved once more is that he knows full well how to continue the Bush legacy of losing friends abroad and alienating people."

Even, astoundingly, Spain. A NATO ally. Who McCain says he'll not promise meet with in the White House. But then, he can't back off of that position because he thought Spain was in "this hemisphere" and by placing it in South America he would then have to be careful about their politics. Pathetic. McCain's only a half-step ahead of, as he describes her, his "maverick" running mate Sarah Palin, who thinks Alaska's proximity to Russia, and you know Putin flying over and stuff, makes her a foreign policy expert.

After McCain's suspending-my-campaign-and-cancelling-debate stunts of the last several days, it wasn't surprising to have confirmed that he doesn't have the temperament to be president. Obama won.... by a presidential smile.

November.

McCain Not Ready for Prime Time?

John McCain wants to duck Friday's debate with Barack Obama.

As the Huffington Post points out in McCain Wants a Time Out - But Why? .... even McCain's announcement of the "idea of uniting the campaigns to find a bipartisan solution to the Wall Street crisis wasn't even McCain's idea."

At 8:30am this morning Obama called McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, McCain returned Obama's call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement.

Then, McCain held a press conference trying to make it look like the joint statement was his idea and urging the cancellation of Friday's debate so he can rush to D. C. to focus on the rescue package.

Since McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any other Senate member except for Tim Johnson who had major brain surgery, casting a single vote in the five months since April 9... his motives seem suspect. McCain even admitted yesterday that he had not even read the administration's three-page $700 billion bailout proposal.

It seems it would be much more useful for the country to hold the debate which will be viewed by up to 100,000,000 people, giving both McCain and Obama the opportunity to explain to this large audience their positions on this financial crisis.

Is it that McCain just isn't ready for prime time on this and other issues?

McCain's "Waldo" Economics

Where's McWaldo?

We used to find John McCain at the economic poker table with his corporate cronies, a high-stakes gambler betting on deregulation of financial institutions until.... well.... the markets collapsed as criminally reckless mega financial institutions committed subprime-suicide when left to their own deregulated greed.

So.... now you'll find McWaldo on his campaign soap box preaching the joys of federal regulation and calling for the firing of the unfirable SEC chief.

He also used to place his Wall Street-backed bets on privatizing Social Security... he was a BIG supporter of privatizing Social Security with stock market securities, advocating in 2004, "Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits."

Well.... this is over time. Hoping for voter and media amnesia.... McCain Denies Social Security Comments (Huffington). Yes, our elusive McWaldo said this June, "I'm not for quote privatizing Social Security, I never have been, I never will be."

As Eugene Robinson points out today in Flunking Economics, "John McCain was telling the truth when he said that economics wasn't his strong suit." (WaPo)

And, it seems a policy-wandering, clueless McWaldo proved his point this week.

On Monday McCain insisted that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," followed by rhetoric about AIG, the behemoth insurance company that was teetering on the brink.... "I do not believe that the American taxpayer should be on the hook for AIG, we cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else."

But, within hours, in the latest corporate-welfare move by the Bush administration, the federal government bailed out AIG to the tune of $85 billion.... so McCain quickly reversed himself, saying the government was "forced" to make this move.

Not even his own advisers have confidence in McWaldo's fitness for the job. As Robinson points out, "Adding insult to injury, one of McCain's most vocal campaign surrogates former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina - volunteered that McCain wasn't qualified to run a major corporation."

You probably won't see her on the stump for McCain again anytime soon.

Besides bad advice from his career-lobbyists campaign staff, it seems McCain's major problem is that he just wants the presidency too much. Voters used to think they knew exactly where McCain stood on the issues.... they could pick out their McWaldo in any political landscape.

No more. McCain has squandered the best thing he had going for him in his quest to get the presidency for his sake, not ours.... he squandered his reputation for standing on principal.

His Straight Talk Express is now careening wildly about the countryside trying to please voters by taking the latest popular detours on hot issues.

Would someone please send McWaldo a striped stocking cap so we can find him in the good ol' boy crowd....

Bush's Golf Story....

Oh boohoo. The Decider's big sacrifice for the troops in Iraq.... he gave up golf. (Huffington)

But did he?

In an interview with Politico last week President Bush laid the heavy one on us.... "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf." He said he made the decision in August 2003 after the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Well.... he almost gave it up. He played a round on October 13 of that year. Maybe he forgot.

Or, maybe it's another nose-growing Bushism. You see, Boy George suffered a minor muscle tear in his right calf which had healed by August 2003, but he was still having problems and said he suspected he had a tear in September of that year.

It hurt him to run.... he gave that up.... his calf hurt, his knees ached. Gave up golf for the troops.... tell us another one.

If only The Decider had quit the presidency and taken up golf....