10.05.08
John McCain speaks on the subject of attack ads
Here’s a great ad, with John McCain himself speaking on the subject of “negative attack ads.”
Holy cow!!! McCain: “There are going to be other wars” and Buchanan says McCain will be a “war president”
Look at these clips of John McCain talking about the wars to come!
I knew General Wesley Clark had been speaking out, but I hadn’t heard this quote before: “The truth is that, in national security terms, he’s largely untested and untried. He’s never been responsible for policy formulation. He’s never had leadership in a crisis . . . McCain’s weakness is that he’s always been for the use of force, force, and more force.”
And from his own party! From Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who says a McCain presidency scares him because he’s so erratic and hot-tempered.
From Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist who offers conservative commentary on MSNBC and The Laughlin Report: “There’s no doubt that John McCain is going to be a war president. . . . His whole career is wrapped up in the military. . . . He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening Iran, we’re gonna be in Iraq for a hundred years . . . ”
And the interview with Scott Ritter, the author of a book on Iran, leaves me almost speechless. He says basically, If we attack Iran with a nuclear weapon, we might as well choose in advance which American city we’re willing to sacrifice to nuclear retaliation because that’s definitely what’s going to happen.
As Obama would say, let me be clear: Promoting war has always been an effective way for a president to solidify a base of supporters behind him. If you paint a picture to the American public that there’s big, scary, bad guys out there who want to do America harm, Americans will get behind you in a push to war. We saw it in 2002 and 2003 with the build-up to the Iraq War, and as this compilation so brilliantly shows, afterward Bush had the gall to make jokes about it. With young people dying in Iraq, he has the nerve to joke about finding no weapons of mass destruction. And this man parades himself as a moral leader because he’s supposedly Christian! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Who would Jesus bomb?
Wow. Thanks to my friend, rolfer Debbie Mihal, for sending me the link to this video.
Here’s the SNL skit on the debate
Tina Fey does another wonderful job of Sarah Palin. “I think marriage is a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers.” Lots of references to speaking to a different question than the one that was asked. And there’s a great speech about a minute from the end about “the mainstream gotcha media with their follow-up questions, fact-checking or incessant need to figure out what your words mean or why you put them in that order.”
And Queen Latifah does a great job as Gwen Ifill. I don’t think Joe Biden was done as well.
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/vp-debate-open-palin-biden/727421/
Another brilliant Saturday Night Live skit
Another brilliant Saturday Night Live skit, this one on the legislation passed on Friday, called C-Span Bailout. It skewers President Bush and Barney Frank, and I got a real kick out of watching Nancy Pelosi tell President Bush to step to the back and describe him as the worst President ever.
Even better, Pelosi interviews a series of “victims” of the subprime mess. Watch the captions!
I haven’t been a regular SNL watcher in years. Back in the early years when John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Chevy and Chase and Lorraine Newman were on, SNL was required watching.
Sometimes in a crisis, a comedian or comedy team seems to come to the fore because it can really nail what’s happening, and that seems to be true of SNL right now.
John McCain loves war
I read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt some years ago. I don’t always remember the books I read, but this one left such a strong impression on me that I vividly remember several of the stories it told of the man who was president from 1901 to 1908. And perhaps in part because he was a vivid man, larger than life in many ways.
The first was of TR spending much of his childhood in bed with asthma and becoming a voracious reader. It was said of TR as an adult that he had a photographic memory and could quote long passages from memory of books he’d read years earlier. It was also said — and this was the image that remains in my memory — that he would sit on the porch of the White House in a rocking chair and converse with people who stopped by, discoursing for hours on a wide variety of topics.
The second was of his adventure walks. He would set out on a walk in a certain direction, and if that direction meant he had to walk through a pond with water up to his neck, then by God he walked through the pond with water up to his neck. And he often had with him a visiting head of state who was also required to walk through the pond with water up to his neck. Knowing that our current president thinks of TR as one of his heroes is enlightening here — wouldn’t you agree that George Bush’s experience of Iraq has been a stubborn walk with water up to his neck?
The third – and here’s where I think McCain’s admiration for TR should scare us to death — is that Teddy loved war. There’s a story of his riding his horse into battle and getting so caught up in what is often called “blood lust” that he paused when he saw a wounded man lying on the ground, got off his horse, shook the man’s hand, said, “Isn’t this splendid?” and rode on.
(I wrote an essay in 2003 about Bush’s admiration for TR.)
I got much the same impression from John McCain during the first presidential debate, and I expect to see more of it. McCain has been called “bellicose” and “belligerent” since his days at Annapolis. What’s even scarier is that recently the word “erratic” has been added to the descriptives for his behavior. During that debate, he derided Barack Obama for wanting to increase spending, yet he was clearly ready to go to war with Iran (remember him singing, just a few months ago, ”Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”?) and now is clearly ready to go to war with Russia over the situation in Georgia. War with Russia!!
My opinion is confirmed by conservative op-ed columnist George F. Will (who is a gazillion times better read than I), in What McCain Learned from the Rough Rider” in today’s Washington Post op-ed section.
Will writes that TR rejected the idea of competition without open conflict and wanted government to send men to war to redeem them from the dangers of effeminacy (for some bizarre reason, Microsoft Word’s thesaurus doesn’t offer any synonyms for effeminacy so I’ll offer my own: wimpiness). In Will’s words (bold for emphasis is mine):
“TR, who a critic said ‘keeps a pulpit concealed on his person,’ almost wore the word “corruption” threadbare before pastor McCain came along to make it the centerpiece of his political lexicon. TR, like McCain, rejected James Madison’s vision of politics driven — and freedom preserved — by peaceful conflict between competing factions. . . . [TR] wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor would pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put them in harness for redemptive collective action.
Such as war. TR’s response to William James’s idea of a ‘moral equivalent of war’ could have been: Accept no substitutes.”
The fourth memory from reading the biography of TR was what Mark Twain said of him: “You have to remember that the President is fourteen.” Emotionally immature, in other words. It was said of TR that his love of war finally broke him when his son Quentin went off to fight in World War I and got killed. Only then, it seems, did the tragedy of war sink in for Teddy.
10.04.08
McCain campaign plays the subliminal religion card
The news today is that the McCain campaign, knowing it’s at risk of losing the election, is going to step up its attacks on Barack Obama’s character. And Sarah Palin has fired the first shot, by accusing Obama of having a friend who was a “domestic terrorist.” It’s a thinly veiled attempt to remind people that Obama’s middle name is Hussein and therefore to suggest subliminally that he must be a Muslim. (Obama is a Christian, the grandparents who raised him were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, his mother was a religious skeptic, and Obama has never been a Muslim. More info here including CNN’s story confirming.)
An excerpt from the Associated Press story I heard on NPR:
“GOP operatives say the goal is to undercut Obama, likely by criticizing his associations with convict Antoin “Tony” Rezko and William Ayers.
“Indeed, Palin wasted no time Saturday in Colorado, saying: ‘Our opponent … is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.’ It was a reference to Ayers, a founder of a 1960s radical group [the Weather Underground].
“Obama’s campaign called Palin’s comments ‘desperate and false attacks’ intended to change the subject from the economy.
“It’s clear McCain’s campaign believes that making Obama supremely unacceptable in voters’ eyes may be the Republican’s best — if not only — shot at winning the presidency.
“The risk: Voters could be turned off if McCain goes too far.”
10.03.08
New York Times editorial on the Biden-Palin debate
I find this editorial in the New York Timeson last night’s Biden-Palin debate surprisingly partisan and surprisingly silent on the most important points about the debate, such as Palin’s suggestion that the Vice President’s powers be increased. And consequently a surprisingly unimportant addition to the post-debate analysis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/opinion/03fri1.html
However, I enjoyed this final paragraph for its penetrating comment on Palin’s candidacy, which reflects my own change in attitude toward McCain (a man I once admired) over the course of the campaign:
“In the end, the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin’s candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.”
FactCheck.org’s vidcasts and memories of the theater
This morning for the first time I watched the video version of FactCheck.org’s commentary on the campaign – what they call their “weekly vidcast.” Here’s the vidcast on last night’s Biden-Palin debate. http://www.factcheck.org/just-the-facts/the_2008_vp_debate.html
A script of the vidcast is apparently being prepared and will be available soon.
I find the vidcast useful because, particularly when I’ve watched the event they’re commenting on, they play a clip from the debate and then comment on its accuracy/inaccuracy. It helps me remember what exactly they’re checking on, and watching the video is easier and more pleasant than reading text.
The speaker is Emi Kolawole, their video editor. I was curious about her background and checked her bio at the FactCheck.org site. She has a BA in international relations (a field my daughter studied in college before getting a degree in Peace and Global Studies) and theater studies and has studied abroad in France and elsewhere. She has worked as a researcher for Congressional Quarterly and as a production assistant for “NOW with Bill Moyers.”
Another thing I learned — I’ve known about FactCheck.org for some years now, and I didn’t realize it was based at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania, where I once worked and did research. In fact, I didn’t know that Penn had an Annenberg Public Policy Center. During the 15 years I lived in the Philadelphia area, I worked for 3 years at Penn’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts as secretary to its director, Steve Goff. The Center was adjacent to the better-known Annenberg School of Communications, and the APPC’s website seems to say that it’s housed in the same building.
If you’ve ever read an article about the negative effects of television violence on children, you probably know of the Annenberg School of Communications because it was responsible for one of the most important studies done on that topic some years ago.
During those 3 years working at Penn, I did research on Thomas Paine that resulted in my article “Thomas Paine, Privateersman,” published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1977. It surprised me then, and it surprises me now, that I was able to do ground-breaking research on events that took place in Britain during the 1750s during the 1970s in a university library in Philadelphia while working as a secretary.
I remember my years at the Annenberg Center with great fondness; I think they were some of the best years I ever spent in an office. The Center at that time was a staging ground for productions going on to Broadway and a reprise for productions that had already been on Broadway or off-Broadway (or off-off-Broadway). I got to see a lot of plays and get to know a bit about the theatre, which was tremendously fun. I was working with people who had been bitten by the theater bug, as they called it. I wasn’t bitten in the same way, meaning that I haven’t felt compelled to keep up with theater ever since, though I still enjoy a play whenever I can afford one. I had been into theater in high school and was scheduled to appear in two reader’s theatre productions, Anouilh’s The Lark, about Joan of Arc, and The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame. I would have played Joan in the former and the Narrator in the latter, but our high school drama teacher, Bill Hugo, died suddenly of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve. There was no one else on the faculty who felt up to the challenge of the two plays, and they were never produced.
I’ve often wanted to try my hand at writing a play, and have written screenplays, but am well aware of how different the form of a play is and the fact that I’d have to spend a lot of time learning how to write a script for the stage. I spent several years in the late 1980s studying the Wright brothers in preparation for writing a screenplay about them and came to the conclusion that it would work much better as a stage play but that I wouldn’t have the skill to write it.
10.02.08
Signs
Some clever signs I’ve seen relating to Sarah Palin and John McCain. I think it’s so cool that people can think up such clever things to say on signs.
The Alaska Disasta
Don’t Insult My Pitt Bull
Wrong Woman, Wrong Message
I Live Next to Russia Too. Can I Be VP?
How’s That Abstinence-Only Education Working For You, Sarah?
I’m a Proud Community Organizer
I Vote with My Brain, NOT My Gender
McSame
My Daughter Deserves Better
Hey Sarah, Why Does Ethics Reform Apply to Everybody But You?
G. W. Bush with Lipstick
“God’s Will” Is Not a Foreign Policy
The Sarah I Know Would Have Fired Me For This
McCain/Palin, Unstable/Unable
War Is Not a Family Value, Sarah
Sarah’s Only for Sarah
Courtesy of http://bigshow.bigfolio.com/?s=000011662&t=0e6a8ae03101be65098418ccb735e4a1
The Biden-Palin debate
I watched the Biden-Palin debate tonight at the home of my friend Susan Claire, who treated me to some delicious homemade gumbo and salad and a gin and tonic. I didn’t want to watch the debate alone because, frankly, I was terrified. I was terrified both of Joe Biden making some huge gaffe and also of Sarah Palin getting away with murder.
I think Biden did well. And I think Palin did well for herself, too. She finally showed that she’s capable of answering a question with a coherent sentence. She made the bizarre suggestion that the Office of the Vice Presidency should increase in power, and she got a bunch of facts wrong, but each of her sentences had a subject and verb and a beginning and an end.
We were watching MSNBC, which I don’t watch because I don’t have cable, and I found the commentary by Keith Olbermann interesting. He pointed out how many times Palin avoided answering a question, and someone he interviewed pointed out that Gwen Ifill didn’t follow up to make sure somebody answered a question, and I agree.
I think what disturbs me most about both Palin and McCain is their reliance on Karl Rove’s favorite move: accuse the other guy of the worst tactics you yourself are using. So Palin accused Biden of having changed his position on an issue (when McCain has outdone himself on changing his positions on a variety of issues), of having expressed support for something before withdrawing support for it (and I was so wanting him to bring up the bridge to nowhere!), and of “pointing fingers” about things that have happened in the past, when McCain has excelled at doing exactly that.
That strategy has always been Rove’s most successful one. His chief protege (some might say puppet), George W. Bush, really excels at it, as we’ve seen these past eight years. If you were to look at Bush’s domestic policy, the last thing you would ever call it was compassionate. So of course they dubbed it Compassionate Conservatism. The name is both a lie and a bold attempt to undercut criticism by pretending to be precisely what it is not.
McCain and Palin seem to have picked up Rove’s banner, either from having studied it in the past or because Rove is busily advising them now, I don’t know.
I’ll be very interested to hear what the American public thinks about this debate. MSNBC ran a poll that showed most respondents thinking Biden did better than Palin did but also that it was unlikely to affect very many votes. We switched over to CNN a few times, and their poll said 51% of respondents said Biden did better, compared to 39% saying Palin did better.
I would definitely have liked to see Gwen Ifill pursue the candidates when they didn’t answer the questions they were asked. Jim Lehrer tried to do that in the presidential debate last Friday, and he didn’t have much success. Maybe Ifill figured she wouldn’t have any success with that either.