Endorsements

At this point, you gotta kinda feel bad for McCain. I mean, what a time for Darth Vader to endorse...

New Special Comment

Maverick

THE Beach Book of 2008: Black Coffee, Staring at the Walls

I know what I'll be reading, aside from horrid style manuals, sunning myself in the Grand Caimans...

Actually, with the price of gas, I can't even get to the Grand Vic Riverboat for under a twenty, and that's only 45 minutes a way. Closest I'll get to a beach is if I quit eating, I might be able to make it to The Beach Water Park-in August. But I'll be reading in the simulacra :

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

Oh sure, it was the liberals that did this to our country:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

It's instructive to,of course, remember the culpability in perpetuating this lie, these rationale, which did not shock this magic user, but did, evidentally, shock Senator Clinton, the smartest woman in the world, fooled by fools. Balls deep in this culpability, but not shocked, is John McCain, who was just happy to be able to claim ostensible balls after he cowered before this doofus.

The culpability, of course, spreads out to every chickenhawkin' dittohead, every dipshit choosing flag pins and stickers over reason and sense, everybody who ignored Blix and the Goddamned No Fly Zone, which had strangle Iraq to the point of needing humanitarian relief, and backpedalling sociopaths who were too stupid to plant WDM's. (Really. We have an army there, and nobody thought to plant the fucking things. Every crooked beat cop knows to have a plant gun. This, alone, should be instructive. If these geniuses couldn't even plant evidence for their case, how the hell were they gonna handle some "unplanned for"?)

Pull your head out, people. You elected criminals and incompetents. Learn from your miskakes. The best part is the satisfaction of the nyah nyah nyah nyah to every asshole who, with no remorse (or sense), still proudly sports a Bush/Cheney bumpersticker. Except that I'll probably cry at what's happened to the country, and the dream, and desperately try to get it back.

You, of course, will watch Fox and give your self a vicarious stroke for WarHero McSame. Or perhaps you'll lose yourself in the kind of knee jerk bigotry that can only come from a dittohead's love of Obamaslander.

Who knows, maybe you'll just head off to Panera and rant about the misogyny of it all with your "Designing Women" Fan Club...

Wait. You seem to be dripping blood from your hands...

McSame-or McShame?

Evidentally, big time hero John McCain is one crooked S.O.B. As Steve Benen notes, it goes beyond the Keating thing:

"When considering John McCain’s history of unethical behavior, the list usually starts (and ends) with the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, for which McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for having shown, at a minimum, poor judgment. In the aftermath, McCain helped improve his public image, and bury the scandal, by becoming an advocate of campaign-finance reform.

But the notion that McCain cleaned up his act may not be entirely true. Take, for example, Donald Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer and generous McCain contributor, who wanted some coastal land in California freed up by an Army base closing."

I, like Benen, am baffled as to why the New York Times chose to run this the day of the Pennsylvania Primary (thanks, by the way, for thinking that one through, folks). Indeed, of all the charges and counter charges that the media has been soft on Clinton or Obama, the one getting the sweetheart deal is one we need to fear the most.

This brings up some interesting things as well. Why aren't these questions being asked of the Republican Nominee?
Liberal Media, indeed.

Integrity

"Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator..."

For a guy who is all about honor and integrity, you'd think he'd wanna punch the guy responsible? He is-or was, after all, Mr. Straight Talk, right...



The 2000 John McCain would win this year. The whore that he's has become, pandering to the reactionary fundementalists, and ignoring his good sense in order to suck up to the far right wing of the Republican Party...so much for integrity.

You hitched to the wrong wagon, buddy.

Party of Lincoln: We Care A Lot

...cannot seem to fathom why black voters do not vote for them. This is the party of Lincoln, afterall, and you would think they would be hellbent on protecting that legacy, or at least, appearing to.

The thing is, I kind of feel sorry for Black Republicans in that there is a question of racial authenticity (see Obama) because they are Black and Republican; they do not conform to the what the Democratic establishment and its agents think is "authentically" black, whatever that means. This is a question that does not appear as often among working class white Republicans, who were also traditionally Democrats, except in strictly defining the binary. Reagan Democrats have now morphed into the authentic real Americans because they vote Republican, whereas Black people would not be authentically black for the same reason, at least in the black community.

However, when any group gets in the business of mandating "authenticity" on others, you are about a mustache hair from National Socialism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian ideology that works within such ridiculous binaries, so when Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney get to decide who is an "Uncle Tom" (a race traitor, in other words) or a "Liberal" vs. being "Black" or an "American", you find this ideology churning hard and fast, making specious distinctions between people and groups, you are way closer to that totalitarian mind set than I am ever willing to go.

It is the right of every American, regardless of their ethnicity, class, or religion, to vote against their self interests and buy into the the most ostensibly empowering bullshit imaginable. Our humanity makes this possible. Having said all of this, for the Republican frontrunners to call in sick for a black hosted debate is a disgrace, and feeds in the idea, which they are seemingly clueless about its origins, that they don't give a hot fuck about black people.

Let's pull back for a second, and say, instead, that they don't give a hot fuck about most people. If the GOP, as it is now constituted, were to truly debate in front of its constituency, its real constituency, it would in a closed boardroom somewhere in Dubai, and they'd pipe it in to the so called social conservatives in the rich suburban megachurches can continue their infantile apocalyptic fantasies about Jerusalem and revelation through auto de fey.

Still, for the Party of Lincoln, it wasn't much of a party at all: I mean, they had to roll out Alan Keyes, for crissakes...