first as tragedy, second as farce

The disaster playing out between Georgia and the McCain campaign appears to be a sad echo of the last time a Republican presidential campaign manipulated American foreign policy to win an election.  Randy Scheuneman is no Dragon Lady.

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon's presidential campaign sabotaged peace talks in Vietnam, afraid that peace would help the Democrats:

In 1968, Clark Clifford was secretary of defense and Richard Holbrooke was a member of the American negotiating team at the Vietnam peace talks in Paris.  

From his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford had been able to read the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a "secret personal channel" between President Thieu in Saigon and the Nixon campaign.

Up 'till now, every bit of the analysis of the South Ossetian conflict has assumed that Russia entered into the fighting as the result of careful thinking and careful timing.  It was timed to coincide with the Olympics.  It was a show of power, not just to the former Eastern Bloc, but to the US and NATO.  

The Russians were trying to reestablish the Soviet Union.   - John Bolton

The Russians are trying to reestablish the Russian Empire.   - John McCain

Surely it's the Russians whose minds we should be reading, because the Russians must have known what Georgia was going to do in South Ossetia, right?  

Aaaaaand here we go again.  The entire "news" industry has been barking up the wrong tree ... for days, now.  Obama has been mocking a McCain ad from June, which showed Obama's face replacing faces on the $ 100 bill, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore, since it first came out.  But the "news" industry is still pretending that Obama was talking about the "Celeb" ad ... from last week.  

How do these idiots keep their jobs?  Or maybe this is their job?    

The "news" industry, and the rightwing blogsphere, can pretend that Obama's "dollar bill" comments are coming out of left field by ignoring the actual "dollar bill" ad that Senator Obama is talking about.  They can furthermore pretend that Obama is "playing the race card," all while talking about the wrong ad!  

Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish that man would go away.

- William Hughes Mearns, 1899

I do not recognize the Obama that the Republicans are trying to portray.  Sadly, much of the press doesn't recognize complete garbage, at least while they are being fed it.  A lie, as Mark Twain said, is halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. For example:  

Fwd:Fw:FWD:FE:URGENT - ZOMG!! OBAMA PLAYED THE "RACE CARD"!!!

- No, Obama was talking about this ad, from two months ago, which literally does everything Obama said it did.  In fact, Obama's been making fun of that stupid McCain spot since June.  

The Republicans' point is to paint Obama as a race-baiting ambulance-chaser.  The problem is that the Republicans had to fabricate the evidence.  

Media whores, clear your palettes and ready your doggy-bags:  here we go again.  The guy with eleven mansions and a private plane or two is the regular guy.  His opponent?  The self-made neighborhood organizer and college instructor?  He's the elitist.  

Get it?  

Actually, I don't care.  EAT IT!  

Obama's problem is that he's popular, you see.  McCain is lucky he doesn't have that problem.  No, McCain's face has only been glued like a latex deathmask to the inside of your TV and scorched into a translucent cuero by cathode rays since the Reagan administration, but the other guy?  

He's the celebrity!  And that's bad.  

... or something.  

I DIDN'T ASK YOU IF IT MADE SENSE, I SAID "EAT IT!"

The race had been close, and although both candidates made noises about waging a dignified campaign, the barbs were getting sharper.  Frustrated that he could not make much progress against his opponent, John McCain cashed in his "war hero" credentials and started lying about his opponent on Iraq.  When challenged, McCain said his opponent owed those serving in Iraq an apology.  

Last week?  

No:  January 2008.  

The opponent was Mitt Romney.  

And there he goes!  John McCain has already had to go negative.  Is this some kind of a record?  It's not even August!  And it's not just negative, it's brain-dead-stupid negative.  

I mean like Nigerian-email stupid.  John McCain is pushing a line even he doesn't believe.  If you want to look inside the mind of a McCain voter, read the list at snopes.com.  

That's John McCain's base.  Now we know.  

"Citizen of the World" is a phrase with a long and distinguished history in America ... a country conservatives have apparently never visited.  

The phrase has been used by Thomas Paine, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower (twice), John F. Kennedy (twice), Lyndon B. Johnson (twice), Richard M. Nixon (three times), Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (twice), George Herbert Walker Bush (twice), William J. Clinton (three times), and even George W. Bush, just to name a few.  

But American conservatives got exactly the opposite message, raising the question:  why do American conservatives have so much trouble recognizing either conservative or American ideas?  

Is McCain going through the Stages of Grief over his doomed campaign, or over his dead "Surge® über alles" narrative?  

Sorry, that was a trick question:  they're the same thing!  

It appears that John McCain would rather lose his reputation for foreign policy expertise than lose the election.  Unfortunately, on Iraq, John McCain is losing on both counts, demonstrating on numerous occasions that he doesn't know anything about Iraq.  

John McCain is now a joke, even to usually reliable Republican media proxies like David Gergen.  

Perhaps, in stressing Iraq, McCain's campaign was trying to follow the alleged Rovian maxim:  first, take away your opponent's strength.  Being right on Iraq from the beginning was Obama's strength during the primaries.  And, for a time, when you'd asking McCain about anything, say the economy, McCain would change the subject back to Islamic extremists.  McCain would balance the budget by means of a victory he somehow still can't define.  

He brought it to me like a puppy.  A troll on Eschatonblog came ranting about Obama's "purgery."  Naturally, I wondered what he meant.  

Turns out, as usual, it's nothing.  You will hear that "Barack Obama's aides have removed criticism of President Bush's increase of troops to Iraq from the campaign Web site."  

Ah, so Obama has removed criticism of the surge from his website ... other than this part, I guess:

Since the surge began, more than 1,000 American troops have died, and despite the improved security situation, the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people and to reach the genuine political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge. ... But the absence of genuine political accommodation in Iraq is a direct result of President Bush’s failure to hold the Iraqi government accountable.

Yep.  No critism of the Surge there, right?  

Morons.  

First off, let me say that I have more respect for Glenn Greenwald than for any other blogger.  He writes what he knows, he knows it well, he writes extensively so as to cover every angle, and he constantly updates his material as the debate develops.  This is a standard of work head and shoulders above other bloggers', and he has been an invaluable resource.  

And I hope he'll keep doing that, because Glenn Greenwald screwed up, big time.  

Now that I have already done my due diligence, in going to Glenn's site and telling him what I'm about to tell you (which is as face-to-face as is possible in the blogsphere), I'm going to lay it out for you.  

Yes, that's right!  It's time for another round of "Hey, Dumbass!" where we try to get the attention of alleged journalists who seem to think it's their job to play dumb.  

First off, the following quote should be tattooed backwards on the forehead of every journalist in America.  

"If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." - Barack Obama

Of course, every American journalist already knows what Obama said, and are only pretending he unilaterally promised to run a publicly financed campaign, no backsies, etc., so it's not like they actually need to see it every time they look in the mirror.  It's just that this way, American journalists will look as stupid as they sound.  

Once upon a time, these things only happened to other people.  

Catastrophe capitalists would arrive in some third-world country you never heard of, engineer an artificial shortage of something or just start a war (that's the catastrophe part), then use that to create social unrest, then use the social unrest to install a friendly regime, and then use that regime to help rape the country (that's the capitalist part).  

Then, they did it to California.    

Now, they're doing it to America, and the Republicans are committing political suicide in supporting it.  Why?  

By now you all know that McCain didn't even bother to show up for the Senate's vote on the Webb GI Bill.  This is no minor vote, this is setting up for a veto/override showdown.  

Obama, who voted for Webb's bill, had this to say:  

I respect sen. John McCain's service to our country. He is one of those heroes of which I speak. But I can't understand why he would line up behind the President in his opposition to this GI bill.

I can't believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the President more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.

At which point, McCain lost his fool mind.  

I read some tedious squealing from eriposte the other day at Soto's site about the "popular vote" and thought nothing of it.  But this morning, after reading this diary, I realized that this phony count, which leaves out states that are part of the nomination and includes states that aren't, is part of Clinton's latest assault on low-information voters.  

This is the kind of "I hope they're dumb enough to fall for this" bullshit that turned me away from Hillary months ago:  on healthcare, Iraq, and now even on the process itself, the Clintonistas operate just like freepers.  

But now, they're attacking the process itself, just like the Republicans did in the general elections of 2000 and 2004.  

- Media and political elites who don't always agree have nevertheless been on the same page about Obama for weeks ... because they are trying to reverse the verdict of 2006 -  

I see that Jake Tapper is trying to spin the ABC debacle, saying that they went after the frontrunner and that is normal.  

Uh, no.  The crowd at ABC's debate openly booed the moderators for being stupid.  Even Gibson had to acknowledge it.  After the debate, therefore, ABC went into full spin mode, as if ABC itself was a candidate at the debate, a candidate who had stumbled badly.  ABC had to say that Obama "struggled," because he kept taking their stupid questions apart.  Seven different times.  In fairness to Tapper, who has some other good coverage, it's not that simple, but it should have been obvious.  

ABC even pressed one of its afternoon entertainment shows into service to repeat the network's ass-covering talking points.  But, within twelve hours, a sweep of the news cycle showed that ABC had failed.  The story is not that Obama stumbled, but that ABC is a joke.  Mark Halperin's legacy is complete.  So who is singing along with ABC, and why?  

I would just like to take the occasion of International Women's Day to point out all the times that Hillary has saved the world.  If it weren't for all the pro-Obama bias in the media, I wouldn't have to do this.  But it is the role of the blogsphere to make up for the shortcomings of the professional journalist, to fill the silences, as it were.  

It is truly astounding how many times Hillary Clinton has saved the world.  Only her admirable restraint at blowing her own trumpet has kept her from telling us all about it.