The Smug Baldy Speaks

Some people - myself included - suspected that the presidential debates weren’t debates as much as they were shared stump speeches. Based on the evidence in this video, we find this suspicion is well founded.

Thanks to Matt for the heads up!

The final presidential “debate” is past, and both Barak Obama and John McCain are taking their largely negative campaigns into the home stretch. Interestingly, lots of people are critical of negative campaigning, despite the fact that it tends to work. One of the things I find even more interesting is that while both campaigns are being criticized for “going negative”, there is an important difference between them. Barak Obama has been critical of John McCain’s erratic behavior - since the the unsteady way McCain has conducted himself over the past three weeks speaks to how he’ll likely lead if he is elected President. McCain, on the other hand, has been trying to scare people into seeing Obama as an un-American radical with strong ties to terrorists and a penchant for lying.

The difference between these two sets of negative attacks is that Obama’s attack on McCain is factually true. McCain’s attacks are not.

Over the past weeks and months, we have seen a John McCain all over the map as he tries to regain the lead in a race that is largely going badly for him. His faux suspension of his campaign for two days before the first debate was seen as a desperate hail-mary attempt to shift the focus to his leadership and willingness to put America first in a time of unprecedented economic crisis. When the economic deal his campaign needed didn’t materialize, he claimed victory and restarted his campaign with a “surprise” visit to the first presidential debate. This occurred after McCain’s previous hail-mary selection of a feckless governor of America’s least populated state as his running mate in an attempt to put the conservative Republican base at ease with his candidacy. That’s largely worked, but it hasn’t won him the accolades from women’s groups that he expected, nor has it swayed many Hillary Clinton supporters since many of them vote principles over gender.

For Obama to attack McCain for trotting out weirder and weirder ideas (taxing employee health benefits, anyone?), or flip-flopping on key issues (the fundamentals of the economy are strong one day and the sky’s falling the next) isn’t going negative. It’s calling things how they are.

I often wonder what might have happened if John McCain had successfully grasped his proper moment in history - if he had defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican Primary. McCain was the right Republican for the job eight years ago.

He isn’t anymore.

This made us chuckle.

We’re glad that John’s handling the economic crisis with the intensity of a psychopathic astronaut.

So said late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, reminding us that public policy created openly, in the light of day, tended to be better than policy created behind closed doors. We’ve seen disaster after disaster brought on by the Bush administration and it’s penchant for deception, half-truths, and closed-door antics. But now, as the winds of change appear to be blowing the way of the Democratic party, there are still more than a few things that the GOP seems to be willing to hide in its own bid for the White House.

Yesterday, GOP nominee John McCain suspended his campaign, saying he wants to lead a bi-partisan effort to solve the current financial crisis. At stake for McCain is the presidency, which seems to be slipping from his grasp with each new revelation about how the chickens released following years of deregulation and lax policing of financial markets - policies long supported by McCain - have now come home to roost.

So rather than face the tough questions about this situation, McCain hides behind a flimsy call for bi-partisan leadership on the issue. Never mind the fact that a deal is already nearing completion without McCain’s special brand of leadership. Never mind the fact that McCain, if he has his way, might be able to avoid debating Barak Obama. Never mind that McCain has admitted to being not particularly strong on economic theory. Never mind that McCain is a Bush Republican - which as we have all experienced - is many times worse than being a Tax and Spend liberal. These are the Bomb, Borrow, and Bail-out Republicans - and they preach a “small-government” line while putting taxpayers on the hook for their miserably failed policies again and again.

With McCain’s call to cancel the debate, he could well deprive the entire nation the opportunity to see how both candidates plan to deal with this crisis in the coming months. He’s apparently ok with keeping us from kicking the tires on the presidency he want to sell us. Interestingly, if he’s able to cancel or reschedule the presidential debate, then there’s another thing that the GOP will be able to keep hidden: Sarah Palin.

Beyond McCain’s irresponsible and politically calculated selection of an apparently know-nothing governor, the legitimate issue many have with Palin is that we know next to nothing about her. And if the McCain/Palin Campaign has its way, things will remain that way up to Nov 4, when you’re asked to buy a Republican bag of goods. What we do know is that Palin was added to the ticket to placate the religious right, as the lipstick on the pig of McCain’s not too conservative candidacy. We also know that McCain doesn’t have a plan, not for the economy, not for the wars, not for education or health care or job training or social security or anything. He doesn’t need one, because he’s cribbing from Bush.

But he doesn’t want any sunlight cast on that now, does he?

Edit - here are some David Letterman outtakes after McCain cancelled his interview to race back to Washington.

On the seventh anniversary 9/11, Keith Olbermann has the courage to speak out against Republican Party for using it as a political tool.

You’re about to travel through another dimension, a dimension not of logic and reason, but of political influence and deep pockets. Your are journeying into a land where up is down, and more pollution is less pollution. If you could read that signpost through the smog, you would know you’ve entered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Twilight Zone

In the past two days, there have been three major reports concerning the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) that makes me wonder what kind of wacky weed these guys must be smoking.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the big story today is how Big Brother the Bush Administration got the extra spying powers it sought with the passage of the so-called FISA Compromise Bill. The Washington Post reported:

Bush today welcomed the Senate vote, calling the bill “critical to America’s safety” and “long overdue.” He said in a statement, “This vital intelligence bill will allow our national security professionals to quickly and effectively monitor the plans of terrorists outside the United States, while respecting the liberties of the American people. . . . It will ensure that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will, themselves, be protected from lawsuits for past or future cooperation with the government.”

Senator Barak Obama voted for the bill - which, as Keith Olbermann said earlier, will probably be seen as some sort of political weakness, even though most Republicans voted for the bill as well.

John McCain didn’t bother to vote at all, and instead spent the day campaigning. He also predictably criticized Obama for voting for the the same bill that he too supported - and would have voted for - if he hadn’t been too damn busy.

Interestingly, while there is quite a bit of commentary about how the bill blocks lawsuits of Telecom providers who aided and abetted the Bush administration’s illegal domestic wiretapping scheme (for our own good, you know), there is relatively little commentary about whether Administration officials or Telecom execs could face future criminal charges. Now that would be something to see.

If YouTube views were votes, then we’d be talking about President Barak Obama, and how he beat John McCain by a whopping 50 million votes. Below is a screenshot of the YouTube politician channel, and as you can see, Obama has over 1100 videos with over 54 million views to McCain’s 216 videos with just 3.7 million views. Indeed, Obama has three times as many videos and almost ten times the number of views as Republican internet sensation Ron Paul.

Obviously YouTube views aren’t really votes, and it’s not really clear how, or even if, they’ll somehow translate into votes. Obama’s success on YouTube does, however, illustrate the fact that Obama, much more than McCain, has an effective strategy to leverage social media sites like YouTube and Facebook to get his message out, and that very well could translate into more votes come election day.

Take, for example, Brian Stelter’s interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about the new media strategy of the Obama campaign:

The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.

The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

What we see here is that the Obama campaign is doing more than just taking the internet seriously. They’re making it an integral part of their media apparatus. They’re staffing their web team with savvy professionals, and funding it as if victory depended on it. If this trend continues, and if the Obama campaign can somehow translate all the social media juice into tangible action in the voting booth, you can expect every future campaign to learn the lesson: Rather than simply a tool for poking your friends or for niche marketing, social media outlets can play a key role in selecting the President of the United States of America. And to me, that prospect is simply amazing.

Here Pat Condell comments on how “the allowances we make for religion has encouraged Islam to push its way into our society, where it really doesn’t belong, and threaten all of our freedom.”

Some links from the youtube post are here for support:

Assault on free speech in the Netherlands

Islam can no longer be criticised at the UN Human Rights Council

Novelist could face hate crime charge for despising Islamism

You can download an audio version of this video at http://patcondell.libsyn.com/