SC Yellow Dogs

‘Straight Talk Express’ has trouble getting it straight?
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press
Saturday, September 13, 2008
WASHINGTON — The “Straight Talk Express” has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment.

He has said that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year.

He says Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts.

McCain’s skirting of facts has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and pros are watching to see how much voters disregard reports noting factual holes in the claims.

McCain’s persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more notable because many political insiders consider him one of the greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight race with George W. Bush for the GOP nomination in 2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced less-than-truthful campaigning.

Politicians usually modify or drop claims when newspaper and TV news accounts conclude they are untrue or greatly exaggerated. But McCain and Palin were defiant this week in the face of similar reports.

Day after day she said she had told Congress “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere, a rural Alaska project abandoned when critics challenged its costs and usefulness. For nearly a week, news outlets had documented that Palin supported the bridge when running for governor in 2006, noting she turned against it only after it became an object of ridicule and a symbol of out-of-control earmarking.

The McCain-Palin campaign made at least three other claims this week that omitted key details or made dubious assumptions to criticize Obama:

–It equated lawmakers’ requests for money for special projects with corruption, even though Palin has sought millions in such earmarks this year.

–It produced an Internet ad implying Obama had called Palin a pig when he used the phrase, putting “lipstick on a pig.”

–It produced an ad saying Obama favored “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds defended the campaign’s statements. “We include factual backup in every one of our TV spots,” he said.

To read more of this Post and Courier article click here

Thanks  Bill Clinard for this wonderful commentary.

Obama resume substantial
By Bill Clinard

@-The substance of Barack Obama’s political training and skills can be verified with an “Obama Resume” search on the Internet. His undergraduate degree is from Occidental College and Columbia University, a bachelor’s in political science with specialization in international relations. His thesis topic was Soviet nuclear disarmament. His graduate degree is a juris doctor, magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Obama taught constitutional law for 11 years at the University of Chicago Law School also practicing law. with a reputable firm. He is more knowledgeable about our Constitution than most in Congress and feels called to restore it after eight years of abuse by Bush/Cheney.

Obama served eight years in the Illinois Senate. He serves in the U.S. Senate on five important committees, Foreign Relations plus a subcommittee, Health and Education, Homeland Security and Veterans affairs. Twenty of his bills and/or amendments have been passed, with 10 other bills introduced.

Obama’s qualifications and intelligence are confirmed by the Republicans’ attack on his splendid vocabulary, which he is invoking to regain friends around the world.

Here’s an interesting editorial from the Times andDemocrat.

The Times and Democrat
The ‘me, me, me’ platform
By EUGENE ROBINSON

WASHINGTON - John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it’s hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself — until you take a closer look and see that he’s running one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.

Not that Barack Obama lacks a healthy opinion of himself, mind you. No one wants the next president to be paralyzed with insecurity, or even to doubt for a minute that he’s the right man for the job. But after trying to ridicule Obama as a preening celebrity, if not a self-proclaimed messiah, McCain is campaigning on a platform that can be summed up in three words: me, me, me.

Much has been made of the fact that he’s a Republican running on a pledge to clean up the intolerable, unforgivable mess created over the past eight years by a Republican president — and, for much of that time, a Republican-controlled Congress in which McCain himself had great power and influence. It’s amusing to listen to a man in his fourth term in the Senate (after two terms in the House) when he rails against evil “Washington,” as if he weren’t one of this modern-day Sodom’s most prominent denizens.

There has been less comment, however, on the extent to which McCain rejects not only his party’s record but also important tenets of its stated philosophy. He’s a Republican who doesn’t entirely believe in modern Republicanism.

“We oppose amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, the GOP platform says. “The rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activities.” Yet McCain co-authored the ill-fated immigration reform bill that would have granted de facto amnesty to millions who are in this country without the proper papers.

“Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by the aficionados of centralized command-and-control government,” the platform says. McCain is with his party on the issue of offshore drilling — there was a surrealistic moment in St. Paul when delegates were actually chanting “drill, baby, drill” — but he has tried his best to sound more like a Democrat in acknowledging the urgency of taking measures to ameliorate global warming.

On abortion, the platform is uncompromisingly pro-life and mentions no exceptions for rape or incest; McCain believes there should indeed be exceptions. On embryonic stem-cell research, the platform says no; McCain says yes.

I’m not being disingenuous. I know that party platforms aren’t as important as they once were. But McCain’s apostasy on these hot-button issues has to be considered alongside the stunning charges he leveled against his own party in his acceptance speech. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us,” he said. “We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption…. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles.”

I can’t argue with any of that. Those sound like great reasons to throw the Republicans out of town and give Democrats a chance to lead. But John McCain is arguing that he should be elected in spite of his party’s many failures because, well, he’s John McCain. He’s special.

“I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need,” McCain said in accepting the nomination. But this line — which I took as a continuation of his attempt to paint Obama as some kind of self-proclaimed Chosen One — came right after a lengthy recounting of the horrors McCain lived through as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In effect, he had used his personal experience to anoint himself.

McCain’s speech offered hardly anything in terms of policy. At one point, he mentioned three “ordinary” families by name and spoke of their travails — and it was no coincidence that they happened to live in Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, states McCain would like to steal from the Democrats this year. But he offered no specifics on how the federal government under a McCain administration would make these families’ lives one bit better. He pledged only that he, personally, would “fight” for them.

McCain and his campaign aides are right when they insinuate that one candidate is acting as if he thinks voters should accept him, on faith, as their political messiah. They’re just trying to make fun of the wrong one.