One of the most entertaining things about the 2008 campaign has been watching John McCain embrace all of President Bush’s policies and word game flimflams. And there’s no better example than Social Security where McCain has not only adopted President Bush’s proposal to phase out Social Security and replace it with private investment accounts he’s even adopted Bush’s word game bamboozlement to try to trick voters into thinking he doesn’t support the policy he actually does support.
Those of us who are about to talk straight, Salute You!
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
Can you believe this dude was their dream candidate?
Daniel Levy on what to expect from the Egypt-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Despite being a pal of notorious charlatan and con-man Ahmad Chalabi’s and a prime architect of the public campaign to get the US to invade Iraq, I confess that McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann just isn’t quite as over the moon as his colleague and fellow McCain advisor Jim Woolsey. But here’s Peter Slevin’s run-down on Randy in the Post’s Trail blog anyway.
McCain again forgets what his own policy is — this time on cap and trade.
Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld put together a pretty hilarious post today about this list the McCain put out of “prominent Democrats and Independents” supporting McCain’s candidacy. A few years back when McCain was considering becoming a Democrat, there were lots of Democrats who were big fans of his. So it really wouldn’t have surprised me if McCain was able to put together a list of prominent and half-way normal Dems who are supporting him. But it turns out the list is made up of non-Democrats, hardcore conservatives and what I guess you’d call a smattering of county-level Zell Millers sprinkled around the country.
My favorite from the list is the aptly named “prominent Democrat” and “former Democratic gubernatorial candidate” Philip “Icky” Frye of West Virginia. Sounds pretty impressive. But it turns out that Frye’s credential as a Democrat is limited to … well, Frye’s wife made a cuckold of him by sleeping with then West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise (D). In revenge, the humiliated Frye decided to challenge Wise in the Democratic primary for governor — which, I’ll have to say is one of the more creative and civically-minded ways I’ve heard of to get back at the guy who slept with your wife. Wise decided that things were getting a little out of hand and without precisely admitting to the affair decided not to run again. At this point Frye seems to have lost interest in the job and ended up garnering less than one half a percent of the vote.
When the Charleston Gazette found out that McCain was carting small Frye out as a ‘prominent Democrat’ they had more than a little fun at his expense.
As I mentioned Monday morning, for the first half of this week TPM’s Managing Editor David Kurtz was attending the International Press Institute World Congress & 57th General Assembly which was held this year in Belgrade, Serbia. At the closing ceremony Tuesday evening, David accepted the “Free Media Pioneer 2008” award on behalf of the entire TPM crew.
I was just checking out the website this evening. And they’ve got a pretty elaborate multimedia setup, where I noticed they’d already posted pictures of the award event. So I thought I’d share them with you.
As you can see there, the award is some sort of glass obelisk or something. And as David told me by IM early this afternoon (evening local time) his primary remaining mission was to see if he could get it back to New York in one piece.
We’ll keep you posted.
Post columnist Michael Gerson, who helped bring us Dick Cheney, state-sanctioned torture and official lies to lead the country to war let’s us know that Al Franken is the Vulgarian at the Gate. He’s also concerned about “the cooperation and mutual respect necessary in a functioning democracy.”
This should be fun. In a conference call this morning, the McCain campaign is bringing out Rudy Giuliani as a surrogate for McCain on terrorism. Any bets on how many times Rudy says 9/11 in his comments on the conference call?