Shorter New York Times

Just about everything John McCain said about Obama in today's speech was a lie. Worth reading; it's a shockingly long list. Does McCain think he's going to get away with this? Is he?

John McCain: WAAAA!! LIFE ISN'T FAIR!!! AND I HAVEN'T EVER LIED!

Really, I am serious when I say John McCain said his poll numbers are dropping because "life isn't fair."

John McCain said Thursday that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are rising as the economy seems to sink "because life isn’t fair.”

“He certainly did nothing for the first few days,” McCain told Fox News Thursday. "I suspended my campaign, took our ads down, came back to Washington, met with the House folks and got on the phone, and also had face-to-face meetings.”

But the Republican nominee said the economic anxiety-fueled poll swing was likely a blip. “Well first of all, you know very well that these are temporary things," he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. "The focus was on the fiscal crisis we were facing. I understand that. I understand there are going to be ups and downs in campaigns. I'm happy where I am…"

Wow.   Is this guy delusional?  From up by 2 points after the convention to down by 4 or more in less than a month, and with all major news stations showing a widening gap in both electoral and national votes?  

Okay, further, John McCain apparently thinks he has NEVER LIED IN HIS LIFE!  

"If facial expressions produced heat, John McCain would have just melted that editorial board." -- Rachel Maddow

How the McCain Campaign Continues to Squander Their Candidate's Honor

The 2008 Presidential Election has gotten to the point where John McCain can no longer claim to have the integrity to be the leader of our nation. Put aside experience and judgement, what most people would say are the two most important questions a candidate has to face. Integrity would surely be the third question, and in my view, the most important. If a person has no integrity, how can we trust anything a person says? For everyone leaning towards McCain, I have to say that if you like any of his policies, do you really believe he is telling the truth about what he says he will do? Do you really believe he is telling the truth about what he says Barack Obama will do? The answer to both of those questions should be an emphatic "no!"

Stretching the truth in politics is not to be unexpected but it should be discouraged. Lying should not be tolerated, anywhere. While John McCain is free to lie all he wants, American voters should realize that, in the marketplace of ideas, John McCain shouldn't even be allowed to sell his product. His lies have brought cynicism and disgrace to all politics, and all politicians, for their own sake and for our nations' sake, should condemn McCain's tactics as wreckless unless they want us to believe that such tactics belong in political discourse. Surely, when the campaign is over, no speech given by McCain this time around will ever be put into a book on political discourse or debate, simply by the fact that John McCain will from now on be known as a liar.

The evidence against John McCain is so abundant that one only needs to type John McCain's name into a Google Search Engine and numerous cases would show up. Of course, the McCain campaign would like you to believe that the media is paying too close attention to what is true and what is a lie. The evidence against John McCain is so abundant that one only needs to type John McCain's name into a Google Search Engine and numerous cases would show up. Of course, the McCain campaign would like you to believe that the media is paying too close attention to what is true and what is a lie.

Politico reports: 

"We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.” [Brian] Rogers [McCain Spokesman], who hung tough with McCain through the dark days of the primary and has lived through every high and low of this turbulent and unpredictable race, argues that they tried to run a high-ground campaign and sought to keep the candidate in front of the media in the fashion he enjoys. His point: No one paid any attention. “We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything,” he said.

I suppose "forward-leaning" means lying, and pretty much on everything he has said since the convention, John McCain has fallen flat on his face with so much "forward- leaning." Someone needs to tell John McCain to stop being "forward-leaning" and start being forward-thinking.  Someone needs to tell John McCain to lean back and remember he represents his family, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Navy, and the United States of America, and his lies are an embarrassment on all of those things.

Indeed, when the McCain camp ran on its record and on its boring candidate, nobody would listen to it and nobody cared about it.  What does it tell you when John McCain runs an honorable campaign against the Obama campaign?  Obama wins handily.  The same would have happened in 2004 has George Bush run an honorable campaign: Kerry wins.  But John McCain has been here before: in the 2000 Republican primaries, John McCain did it the right way, with truth and honor.  And Bush went the low road, people voted on their fears instead of their dreams, and John McCain lost.  So what I hear from the man "who would rather lose an election than lose a war" is that he would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.

Let me simply list all of the "forward-leaning" claims John McCain and his campaign have put out (drawn from today's NY Times article entitled The Politics of Lying):

LIE #1: Obama supports sex education for kindergarteners. TRUTH: The plan he supported in the Illinois State Legislature taught Age-appropriate Sex Education and specifically aimed at teaching kindergarteners how to avoid abuse.

LIE #2: Obama used the colloquial phrase "lipstick on a pig" to describe Sarah Palin.  TRUTH: Obama was making an analogy to describe George Bush's policies as the pig and John McCain's attempts to differentiate himself from Bush's policies as the lipstick.  

LIE #3: Sarah Palin refused federal earmarks as Governor of Alaska. TRUTH: While she has lower the total amount of earmarks since the previous governor, she still requested nearly a half-billion dollars work of earmarks.

LIE #4: Obama will raise middle-class families' taxes.  TRUTH: Obama will cut taxes on all families below $200,000.

LIE #5: Sarah Palin visited Iraq and Ireland and this gave her foreign policy experience.  TRUTH: The trip to Ireland was to refuel the plane she was on and her trip to Kuwait stopped at the Iraqi border.

LIE #6: Obama's health care plan will force people into a federally-run health care system.  TRUTH: Everyone who currently has insurance would be allowed to keep their insurance as it is, and the only people required to have insurance would be children.  Even then, it wouldn't be a federally-run health care system, but people could buy the same health insurance that federal employees have.

LIE #7: Sarah Palin said "Thanks, but no thanks" to the congressional earmark for building Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere. TRUTH: As Mayor of Wasilla, she supported the bridge until the media discovered the embarrassment; when the federal government pulled the plug on the project but still gave Alaska the money to use on things other than the bridge, she kept the money.

Seven lies from "the Straight-talk Express."  This is what John McCain has resorted to.  I don't think that anyone would argue that these lies help America; they, in fact, hurt America.  And since John McCain can't get any press coverage, and what he wants press coverage, he is resorting to hurting America in order to win this election.  And he won't say that they are in fact lies, much in the same way the Bush Administration won't fess up to any of its lies over Iraq, political firings, and countless other issues.

And now, Stephen Colbert takes it away:

"Blizzard of Lies"

How beautiful Paul Krugman put it in his op-ed on Thursday:

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that. One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years. But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

--- 

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse. 

While what I know about politics is still considerably small, I know that calling people liars in politics is a big deal, and instead of stopping and calling out the Obama campaign on it, the McCain campaign (and especially the little pissant spokesperson Tucker Bounds) just keep singing the same lying tunes.   

The Man Who Lies, Cheats, Steals, and Runs for President

Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad month.

First, his longtime buddy and protege Bernard Kerik, who he made police commissioner of New York, gave a job in his firm, and nominated for the top job in the Department of Homeland Security, was indicted on 16 counts of "bribery, tax fraud, and obstruction of justice."

Kerik's sleaziness is old news, but now Giuliani is being forced to ask other cronies to keep him from calling up the "old crowd" in his defense, which might be tough considering this photographic gem:

Have you ever seen a two men kiss a baby less convincingly? I think they could give Lord Voldemort and Wormtail a run for their money.

Read more »

I don't believe Tucker Carlson

I don't believe that he was assaulted by a gay man in a bathroom, I don't believe that he pounded the guys head into the wall, I don't believe his revised story, I don't believe any of it.

I think Tucker Carlson made it up out of whole cloth to impress his macho homophobe friends. Do I have any reason for thinking this? No (except that Carlson was careful to make his revised story unverifiable), nothing concrete.

Carlson just has a history of being an idiot and wearing a stupid bow-tie and appearing on television, and i simply don't believe him.

So, next time someone gets a chance to ask Tucker a question, they need to ask if he didn't just make the whole thing up and observe how he looks while he's answering no.