Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
John McCain Archive
May 16, 2008
"Completely divorced from reality"
Phil Carter thinks John McCain needs his "vision" corrected.
Rats being forced off the ship department?
Mark has done a great job of drawing attention to the dictators' lobbyists on the McCain campaign. See here and here. Today comes word that Craig Shirley has been ousted from the McCain campaign after Politico asked about his connection to an anti-Democratic 527. In the 1990's Craig Shirley was on payroll of the Serb side in the Bosnian conflict....
Another goddamned appeaser
John McCain, two years ago, about negotiating with Hamas:
"They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another."
May 12, 2008
Some 'splainin' to do
At some point, will a member of McCain's worshipful personal press corps dare to ask him a question about whether he feels comfortable taking money and advice for paid agents of hostile foreign powers?
May 10, 2008
Judge him by his friends
How come so many of John McCain's buddies take money from anti-American tyrants?
May 08, 2008
Embracing hatred
Can McCain get away with his "spiritual leader" Rod Parsley's call for a war on Islam?
Probably.
Question for John McCain
If your wife won't release her tax returns, how do we know that your official actions aren't helping her business associates: Charles Keating, for example?
May 04, 2008
Obama/Ayers. McCain/Liddy.
Sauce. Goose. Gander.
John McCain is closer to Gordon Liddy than Barack Obama ever was to William Ayers. He has never repented his record of burlary and of plotting to use firebomging, kidnapping, and political assassination when he worked for Richard Nixon.
May 01, 2008
McCain, lefty
He only proposed a gas tax holiday *to help poor people*.
April 30, 2008
Against it before he was for it
John McCain, before he called for 100 years in Iraq, called for bringing all the troops home because their presence in an Islamic country would inevitably stir up trouble.
"Just asking" dep't
In what universe is a $150-billion-per-year war affordable and a $2-billion-per-year extension of the GI Bill not affordable?
Birthday cake
MoveOn goes after John McCain on "100 years."
April 27, 2008
I feel your pain: McCain's fatuous but politically effective tour of coal country
Deep in his World War II memoirs, Winston Churchill laments that the democracies spent the phony war hesitant and bickering, thus allowing the Germans to systematically execute a scientific war plan. November is a long way off, but right now the Democrats seem trapped by some of the same problems. John McCain's fatuous but politically effective "Time for Action" Appalachian tour provides one reason for worry....
Even more precisely: Wouldn't Hamas profit from another conservative Republican?
According to a recent interview, John McCain believes that Hamas wants Barack Obama to be president. Judging by past performance, wouldn't Hamas profit from another conservative Republican?
April 26, 2008
Precisely!
Andrew Sullivan asks the right question: why does John McCain want to let the terrorists choose our Presidents for us?
April 22, 2008
Another McCain scandal for the media to ignore
McCain helped a big developer who is also a big contributor get favorable treatment from the feds on land swaps. Ho, hum.
April 21, 2008
McCain finds a loophole in McCain-Feingold
... to let his fat-cat friends give him $70k each instead of the $2300 legal limit.
Damning McCain with Faint Praise
Obama says that McCain would make a better President that George W. Bush.
Well, yes. But then you could make a better President than George W. Bush out of papier mache.
April 20, 2008
"I wanted them to think me still an honest man"
... but he's not. Anna Quindlen has details on the sad moral wreckage that is John McCain.
April 19, 2008
Voodoo economics 3.0
The numbers don't add, and Bloomberg calls McCain on it.
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and John McCain
When McCain says that if we pull out of Iraq "al-Qaeda in Iraq" will wind up "taking a country," he's saying something demonstrably absurd. Michael Cooper and Larry Rohter provide the demonstration, with Kenneth Pollack of Brookings in the role of Deputy Clown.
April 06, 2008
Say what? dep't
McCain claims he "voted hard" [whatever that means] against Bush's strategy in Iraq. Huh?
April 02, 2008
Neutronium John McCain
If he were any denser, light would bend around him.
Keating 5 anniversary: Did McCain just call for more "government-induced accounting fraud"?
The original Keating Five whistleblower says that John McCain's proposals to deal with the current financial crisis simply replicate the error that led to the S&L meltdown: letting banks lie about their assets.
April 01, 2008
Big in Iran
Press TV (Iran's Russia Today/Fox News official 24-hour propaganda channel) profiles John McCain. They're not impressed:Iowa Senator Charles Grassley who was subject to McCain's "I'm calling you a f****** jerk!" said in an interview that he was so upset by the tirade that he did not speak to him for two years. Many say Americans should be worried that if...
March 29, 2008
More lobbying in StraightTalkLand
Phil Gramm wrote a financial deregulation law that allowed UBS to buy Paine Webber, and promptly went to work for UBS as a lobbyist fighting tighter mortgage regulations. He's now "general chairman" of the McCain campaign.
March 27, 2008
NPR frames itself
NPR stokes the liberal-bias canard.
March 26, 2008
How bad could four years of McCain be? Bad.
Harold Myerson makes the case that McCain isn't to be trusted on matters of war and peace.
March 24, 2008
Banzai!
... means "Ten Thousand Years." At last, a "Yes We Can" video for the McCain campaign.
March 23, 2008
The Real McCain
McCain's tax and health-care proposals ought to help focus progressive attention on November rather than Obama-v.-Clinton sniping.
March 20, 2008
Michael Scherer Fluffs McCain
Take that, NPR! Time Magazine's Michael Scherer can kiss up to McCain more than you can. Writes Scherer: The ongoing saga of the McCain Campaign’s effort to keep the political discourse respectful added another chapter today. As reported by Jon Martin, the campaign has suspended a junior staffer, Soren Dayton, a conservative blogger/consultant who worked in McCain’s political department. His...
Precisely!
"McCain '08: Not tougher. Dumber."
Another NPR puff-piece on McCain
Their "news stories" sound like campaign radio spots.
March 18, 2008
Retraction
John McCain just gave Hillary Clinton a good excuse for taking back her comment that he was ready to be Commander-in-Chief. Will she take it?
Not-so-strange bedfellows
In defense of John McCain's addlemindedness
March 16, 2008
A good Mayor of Birmingham
Hillary Clinton is like Neville Chamberlain - not the way you'd think
March 10, 2008
McCain v. Hillary, redux
No, it's not just the Supreme Court.
March 08, 2008
Meantime...
McCain surrogate launches full-throated attack on Obama's heritage. Will the Clinton campaign be smart enough to respond?
March 07, 2008
Question for Hillary Clinton
Does Hillary Clinton think that someone who believes that the CIA should employ torture is fit to be Commander-in-Chief?
February 29, 2008
John McCain and John Hagee: a profile in ...
Neither denouncing nor rejecting, McCain just waffles.
Althouse on McCain and Hagee
Ann Althouse wonders why her candidate is embracing bigotry.
February 27, 2008
A bandwidth too far?
There were limits to John McCain's subservience to Paxson Communications. He'd still make a terrible President, but it is refreshing to find a Republican who has some limits.
February 26, 2008
Yeah! What he said!
E.J. Dionne says that McCain was lucky to have the red herring of sex dragged across the trail of influence-buying.
February 25, 2008
"The real McCain"? I don't think so.
David Brooks is shocked -- shocked! that anyone could accuse John McCain, who has a lobbyist working out of his own campaign bus, of being too cozy with lobbyists.
February 22, 2008
Shorter John McCain
"Since the FEC doesn't have a quorum, there is no controlling legal authority requiring me to abide by the laws I helped write."
Influence peddling on the Straight Talk Express
Charles Black, who runs a lobbying firm, is still drawing a full-time salary from his firm even as he travels on the Straight Talk Express as one of McCain's senior staffers. How does he earn his salary? Why, he does his lobbying work by phone from the campaign bus.
Beautiful!
Shorter Josh Marshall
McCain is a liar. And his free pass from the press may be about to expire.
Straight Talk speak with forked tongue
McCain claimed that his letter to the FCC was designed to get a speedy decision, as desired by both sides to the controversy. But at the time the lawyer for the opponents of the deal denounced it angrily.
Don't bother emailing this post
McCain in the blog echo chamber.
February 21, 2008
Paxson and the dominionists
Paxson Communications, for whom John McCain did such a big favor at the behest of lobbyist Vicki Iseman, is run by one of the big wheels in Florida's Christian Right establishment.
Another take on McCain-Iseman
It's perfectly plausible that they were flirting but nothing more.
McCain and the media barons
It doesn't pay, if you're running a media empire, to annoy the chair or the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, especially not one who has presided over the media consolidation that has made you richer and more powerful.
Very afraid
I'll see your Giuliani and raise you an Edwards.
February 20, 2008
The Iseman cometh
The New York Times doesn't quite say that John McCain was making it with a blonde lobbyist thirty years his junior and doing favors for her clients in return, but it gets pretty close.
Be Afraid: John McCain's Attorney General
The Washington Post seems to be interested in John McCain's VP selection for all the ordinary and all the macabre reasons. In keeping with McCain's embrace of the GOP establishment, they find that he will pick a safe right-winger. But that's not the real question: what I want to know is who will be his Attorney General. And the answer...
February 19, 2008
The Obama Backlash Proceeds Apace
The New York Times reports that Barack Obama might back away from indications he gave last year that he would agree to accept public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did the same. The hesitation has given Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee whose advisers concede he would most likely fall far short of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising...
February 16, 2008
Nick Kristof Should Go Back to Darfur
...because he has done great work there. Oh yes--and he does such abysmal work here. His Sunday column is simply an absurdity. Entitled "The World's Worst Panderer," he tries to argue that John McCain is courageous and principled. Of course, this is difficult to claim with a straight face, and even a little research would demonstrate its absurdity. So Kristof...
February 14, 2008
McCain and the wingnuts: a rebuttal
A reader writes:
The anti-McCain movement is completely rational, if one is a member of the VRWC. There is nothing that the VWRC fears more than a patriotic American acting in their name, even if the patriotic American is almost as crazy as they are. Better four years in the wilderness: four years of fundraising and building mutually-supporting VRWC institutions.
Feint praise
A reply to Jonathan Z., on McCain's dunce cap.
February 13, 2008
John McCain Gets a Dunce Cap
So now John McCain is attacking Barack Obama for not offering enough policy specifics in his campaign. As Jonathan Chait mentions, this is laughable given that McCain himself admits that he knows nothing about economic policy and that his entire campaign is tantamount to, "vote for me--I was a POW." Perhaps the snarkier response is simply to say, "Senator McCain,...
February 12, 2008
Does John McCain Have Enough Foreign Policy Experience?
John McCain says that "anyone who worries about how long we're in Iraq does not understand the military and does not understand war." After all, McCain said, we have troops in Kuwait and no one is worried about how long they will be there, and we have had troops in Germany for more than a half century. This is really...