Matthew Yglesias makes an astute observation:
In some ways, I think McCain himself doesn’t quite realize how Bush-esque he is. He clearly doesn’t like Bush, and has been disliking him for a long time. But that kind of personalized, overblown disdain for Bush-the-man can wind up leading you to overestimate Bush-the-grand-strategist. To McCain, Bush’s policies have failed because of Bush. Replace Bush with McCain and shift tactics around the margins, and the same basic ideas should work out fine. It’s a nice theory, but I don’t think it’s a true theory.
McCain has a tendency to say things on the campaign trail that simply aren’t true, such as his claim Tuesday night that he “strongly disagreed with the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq…” a claim clearly contradicted by many prior public statements.
It could be, as Yglesias suggests, that McCain has conflated his personal dislike for Bush with his personal evaluation of the administration’s strategies and tactics—McCain may actually believe he opposed Bush, despite his near-lockstep support for the President’s policies. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t remember critical facts about key policies and issues. Or maybe he’s just lying.
Whatever. McCain himself may believe he is a “maverick,” but over the past few years both his Senate voting record and his record of public statements say otherwise. These are contradictions of which voters will be made well aware over the coming months.
McCain = Bush
Watch McCain start to sink in the polls – after a horrible speech (as even Faux News said), more mistatements (these used to be called lies) and further examples of straight talk going awry – McCain is starting to be called on his own statements and his own support for bush and the war in Iraq. McCain was a supporter of the Bush adminsitration and their LIES on the intelligence and on Iraq. Running away from Bush, McCain is running from his own record. He can’t have it both ways – he was against Bush but FOR everything bush was for…that seems to be his campaign message – how weak can it get?
Love.. Love.. Love…
McCain’s a republican. Republicans lie. This is their normal behavior. They may just be so used to it, they don’t notice or care.
“I just believe in the unique status of marriage between man and woman..”
A story in the fishwrapper says New York judicial authorities fired a city judge for jailing everyone in the courtroom after no one admitted having a ringing cell phone that annoyed the judge.
According to the story, “The New York State Court of Appeals … calls punishing innocent people ‘inexcusable.'”
(Quoted under fair use.)
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Let’s put the New York State Court of Appeals in charge of impeaching Bush and Cheney.
The Maverick is so mavericky that he’s now taken over Obama’s campaign theme. The only thing he wants to change, however, is the name at the top of the White House stationary, and a few more Supreme Court justices.
I know that I remain in touch with my feelings because when I see images of Bobby’s funeral train taking him from New York to Washington, when I see the faces of the people who lined the tracks; firemen, police officers, military , black faces, white, the old, the young, men in hardhats, hands over hearts, salutes, our flag held high – when I see this and still weep after all these years, yes, I know I am still the man I once was.
Not long after the death of his brother, Bobby Kennedy addressed his political party’s convention. He also addressed this great nation and this wonderful world we live in. When he spoke of his brother he chose the following words:
From Romeo and Juliette,
When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will love the night and pay no worship to the garrish sun.
I loved ya, Bobby. I always will.
“Today, as it was in the beginning, it is the truth that shall make us free.”
Speaking of lies:
Here are the lies that McCain helped perpetuate for the Bush administration – and how he helped the start the drumbeat for an unnecessary war based on not “false” intelligence but deceptive use and slanting of the intelligence.
Link:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/244/story/39963
From Hamlet:
“To thine own self be true….” still good advice to this day – too bad the republicans were only true to GWB and his false war.
McCain still says the war was justified and worth fighting – ewven if we now know all of the false claims and lies made by bush – and Dana Perino is lying when she says they just had false intelligence – they ignored and slanted the intelligence.
Oh and here is the link to McCain’s lobbyist connections:
133 lobbyists working for the McCain campaign or linked to them:
http://www.mccainsource.com/corruption?id=0006
Send this link to anyone who claims McCain is either:
a. A reformer, maverick or has a shred of honesty
b. Against lobbyists
Nice to hear that BushCo is preparing to hold a media spectacular at Gitmo under the guise of a “trial” in September. Perfect timing to serve as a diversion from the campaign, which even the neocon leadership must realize isn’t likely to be going their way by then.
4 more years of BushCo means:
* widening inequality
* wholesale environmental destruction
* more wars
* recesssion/depressions
* famines
ChoicePoint, the company that installed a baboon in the White House by “scrubbing” Florida voter rolls of tens of thousands of eligible voters (all of them black) in 2000, has become a big player in the employment screening business.
Employers’ use of outside companies to conduct background checks of job applicants is growing by leaps and bounds. Over 90% of U.S. companies now do such checks, and a growing number are even running background checks on current employes. Choicepoint controls 20% of the U.S. market and sells over 10 million background checks to employers a year.
A different company has a monopoly on background checks for the trucking industry, and has so much power in that industry that it literally controls whether a trucker can get driving work or not.
The problem is, these companies’ reports often contain errors, unverified information, or even outright slanders. They are subject to regulation under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but the law isn’t being enforced by the Bush administration and they are effectively unregulated. One industry veteran quoted by Business Week says “it’s the Wild, Wild West” with easy money being made and no concern for hiring quality personnel to conduct the background checks or the accuracy of files.
Getting back to ChoicePoint, that’s the same company that sold a software program to the public that allowed access to personal information, and then later sold the personal information of 160,000 people to identity thieves.
And what is ChoicePoint’s answer to the accuracy problem? Why, turn it into a profit center, of course! They now sell copies of their background checks to job applicants so you can find out whether they’ve trashed your reputation with bad information before you apply for the job! In the old days, they used to call this “blackmail” or “extortion,” but now it’s a profitable business.
Well, that’s laissez-faire capitalism for you: Your reputation is now a commodity that can be packaged, marketed, and sold like bandaids or corn ethanol. Hell, it’s probably only a matter of time before someone sets up a futures market in workers’ reputations.
Why should anyone put up with this horseshit? Working for a living is getting to be too much of a hassle. Why should you take a $15,000-a-year job lifting patients in a nursing home because it’s the only work you can get after some $1-a-day contract worker in Bangladesh confused your social security number with John Dillinger’s?
Fortunately, capitalism provides a solution to the problem of capitalism making employment intolerable. Become a capitalist! That’s what I did. Instead of working for the companies that buy this crap from outfits like ChoicePoint, buy their stock instead. One of the beauties of being a capitalist is that the worse these companies treat workers, the richer you get, and the less you need to work! Eventually, there will be 1,000 shareholders for every worker, instead of the other way around. That’s the way it should be!
No one should work or produce anything. You also get a 2/3rds discount on your income taxes by being a leech like me instead of a productive worker. And nobody runs any background checks on me before letting my sit on my fat rabbit ass at a computer keyboard pushing the same money in the same circles and producing absolutely nothing. Hell, I don’t even contribute capital to any companies. All I do is buy stock from some guy who bought it from some guy who bought it from some guy who contributed capital to the company years ago before any of us were born — shares that have been bought and sold maybe 500 times since it did the company any good. And then maybe I’ll sell it back to the guy who owned it 200 transactions ago, or his cousin. I have no idea who buys my shares — it could be an Arab terrorist for all I know.
Seems like a stupid system to me, but it’s the system we have, and that Republicans love, and since they’re running the show I just go with the flow. I don’t work, I flip stocks. That way, I don’t have to give a shit what ChoicePoint says about me.
It might be fun to read my ChoicePoint dossier, though. If any of you get a chance to steal it, would you please forward it to me? My e-mail address is idlerich@rabbit.net.
P.S., if you’re interested, there’s an article about the background check industry in the current online edition of Business Week magazine.
P.P.S.: So far this morning, I’ve made $1,375 in the stock market while sitting on my fat rabbit ass doing no work — and ChoicePoint can’t touch me!!!
Poor McCain. He deserved better back when they bleeped him in South Carolina against Smirky McFlightsuit.
Now he’s left with 2nds.
Deserved better, but since he had to suck up to the Bush “base” he lost any credibility.
13 Roger, I have two observations to offer up.
First, The Piper better keep his kilt cleaned and pressed and his bagpipe chops honed, because it sounds like sooner or later he’s going to see his day job corporatized and offshored. Why pay the Glenfiddich budget for a guy in Woodinville when the destruction of careers can be done by someone in Bangalore working for pennies?
Second, (and I know you must realize it but maybe not everybody does) if we end up with lots of investors and not many workers, it means that no real value’s being generated to back up all that inflated “wealth”. In other words, Wall Street has become nothing more than the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. As soon as enough people realize that, the game’s going to be up, and very, very quickly.
That’s the real reason why the RepubliCrooks are so frantic to get their hands onto everyone’s FICA witholdings. When it gets to the point where nobody in his right mind would voluntarily put his money into the securities markets, they’re going to force the few remaining productive Americans to do so.
@15 Of course you want to sell before capitalism collapses.
But it hasn’t collapsed yet, and in the meantime, I’m not gonna mail the $2,225 I made in the stock market today back to Wall Street. It’s going into the Help Roger Rabbit Live Like A Republican Fund.
@15 The deck is so heavily stacked against workers, we’re already at the point where nobody in his right mind would work in this country unless he absolutely has to.
Less than 5% of the U.S. economy’s productivity gains since 1970 have gone to workers. The rest went to capitalists. Clearly, being a capitalist is a better deal than being a worker for the present, while we wait for capitalism to collapse.
@17 I see that you post your gains. No offence, Roger, but how about posting your losses? I mean, hell, I might make $20K one day on a trade, then lose $18K the next day on another trade. To post only my gains wouldn’t convey the whole story. Your posts infer that for you it’s win, win, win. I suspect that is a little misleading, Roger. That is, unless these are long term trades and you only do a few a year. It could be then that they are all winners. However, when someone like myself, and I’m a decent trader, does several thousand trades a year, I’ve got a lot of stinkers in there. One hopes to win more than one loses.
“Of course you want to sell before capitalism collapses”
Prepare for that to happen in the early fall. In September, to be precise.
20 Conventional thinking has it that the incumbent ruling party will do everything in its power to stave off the inevitable until the election. Whether it’ll be noticeable or not is a good question. Bernanke’s clearly running out of rabbits to pull out of his hat. Just this month alone, the Fed is dishing out $225 billion in short-term loans to banks. The rest of the world is quickly becoming disenchanted with the dollar as a trading currency, and the major foreign funds are eventually going to tire of bailing out our financial institutions.
By the time this is over, Bush might end up looking more like Hoover than Hoover did in 1932.
@19 Of course it’s misleading. I’m a capitalist propagandist! You don’t expect me to admit losses, do you? But since you’re so nosy, I’ll put it this way. My portfolio earned a 50% return last year, and is positive for this year.
Both McCain and Obama kowtowed to the AIPAC lobby yesterday. Why don’t we just get out of the religious war raging in the Middle East?
Gee, minding our own business for a change. How refreshing.