Political Irony

Even though she won’t meet Obama until Thursday morning, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview “I would say that he is well-equipped — physically, mentally and politically.”

In 2006, Merkel was famously given a quick backrub by President Bush, which was caught on camera. When asked if she expected more backrubs from the next US president, she said “I wouldn’t resist.”

But before you get too excited, remember that Merkel is not actually a big supporter of Obama. She won’t be in Berlin for his widely anticipated speech, and even remarked “Maybe I’ll turn on the television.”

At a fundraiser last week President Bush admitted that his friends in big business “got drunk” on all “these fancy financial instruments”, and now have “a hangover”. Is Bush actually realizing that throwing money at large corporations might not have been the best thing for him to do for the last 7 years?

By the way, need we point out that Phil Gramm (McCain’s chief financial advisor until last week) was largely responsible for making those drunken crazy-making “fancy financial instruments” legal? Does that make him the person who bought the alcohol for Wall Street’s drunken party?

And as a side note, Bush also mentioned that Laura is looking to move from Crawford to Dallas. As Daily Kos asks, does this mean that his ranch was merely a political prop?

Note: if this video stops working, try here.

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan had to give up after trying to post a comment on McCain’s website:

Even after I got an account, an ordeal in itself, clicking ‘Post a comment’ or ‘Reply’ made the ‘Take Action!’ page appear.

Of course, the “Take Action!” page is the one that asks you for money.

Even if he had been able to get to the page where you post a comment, Sullivan would have run into a further problem — an extremely overzealous comment filter. One poster did manage to get through and post a comment, but just so he could say:

If someone can help me understand, there seems to be an automatic moderation in place. The most innocuous of words seem to be off limits, but I’m having a hard time figuring out which ones. I find myself editing my posts until they become almost meaningless and barren of information. Any ideas anyone?

Apparently, their comment filter rejects any word that contains potentially naughty letters. For example, the word “compass” is rejected because of the letters “ass”, and the word “analysis” because it contains “anal”. And not just naughty letters — the letters “net” or “org” or “gov” get rejected; for example, “monetarily” gets rejected for “net”.

All eyes are on Obama this week while he tours Afganistan, Iraq, and Israel. Even the New York Times says that Obama’s trip carries considerable risk. But they aren’t worried about Obama’s safety — the media are all waiting for him to make a gaffe. You know, even a little one (like when he mentioned that he was “refining” his Iraq withdrawal strategy, which was blown up into a major flip-flop, even though my dictionary defines “refine” to mean “perfect, polish, hone, fine-tune”).

But to nobody’s surprise there was a gaffe, but it was from McCain, who on today’s ABC morning show started talking about “the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border”. News flash — there is no such place:

As you can see from the map, the Iraq-Pakistan border is actually Iran.

I let it pass when McCain repeatedly referred to Czechoslovakia. After all, that used to be an actual place (until 1993).