Nancy Reagan always had something of an undeserved reputation as a dutiful but meek wife, probably because of the way she looked adoringly at Ronnie whenever they appeared in public together. But on Friday, Reagan showed that she can still be dutiful while also making it clear how she really feels. She appeared with McCain and endorsed him with the less-than-exuberant words:
Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed. Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party.
That’s all she said during the entire event. Why the freezer treatment from the former first lady? It turns out that Nancy Reagan is good friends with McCain’s first wife Carol. You know, the one he cheated on and then dumped (along with his daughter) for the much younger, much richer Cindy. Nancy even hired Carol McCain as a press assistant after Carol was dumped. In his memoirs, John McCain says:
My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy … was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear. I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship.
Personally, I find the cover funny, although I’m not sure if everyone will get the humor. The bottom line is that The New Yorker will probably sell a bunch of magazines because of this cover.
UPDATE 2: Newsweek magazine tells you why — even if you think the cover is funny — it will be a problem for Obama. Unfortunately, images — even sarcastic ones — speak louder than words.
UPDATE 4: The New Yorker editor defends the cover. “Satire doesn’t run with subtitles. A satirical cartoon would not be any good if it came with a set of instructions.”
Good satire has got to take the premise further comedically, and it has to make clear what the target of the satire is. The target of the satire is not how radical Obama is, but, rather, how ridiculous the right wing apprehensions are. Because that was unclear, the satire didn’t work.
But Matt Bors says “It seems that more people are worrying about people not getting it, than people actually not getting it.”
It’s a cartoon … and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment. And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. … I’ve seen and heard worse. I do think that in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But that was their editorial judgment.
Wolf Blitzer asks South Carolina’s Republican Governor Mark Sanford if there are any “significant economic differences” between McCain and Bush. His response:
For instance, take, you know, take, for instance, the issue of — I’m drawing a blank, and I hate it when I do that, particularly on television. Take, for instance the contrast on NAFTA.
Wolf reminds him that Bush and McCain both support NAFTA. So Sanford blows it by trying to change the subject to Obama.
Watch it yourself — it’s hilarious:
Note that Sanford is considered a potential VP for McCain. But with friends like Sanford, who needs enemies?
I have to add that it would have been worse if today’s media had presided during Watergate. Would Woodward or Bernstein be able to publish their exposé of Watergate today?
Who is Phil Gramm? You might have heard his recent statement that America is a “nation of whiners” about the economy. He is a co-chair of McCain’s presidential campaign and arguably his main economic advisor — McCain once called Gramm his “financial guru”. So let’s look at Gramm’s economics:
Gramm was responsible for the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act” in 2000, which unleashed risky new investment instruments (which Warren Buffett called “financial weapons of mass destruction”) that led to the Bear Stearns bailout and the current epidemic of mortgage foreclosures.
Enron CEO Ken Lay was chair of Phil Gramm’s 1992 re-election campaign to the US Senate. Gramm’s wife was a director of Enron from 1993 to 2001.
Gramm co-authored Reagan’s first budget, which drastically cut Social Security benefits.
According to former official of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and current law professor Michael Greenberger “Gramm has been a central player in two major economic crises — the credit crisis and the incredibly high price of energy.”
So when Gramm tells you to stop whining, it is because you are getting in his way of becoming McCain’s Secretary of the Treasury and costing you even more money.
The International Red Cross “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. Government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
Filed in Irony|Comments Off on Red Cross: Bush is a war criminal
On McCain’s website, they feature this quote from him about the Iranian missile tests:
It’s my understanding that this missile test was conducted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This is the same organization that I voted to condemn as a terrorist organization when an amendment was on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Obama refused to vote, called it a provocative step. The fact is this is a terrorist organization and should have been branded as such.
One problem with this attack is that the vote in question — the Kyl-Lieberman amendment — was missed by McCain (who has missed more votes than any other Senator).
When confronted, the McCain campaign admitted the error, but didn’t remove the quote from his website and tried to deflect it by pointing out McCain’s “tough stance” against Iran. The problem with this argument is that the original statement also attacked Obama, claiming that he doesn’t think the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. But in March 2007, Obama sponsored legislation (S. 970) that would have designated them as a terrorist organization.
So in the end, McCain (who often attacks Obama for being “only words”) has no vote and no legislation. It is McCain who has only words, and his words are lies.
On Thursday, Ted Kennedy, who is suffering from a brain tumor that needs daily treatment, flew from Boston to DC in order to cast a vote on a Medicare bill. With this one vote — the only vote he has cast since he was diagnosed on May 20 — he now has voted more often in the last 3 months than McCain.
The last time McCain bothered to show up for work was April 8, missing 76 votes since then, including at least one where the bill in question lost by only a single vote. He has given speeches calling Social Security “a total disgrace” but he didn’t bother to show up to vote on it. Most frustrating was the GI benefits bill, which he vocally opposed, then didn’t bother to vote on. And when it passed, he tried to take credit for its passage.
While it is true that Congress critters running for the presidency often miss a few votes, this is ridiculous. During the current session of Congress, McCain has missed a total of 374 votes, more than any other Senator.
The election statistics site FiveThirtyEight has a new (and wonderful) set of statistics. They have collected the number of times that Obama has been compared strongly to other politicians. For example, there are two articles about how Obama is the new Bush (that would be the current president Bush — there are three articles on how Obama is the new George H. W. Bush). Here’s the whole list with the number of articles — Obama is the new:
George W. Bush: 2
George H. W. Bush: 3
Ronald Reagan: 7
John Kerry: 4
Al Gore: 2
Bill Clinton: 3
Bob Dole: 1
Michael Dukasis: 2
Walter Mondale: 2
Jimmy Carter: 4
Gerald Ford: 1
Richard Nixon: 3
George McGovern: 3
Hubert Humphrey: 1
Lyndon B. Johnson: 3
Barry Goldwater: 1
John F. Kennedy: 5 (you’d think there would be more of these!)
Dwight Eisenhower: 2
Adlai Stevenson: 4
Harry Truman: 2
Thomas Dewey: 2
Some of these articles are hit pieces, trying to equate Obama with some failed or unpopular politician, but not all of them. But it is ironic how Obama has been equated with just about every possible politician, from Reagan to Kennedy, with everything in between.
Filed in Irony|Comments Off on The many personalities of Obama
“Jesse Jackson is now apologizing to Barack Obama for some extremely crude comments he made about Obama after an interview on Fox News. Jackson didn’t know the microphone was on and he said some nasty stuff. So yet another reverend Obama has to distance himself from. What is this, this guy has the worst luck with preachers of anybody I know! Oh man!” -Jay Leno
“They’re now investigating why Barack Obama’s loaner charter jet had mechanical problems the other day. Remember, he had to make an emergency stop in St. Louis. ABC News says the jet was previously used by Hillary Clinton. See, so Hillary let Barack borrow her plane and it had problems — I wonder what that was all about!” -Jay Leno
“The African-American cable network TV One is coming under fire for its plans to cover the Democratic convention, but not the Republican convention. And believe me, black Republicans are very upset — both of them.” -Jay Leno
“President Bush is in Japan for the G-8 summit. Again, another embarrassing incident at dinner. I guess President Bush sent his sushi back cause it was cold. Throw it on the grill a little bit there!” -Jay Leno
“Osama Bin Laden’s teenage son Timmy Bin Laden has released a poem calling for the destruction of America and the killing of all its allies. Imagine a kid writing something like that. Here’s my question: where are the parents?” -Jay Leno
“This is what I love about America. According to a new report, after people started getting their government stimulus checks in the mail, internet porn sites had a 30% increase. You know what that means? People use their stimulus package to stimulate their packages.” -Jay Leno
“The Democratic party announced this week that Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech at an 80,000-seat stadium, and that they will not serve fried food at the Democratic convention. Those are the two things they announced. Yeah, which begs the question: where are they gonna find 80,000 Americans who don’t eat fried food? It’s not gonna happen.” -Conan O’Brien
