This week, McCain claimed that troop levels in Iraq had been “drawn down to pre-surge levels”. He also claimed that Mosul was “quiet”. Unfortunately, neither of these is true. Before the surge, there were 128,569 troops in Iraq, and there are currently around 155,000, and news reports are calling Mosul the “last urban bastion of al-Qaeda”.
But when the Obama campaign pointed out the error, the McCain campaign refused to admit the mistakes. Instead, they unleashed an attack, claiming that the Obama campaign and the media were “nitpicking” about “verb tenses” since the Pentagon has plans to draw down the troops by the end of the year. McCain even denied making the original statement, despite the fact that he clearly said it — during a televised town hall meeting.
So, McCain, while trying to paint an overly rosy picture of the situation in Iraq, lies. When the error is pointed out, his campaign denies that he said what he clearly said, and attacks the person who pointed out the mistake.
Unfortunately, reality still has a liberal bias. Just like Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”, McCain can’t seem to tell the difference between what he wants to be true, and what is actually true (this is sometimes called being “delusional”).
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/mccain_the_surge_and_verb_tens.html
Since they don’t seem to be able to dispute any of the facts in (former Bush press secretary) Scott McClellan’s book “What Happened“, the Republicans are employing their standard tricks and attempting to smear McClellan himself. Unwilling to even identify themselves, unnamed sources in the White House called McClellan a “traitor” and “Benedict”. In the National Review, they declared that McClellan was a “Hamas apologist”. Michelle Malkin calls him a “turncoat” and Jennifer Rubin calls him a “hack” and dismisses him as “probably the worst White House press secretary in recent memory”.
Ironically, this is exactly the kind of White House behavior that McClellan wrote about in the book. What better proof of McClellan’s claims.
Even worse, consider who is calling him a “traitor”. Does the White House really want to put that word on the table?
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/28/mcclellan-traitor/
According to Treehugger, the FBI is looking for “friendly and personable” types with the perfect “look” to infiltrate vegan potlucks, to “rub shoulders with Republican National Convention protesters, schmoozing their way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/are-vegans-plotting-to-disrupt-convention.php
The Republicans held a fashion show at the Mall of America to show off the “official” clothing for the party’s national convention this summer in St. Paul, MN.
Reportedly, one of the people in the above photo is a local republican mayor, but I’m not sure which one.
http://www.startribune.com/18900229.html
The next time one of the Clintons try to claim that Hillary is more electable because she is ahead in some random poll, just remember this page from the electoral vote website showing Kerry v. Bush on May 28, 2004, with Kerry ahead 327 to 211 electoral votes.
As Ben Smith at Politico points out, “polls are wrong, and close, and above all — things change”. Or, as August Pollack smirks, you could point out that Obama will be much more electable than Clinton in the general election because his name will be on the ballot.
The utter failure of the mainstream media to do their job and actually report news is leaving a vacuum. Witness the lack of coverage of the “military analyst” story — a story in which the media were certainly complicit — since if you are simply a propaganda arm of the government and corporate establishment, why would you report on it?
Luckily, as the mainstream media continues its march toward irrelevancy, a small army of bloggers is taking up the slack. The latest evidence of this is Karl Rove’s comment about Scott McClellan’s new book, saying that he “sounded like a left-wing blogger”. After all, the mainstream media in this country would never say anything like what was in McClellan’s book. Well, get used to it, Karl.
For more on this, read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent column today on how corporate executives in the major news outlets suppressed and manipulated the news.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/29/yellin/index.html
Karl Rove’s reaction to Scott McClellan’s scathing memoir What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. McClellan, who served as the White House press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006 wrote that the Iraq war was sold using a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” engineered by Rove, and that Bush engages in “self-deception” to justify his political ends.
Further proof that reality has a left-wing bias?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-05-28-mcclellan-cover_N.htm
It is getting to the point where it appears that McCain is not so much running for Commander in Chief, but Lobbyist in Chief. Just a few days after he had to get rid of half a dozen of his senior campaign staff because they were also working as lobbyists at the same time, it turns out that former Senator Phil Gramm, a general co-chair of McCain’s campaign and one of his primary economic advisors, was working as a lobbyist (again at the same time he was working for the campaign).
But the kicker is that Gramm was working for the Swiss Bank UBS, for whom he was hired to (successfully) stop legislation aimed at creating industry regulations that just might have prevented the current mortgage foreclosure crisis.
So just to lay this out, the economy is consistently listed as the number 1 concern of voters during this election, and McCain is getting his economic advice from a man who — working for a foreign corporation no less — stopped legislation that could have prevented one of our largest current economic disasters.
Keith Olbermann video.
In what some people are calling a deathblow to his candidacy, the Ku Klux Klan has declined to not endorse Obama. Clinton warned us that Obama would not win the racist vote, but would we listen?
A hilarious spoof:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-gene-sullivan/ku-klux-klan-wont-endorse_b_103816.html
