Levees Not War

“The campaign we raged”

John McCain is a United States senator. In the past he was a candidate for president. He prides himself on having survived some five years in a North Vietnamese prison and on his foreign policy expertise. He is an honorable man and never lets us forget it. He agreed to talk with Matt Lauer of the Today Show this morning, knowing there would be questions about revelations in the hot new book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, but he does not want to talk about the process by which he, or his campaign, selected then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Too bad. McCain still has a lot to answer for, and always will, even postmortem.

When Lauer asked whether it’s “a fair assessment” that the McCain campaign relied on “vetting so hasty and haphazard it barely merited the name,” the senator smilingly dismissed the question. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The fact is that I’m proud of Sarah Palin, I’m proud of the campaign we raged, waged . . .” He tried to change the subject to three young soldiers who recently died. When Lauer pressed on, McCain, still smiling his forced smile, insisted, “Look, I wouldn’t know what the sources are, nor care. I am not gonna spend time looking back over what happened over a year ago when we’ve got two wars to fight . . .” It happened over a year ago, so he’s no longer accountable for having chosen a running mate who believed Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, who didn’t know what the Federal Reserve does, or why Korea is divided into North and South, and before her V.P. debate had to be prepped on World War I, World War II . . . ? (She should fit right in at Fox News.)

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How many times my friends have the pundits written off the McCain campaign? We’re gonna fool ’em again. We’re gonna fool ’em one more time!
—John McCain | La Crosse, Wisc. | Oct. 10, 2008

Did he really say that? We had to play it back several times to be sure. (Check it here, on NBC Nightly News.) John McCain says he’s going to win the White House by fooling us? This comes just a week after his campaign aides acknowledged they couldn’t win by talking about the economy, and just days after an apparent Hanoi Hilton flashback in which he addressed a crowd as “my fellow prisoners.” • Even his fellow Republicans are alarmed about his grip on reality and the potential for violence. (See remarks by Gergen and Weaver below.) McCain spent the week trashing Barack Obama—his TV ads are now 100% negative—letting Sarah Palin accuse a U.S. senator of “palling around with terrorists” (a charge gladly echoed by Fox), and whipping their supporters into a frenzy of shouts of “Traitor!”, “Off with his head!”, and worse. Republican Frank Schaeffer writes in the Baltimore Sun, “I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate. . . . Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.”

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Sarah Palin with Alaska National Guard, Kuwait, 2007. For this trip the governor had to apply for a passport. Was it her first trip overseas? Photo: Politico.com.

We already knew John McCain was not serious about governing, but his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate tells us he is not even serious about winning. This choice pleases the evangelical ‘base’ that had been cool to him, but McCain apparently doesn’t care in what contempt he is held by the more adultlike members of his own party, much less by the rest of the nation and the world. (How seriously would he be taken in foreign capitals after this show of poor judgment, cynicism, or desperation? Compare this.) What does this tell us about how he would choose a Supreme Court justice? (He has already said he would pick someone like Alito and Scalia.)

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On the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo explains why the American public should have no confidence in the foreign policy ‘authority’ of Senator John McCain—and the Democratic candidates shouldn’t give him any credit, either. McCain does not possess the expertise or geostrategic vision he likes to think he has. (Boldface added for emphasis.) Click here for a video version of the opinion piece below.

Unfit to Serve
By Josh Marshall

Let me follow up on this McCain gaffe in which he got confused and claimed that al Qaeda was getting trained and equipped by Iran before doing mischief in Iraq, before being corrected by his senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Let’s start by stipulating that if Barack Obama had had this slip up it would be everywhere on the news for the next week. Pretty much the same if it had been Hillary Clinton.

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TPM Cafe reader “57andFemale” has written a powerful rant against the Clinton campaign’s race tactics and tepid ‘regrets’ of Geraldine Ferraro’s well-publicized outpourings. (Original spellings are retained.) HillaryMcCain ‘mindmeld’ composites by Mike Ferry of 2millionth web log, inspired by Driftglass.

• See also ‘Senator Clinton Is Not a Republican, As Far As I Know’ by Bob Cesca @ HuffPo.

You Think It Can’t Get Worse

By 57andFemale
March 12, 2008

And then it does. Big time. Not one interview by Geraldine Ferraro, but cable news shows, Good Morning America, a new interview with the Daily Breeze and the NY Times. Saying the same things. Over and over. Hillary Clinton’s Finance Chair is still standing, to say words that should offend any Democrat.

Obama’s appeal is he is the candidate for everyone. He transcended race. It was the Clintons who squandered the black vote, let’s remember that.

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War critics, peace activists, read E. J. Dionne’s column “Democrats’ Last, Best Hope” in the Sept. 11 Washington Post. Dionne says that in his opening remarks before the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on Sept.10, Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked whether “Iraq is the war worth the risk of breaking our army and being unable to deal with other risks to our nation.” Skelton said war critics should transcend the narrow question about whether the surge has succeeded or failed, and keep the focus on a broader debate about “the overall security of this nation. . . . [W]ith so many troops in Iraq, I think our response to an unexpected threat would come at a devastating cost.”

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