McCain: Talk, Shmalk, Let's Have Some Action!

John McCain is pinning his electoral hopes on people's perception that he will make a good commander in chief. He is a war veteran, of course, and for some reason that is supposed to automatically qualify him for the job. The major question is how he would prosecute the Iraq war.

This morning, McCain stated:

My friends, the war will be over soon. The war for all intents and purposes [will be over], although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it'll be handled by the Iraqis not by us...

How does McCain envision the war ending? How will the US hand the problem over to the Iraqis? I would have imagined by getting the various parties to come together and work out their disagreements. Later in his town hall meeting, McCain said:

I think one of the most overrated aspects of diplomacy is talks

So... He plans on handling the war in Iraq by... not talking to the Iraqis? I'm beginning to see why he predicted that the US will be in Iraq for another hundred years.

With McCain running the show, we'll continue Bush's failed policy of shooting first and not asking questions later. If we had listened to McCain last summer, we'd be at war with Iran right now, over a non-existent nuclear program. Serving in the military doesn't automatically make someone a good leader. It's time Americans took the stars out of their eyes and looked at the man behind the uniform.

Obamarama Rolls On

Last night, Obama won the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucus. Neither contest was even close. He took Wisconsin by a margin of 17%, and Hawaii by 52%. At this point in the race, those numbers spell almost certain doom for the Clinton campaign. The real dagger last night was that Obama cut into Hillary's core voters. Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics.com sums it up nicely.

Clinton suffered significant loses across many of her core constituencies. White women, Democrats, union workers, downscale voters, and white Catholics all drifted to Obama last night - some so much that Obama actually won them.

What this shows is that the Clinton Campaign strategy of going negative in recent weeks didn't help her, and in fact may have backfired.

It's 13 days now until Hillary's D-Day. She has to pull out strong victories in both Texas and Ohio in order to even have a sliver of a chance of getting the nomination. Right now, according to CNN, Obama is ahead in the pledged delegate count by 143. While Clinton leads in the polls in Ohio, a Monday CNN poll shows Texas as a dead heat.

Can Hillary stage a comeback? Negative tactics don't seem to work against Obama's message of hope and change. The real question is whether the Clinton campaign has any new tricks up its sleeve, because the old ones aren't getting the job done.

McCain Was Against Bush Tax Cuts Before He Was For Them

Senator John McCain voted against Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. At the time, he said:

There's a theory, I think, that's prevalent--it was true in the 2001 tax cuts--that if you give it to the wealthy people, then they will then, you know, create jobs, etc. The interesting thing to me is that most economists will tell you that it's the middle-income Americans that have been keeping the economy afloat buying cars, buying houses, consumer goods, not the wealthiest of America.

Tax cuts for rich people do not help the economy. That's what McCain said. For some reason, though, he has changed his position.

[McCain] could "see an argument, if our economy continues to deteriorate, for lower interest rates, lower tax rates, and certainly decreasing corporate tax rates," as well as giving people the ability to write off depreciation and eliminating the alternative minimum tax.

McCain was defending his support for an extension of tax cuts sought by President Bush, which McCain voted against.

I guess the one positive aspect of this is that if McCain were to become president, nobody would be able to say that they are surprised when he turns out to be another Bush. He's been steadily laying the groundwork for just that. And just to make sure we get the point:

"No new taxes," the likely GOP presidential nominee said during a taped interview broadcast Sunday.

Read his lips.

As McCain's Star Rises, His Integrity Approaches Zero

John McCain is a straight shooter. He tells it like it is and if you don't like it, that's too bad. He compromises when he has to, he works across the aisle, he buckles down and gets things done --all in the name of America. At least that's his shtick. And because people buy into it, they believe he has integrity. The interesting thing is that McCain has shed pretty much all of his "independence" and "maverick" style over the past couple of years. Now, he is little more than a morally bankrupt Bush clone.

CBS News reported yesterday that Bush has promised to veto the Intelligence authorization bill that just passed the Senate, because it limits CIA interrogators to techniques outlined in the US Army Field Manual. No big surprise there. The surprising (well, not surprising. More disturbing, really) part was this:

Sen. John McCain, who has previously spoken out against torture (having been tortured himself while held captive during the Vietnam War), voted against the bill, but said his vote was not inconsistent with his previous calls for a ban.

The disturbing part is that McCain knows that torture doesn't work. Newsmax, Limbaugh and some other right-wing hacks have taken some of McCain's quotes out of context to argue that he claimed that torture worked on him during the Vietnam war. Media Matters has an article that refutes that claim. They quote a passage from a Newsweek article in which McCain states:

Obviously, to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear -- whether it is true or false -- if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered. [Media Matters' emphasis]

So John McCain knows that torture is not a reliable way to get useful information out of a detainee. He knows because he has been subjected to torture (which I think gives him a unique perspective on the matter among his fellow Senators) and when he reached his breaking point he gave up false information because he knew that as long as the interrogators got that much, they would stop torturing him. But now he's flip-flopped on the issue. Why? What could he possibly gain from it?

Oh yeah, he's going to be the Republican nominee for president. Got to look tough if you want to do that. Can't let little things like reason or logic or a basic respect for human rights get in the way.

McCain has a reputation (justifiably or not) as someone who will compromise to get the job done. The job this time is getting the nomination for president. The compromise? His ideals, apparently.

By Supporting "Intelligence" Bill, Senate Democrats Show They Have None

In a move that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the past five years, 19 Senate Democrats defected from the defense of American civil liberties and Constitutional rights and gave the Bush administration a major victory in the War On America.

According to the NY Times,

One by one, the Senate rejected amendments that would have imposed greater civil liberties checks on the government’s surveillance powers.

That sums it all up right there. The Bush administration's shameless use of 9/11 to promote their agenda of stripping away our rights continues, undaunted by the Democratic majority in the House and Senate. Indeed, many of the Senate Democrats (who are surely concerned more about re-election than actually serving the interests of American citizens) are totally on board. John D. Rockefeller (D-WV):

This, I believe, is the right way to go for the security of the nation.

Which I'm sure is totally unrelated to the "$42,000 in contributions that Mr. Rockefeller received last year from AT&T and Verizon executives."

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was a little slippery to begin with. From Wikipedia:

[FISA] allowed warrantless surveillance within the United States for up to one year unless the "surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party". If a United States person is involved, judicial authorization was required within 72 hours after surveillance begins.

It was created to accommodate the sometimes urgent need to gather intelligence. It provided (in theory, at least) protection of the civil liberties of Americans while allowing for necessary surveillance to take place.

The new intelligence bill, which was supported by 19 Senate Democrats, changes the basic structure of FISA.

The bill, which had the strong backing of the White House, allows the government to eavesdrop on large bundles of foreign-based communications on its own authority so long as Americans are not the targets. A secret intelligence court, which traditionally has issued individual warrants before wiretapping began, would review the procedures set up by the executive branch only after the fact to determine whether there were abuses involving Americans.

“This is a dramatic restructuring” of surveillance law, said Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department intelligence lawyer who represents several telecommunication companies. “And the thing that’s so dramatic about this is that you’ve removed the court review. There may be some checks after the fact, but the administration is picking the targets.”

So now, thanks to 19 Senate Democrats, we no longer have any sort of safeguards against illegal wiretapping. Do you feel safer yet? The bill also, of course, grants retroactive immunity for any telecom company that gave up caller information to be added to the giant NSA database back when the illegal program began.

There is something about this bill that stinks almost as much as the stripping of our rights against unwarranted search and seizure. It will serve to absolve the Bush administration of any charges of wrongdoing stemming from their illegal wiretapping program. Granted, there are a few hundred other criminal charges that could be brought against them, but this one was pretty solid. Bush has tried to deflect criticism by referring to his illegal wiretapping program as a Terrorist Surveillance Program. Wow, who would have guessed they'd try to use 9/11 to justify their criminal activity? Thing is, this program started well before 9/11.

And now, thanks to 19 Democrats in the Senate, Bush gets what he wants, the Telecoms get what they want, the Republicans get what they want, and the rest of us get screwed.

GOP Strategy: Cheat Early, Cheat Often

Given the recent history of voting "anomalies," and "fraud, malfeasance, or incompetence" in our presidential elections, I would have thought that the Republican party would make every effort to at least create the appearance that the election process has not been completely compromised.

Apparently I was wrong.

As reported in the Brad Blog, John McCain won Saturday's Republican caucus. Luke Esser, the chair of the Washington state Republican party, was so certain of a McCain victory, that he didn't even need to see all of the votes. With 87% of the votes counted and Mike Huckabee only 242 votes behind, Esser stopped the count and declared a winner.

Sound familiar?

After the 2000 and 2004 elections, I think an argument can be made that we need to have some sort of monitoring of our national elections, perhaps by the UN. It may seem like a slap in the face to suggest that the world's greatest democracy doesn't have its shit together, but come on. I haven't trusted Republicans to run a fair election against the Democrats since November of 2000. Now it would appear that they can't be trusted to run one within their own party. How long do we have to watch these people destroy our country before we say, ENOUGH!

Please note: I am not suggesting that all Republicans don't care about representative government. We just need to watch the ones who are running the elections.

Speaking Of The Politics Of Failure...

The NY Times, reporting on director of national intelligence Mike McConnell's appearance before the Senate:

The testimony, in an annual assessment of the threats facing the United States, was the latest indication that Al Qaeda appears to have significantly rebuilt a network battered by the American invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It follows a National Intelligence Estimate last summer that described a resurgent Al Qaeda, and could add fuel to criticisms from Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates that the White House focus on Iraq since 2002 has diverted attention and resources from the battle against the Qaeda organization’s core.

Contrast this to what Bush stated in his State of the Union address:

Since 9/11, we have taken the fight to these terrorists and extremists. We will stay on the offense, we will keep up the pressure, and we will deliver justice to our enemies.

And a few moments later:

Ladies and gentlemen, some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.

So now that Bush has focused 150,000 US troops and hundreds of billions of dollars on defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq (Where they, by the way, did not exist before Bush's war / occupation,) the terrorist organization is, according to McConnell:

gaining in strength from its refuge in Pakistan and is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States.

So while Bush is desperately trying to keep Iraq from completely disintegrating, Al Qaeda has set up shop down the street, in a country that has nuclear weapons. The sad truth is that Bush has no idea how to wage a "war on terror." Worse is the fact that none of the incompetent people he has surrounded himself with seem to have a clue, either.

The Politics Of Spoilage

Mike Huckabee is a spoiler. Ask any Republican who either supports Mitt Romney, or simply opposes John McCain, and they will tell you. In fact, Romney himself fanned the flames of derision by "calling on Mike Huckabee to drop out of the race..." and "expressed concern that Huckabee will peel off enough conservatives to deprive him of victory over McCain in Super Tuesday's Republican nomination contests..."

Huckabee, of course, went and won five states on Super Tuesday to Romney's seven, which perhaps will serve to reduce the cries of spoiler! coming from the Romney camp. As the likelihood of McCain getting the nomination comes closer, the spoiler tag may become permanently affixed to Huckabee, as it has to Ralph Nader.

The tagging of a candidate as a spoiler, and using the term in a derogatory manner, has no place in our political system and is born out of anger and ignorance. I should know; I readily applied that tag to Nader after he (in my eyes) stole enough of Al Gore's votes in Florida in 2000 to swing the state in Bush's favor. I had feared that he would do just that when I saw that he was on the ballot. Any support that he got was obviously going to detract from Gore's. He had no right to ruin the election just to serve his own massive ego.

Sometimes I'm astounded by my own ignorance.

The concept of a "spoiler" in politics is flawed in several ways. First, in the case of Florida, the assumption that if Nader hadn't been in the race, all of his votes would have gone to Gore is presumptuous. Who's to say how many of his supporters would have simply stayed home if their only options were Gore or Bush? Who knows how many would have written in someone, or voted for one of the other candidates. Plus, nobody knows how many contingency plans the Bush team had ready, to assure their candidate "victory."

More troubling, though, is the very notion that the votes that went to Nader (or any votes, for that matter) belonged to Gore. Somehow, he was entitled to all of the "liberal" votes. So how dare anyone take them away from him? Please. The point of a representative government is that the people get to decide for themselves who they want representing them. The idea that one person deserves the votes of a certain demographic is ludicrous. Nobody deserves our votes; they are supposed to earn them.

The other problem with the spoiler is the mainstream parties' response to them. Rather than finding out what is causing people to leave them and lend their support to third party candidates, the two major parties instead try to make the process more difficult for anyone not endorsed by either the DNC or the RNC. The same goes for inter-party fights, such as between Huckabee and Romney. Perhaps instead of calling for Huckabee to quit, Romney should have tried to figure out what it is about his campaign that is causing Republicans to support Huckabee instead (or McCain, for that matter.)

The only spoiler in politics is failed leadership.