Posted on 02/10/2008 2:09:16 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
1. McCain Should Be Feared, Writer Says
Presidential hopeful John McCain is being billed as the Republican that liberals can live with, but his credentials as a “bipartisan progressive” are in fact a “lazy, hazy myth,” according to liberal pundit Johann Hari.
“The truth is that McCain is the candidate we should most fear,” writes Hari, a columnist for The Independent in Britain, in an article that appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Not only is he to the right of Bush on a whole range of subjects, he is also the Republican candidate most likely to dispense with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.”
Hari writes of McCain: “Rage seems to be at the core of his personality. Describing his own childhood, McCain has written: ‘At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.’”
McCain has distinguished himself as an uber-hawk on foreign policy, according to Hari, who is on the editorial board of The Liberal magazine.
“To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: At a recent rally, he sang 'bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran,' to the tune of the Beach Boys' ‘Barbara Ann.’ He says North Korea should be threatened with ‘extinction.’
“McCain has mostly opposed using U.S. power for humanitarian goals, jeering at proposals to intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia . . .
“So why do so many nice liberals have a weak spot for McCain? Well, to his credit, he doesn't hate immigrants: He proposed a program to legalize the 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. He sincerely opposes torture, as a survivor of it himself. He has apologized for denying global warming and now advocates a cap on greenhouse gas emissions but only if China and India can also be locked into the system.”
Hari concludes: “These sprinklings of sanity — onto a very extreme program — are enough for a superficial, glib press to present McCain as ‘bipartisan’ and ‘centrist.’”
2. McCain-Romney Rancor Dates Back to Olympics
The acrimony that developed between John McCain and Mitt Romney cannot be blamed simply on the heated primary campaign for the GOP presidential nomination — the two Republicans were at odds years ago over the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Romney took over operation of the then financially strapped Olympics in Salt Lake City in February 1999, and set out to enlist new corporate sponsors and fix a large budget shortfall.
Then in September 2000, McCain spoke on the Senate floor against what he called the “staggering” cost the federal government faced in helping stage the Games.
“The American taxpayer is being shaken down to the tune of nearly a billion and a half dollars,” McCain declared.
He vowed to “do everything in my power” to delay or kill “this pork-barrel spending,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Romney responded by arguing that taxpayers would need to provide only $250 million, and said he was “quite confident” the Games would receive the funding they needed.
In early 2001, McCain sought to shift $30 million from the Treasury Department, earmarked for law enforcement personnel at the Olympics, to the Pentagon, but the measure was defeated.
Romney, in his 2004 book “Turnaround,” wrote that McCain and others in the Senate were threatening to revoke the tax deductibility of corporate sponsorship, which would “nail the coffin of the Salt Lake Olympics and future Games.”
The clash over Olympics spending, “which dragged on for two years, helps explain some of the acrimony that now characterizes the race between the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination,” the Times observed.
In the end, the federal tab — not including construction or improvement of highways, transit systems, and other infrastructure — totaled about $400 million, and the Games were a financial success.
3. Obama Wants Plane Conversations Off the Record
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has touched off a dispute with the press by insisting that conversations he has with reporters on his campaign plane are off the record.
The issue arose during a Feb. 2 flight when Obama entered the press section of his plane and began speaking with several reporters, including Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times.
“When Obama noticed that the red lights of the journalists’ recorders were on, including Zeleny’s, he said that the conversation was off the record,” politico.com reported.
Zeleny protested that he couldn’t take the conversation off the record. Obama answered a few more questions and returned to the front of the plane.
“In my view, whenever he comes back on the plane to talk to reporters, he is on the record,” Zeleny told politico.com.
“We’re not on the plane, in my view, to have private talks with presidential candidates. We’re here to report what they are saying and give our readers a better idea of their campaigns and their candidacies.”
But Jen Psaki, the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary, responded: “There has never been a press corps in the history of our nation that got as many interviews as they wanted.”
Obama’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has also said at times that a conversation at the back of her plane is off the record, although more recently her campaign said those talks would now be on the record.
Making them unable to earn money to buy food might work and then we could leave a trail of chorizo to the border.
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.-
Theodore Roosevelt
Good Post
John McCain is a formidable candidate and I will support him in November. He just needs to choose a really good conservative running mate.
Soon all the world will know McCain isn’t the sort we want in charge. Watch and soon even his most ardent followers will urge him to step down.
Don’t give them welfare but they probably won’t leave because the economic opportunity over here even without welfare is much much better than what they can get in mexico. This will be a matter of time and attrition but first you have to build the border.
Read the article more carefully. The thesis of the article is anti-McCain or that he’s “crazy” wholly in terms of those aspects of his views that are actually conservative.
and he will get virginia and maryland
If I actually thought this was true, I might like McCain better.
the real liberals...they know that mccain is very conservative. It really bothers them because people like Rush and Ann Coulter positioned him so that he looks like a moderate or almost a democrat
LOL McCain hates “torture” once we capture someone. But, if there is a “take no prisoners” policy.... They make it sound like the “authoroties” better have plenty of virgins ready to go in the Islamofascist afterworld....
his credentials as a “bipartisan progressive”
“
The liberals call themselves “progressives”
Is McCain reaching across the aisle from our side...
Or reaching across the aisle to us from their side...?????
McCain scares me.
Obama and Hillary scare me more.
After church this morning I was talking to a conservative Republican woman. She asked another woman, a Democrat, what she thought of McCain and the other woman said "he'd just be another four years of Bush." Turns out her candidate had been Edwards.
he doesn’t hate immigrants”
Yes, he does...
McCain is anti-immigration and pro-illegal aliens
He was correct to silence Wisconsin Right to Life?
3) National Defense
Throwing open our borders will sure make this country safer, won't it?
4) Judicial Nominations
He was correct to prevent a rule change that would have required the Senate to actually carry out its duty?
Before he was 2 years old, Arizona Sen. John McCain writes in his new family memoir, he developed "an outsized temper" that caused him to "go off in a mad frenzy and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." The doctor told his parents the problem was self-induced: "When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out."
WoW...Thank you.
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