Posted on 11/15/2008 10:26:30 PM PST by Lancey Howard
If the Presidential campaign of 2008 was a football game, the game-changing play came when the alleged "looming meltdown" was announced. The stench of this announcement was so strong that it still staggers the mind that nobody stopped and said, "Wait a minute...! You, Henry Paulson, just discovered today that there is an imminent economic meltdown so catastrophic that Congress needs to pass a $700 billion bailout bill by freaking Monday??"
It made no sense on the face of it, and I figured it had to be a setup. I mean, this horrific news about global economic meltdown breaks just six weeks before a Presidential election?? I was born at night, but not last night. Then when Obama curiously and suddenly took a low profile I knew it was a setup. The Obama team knew what was going on. It was the Democrats' "October surprise", launched a little early and very likely set up by George Soros, who already had God-knows-how-much money invested in this and other campaigns around the nation.
Of course, McCain played right into the scheme by "suspending" his campaign and jumping on his white horse to race back to Washington and take charge and.... Well, who knows what he thought he could do. It doesn't matter, because he ultimately contributed nothing to the process and only made himself look impotent.
All the while, Obama kept his distance as he quietly sat and watched and chuckled. McCain ended up accomplishing basically nothing - - and getting almost no TV face time, to boot! After a day or two of floundering around he finally bailed out (no pun intended) of Washington and made his way back to that debate he wasn't supposed to make... You know - - the debate Obama wouldn't agree to postpone? And Congress did what it did (handed 700 billion taxpayer dollars over to Hank Paulson) without any help from McCain.
Ball game.
The biggest question remaining is: Who orchestrated this election fix, and was George W. Bush in on it? (Yeah, I know - - where's my tin-foil hat. The timing of this was all just an amazing coincidence. Right.)
Don’t forget Josh Bolton came from Goldman Sacs and he and Chuck Schumer wanted Pulson for the job; then keep in mind that it was Schumer who’s big mouth led to the IndyMac mess... and, yes Fannie, Freddie and all it entails.
I know many people who are better off than they were in 2000 but almost no one better off than they were in 06.
When they allowed Lehman to fail and said they were not going to bail anyone out it was a matter of a day and they decided to bail out AIG. IT turned out later that the only non-government person involved in this meeting was a person from Goldman Sacs and Goldman was on he hook to AIG for $20 billion dollars... and then there is the aforementioned Goldman link.
That happens to be one thing really sticking in my craw: the announcement this week they would only be receiving 40% if they had not received this bailout and now everyone would get at least 70%... WE TAXPAYERS are paying these crooks bonuses while many of us do not get a bonus due to the economy.
Amen. Any company that receives bailout money and hands out bonus money should call a stockholders meeting—pronto.
There is a great deal that has bothered me the last four years, I finally was able to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together in reading The Failure Factory, Gertz explains who are the players around Bush really are, basically the liberal Republicans took over after he was re-elected and that is what forced Rove out. I was bothered by Paulson’s nomination and I remain troubled to this day about Paulson.
Except that earlier in your post you admitted:
...Pelosi instructed Josh Bolton that if McCain did not ‘sign off’ on the Frank/Paulsen House bill, she would kill it...
McCain had an opportunity to call Pelosi's bluff and he did not.
And now look where he is.
Don’t forget that after re-election Bush also threw the great General Peter Pace under the bus.
Yep, those two for sure, but I believe there were plenty of other hands in this mess.
McCain’s biggest problem was that he had to campaign on “change”, just like the other guy. And why would people choose OLD change with McCain when they could choose NEW change with Obama?
The reason McCain had to campaign on “change” is because George Bush sat there like a punching bag for eight years, never having the guts to stand up and defend himself as lie after lie after lie from the rats and their newsrooms went left unanswered. Bush’s unwillingness to stand up and fight was an eight-year slap in the face to his bewildered supporters, including me.
The result was that the Democrat candidate could successfully tie his opponent to the easily-smeared punching bag, Bush, while the Republican candidate had little choice but to distance himself from Bush. What? McCain was supposed to defend a man who refused for eight years to defend himself? This situation left McCain between a rock and a hard place.
Throw in the “October surprise” and McCain never stood a chance in hell.
So yes, the November 4th Republican slaughter was Bush’s fault. No joke.
It is truly ironic that Bush defeated McCain in 2000 and then again in 2008.
Whew.... Brutal.
Nothing that happens in politics is coincidence...
Have The No-Drill Democrats Boxed Themselves In?
At that time, I was perplexed by Pelosi's intransigence on gasoline prices.
I think it's becoming clear what was going on, and why the Democrats went on vacation for five weeks, and flipped off the rube Republicans in the well of the darkened House over their smarmy little drilling protest.
What did McCain tell the audience: Obama is a good man, nothing to worry about. That comment went viral all over the net. I believe it played no small part in so many people staying home on election day.. and those people staying home not only affected the outcome of the Presidential race, it could well be the difference in some of the congressional and senate races we lost.
What I am saying is in this equation, McCain does not get off scott free, he had a very dysfunctional campaign.... and, for a man who wanted to win, you don't let your staff -- on either team -- start leaking like a sieve to the media dissing your Veep candidate.
“when reality bites the nation in the rear-end and masses of people are threatened with the loss of their homes and savings - - our elected representatives will wake the hell up.”
No. They will rub their hands with glee, and nationalize everything they can. It’s the “New, New Deal”.
And it’s gonna be a bad, bad deal.
Thanks for your reply. Your points are excellent, and I couldn’t agree more. In the final analysis, McCain lost because of McCain. The solitary good decision he made was his selection of Palin, a selection I suspect he was dragged into by his team. I remain convinced his first choice was Lieberman.
I will never forget that day b/c although McCain had run such an anemic campaign to that point, I still hoped he was saving his fire for the last part of the campaign where it could not be ignored. Yet, by shutting down every supporter who (correctly) believed that there is LOTS to fear from an Obama presidency, McCain destroyed any reason for people wavering to support him, and any reason for conservatives to be enthusiastic about turning out to vote.
If McCain cannot articulate the severe flaws and weaknesses in Obama as a potential President, then why would people (who were not already closely attuned to the radicalism of Obama) think there was any reason to be concerned about the election of Obama? McCain cut the legs out from under his own campaign, despite Sarah Palin’s efforts to salvage something from the mess.
Bush seems curiously happy to be handing the keys to the family car over to the Kenyan manboy, doesn’t he?
I've wondered about this for eight years. How can a President just ignore all the vituperative and never set the record straight? Clearly his unwillingness to fight back hurt himself, his party and even the country. McCain was no better. Yes, he is known for his little temper tantrums and name-calling in the Senate; but he acted like he never really wanted to win the election. Don't we have any tough guys? The toughest candidate was Palin. Is there something in the water?
From early on I got the sense that McCain pledged an “honorable campaign” (eg., none of this mean-spirited talk about the Reverend Wright) because he didn’t want to lose his share the black vote. (!) How bizarre was that?
I think McCain kept that mindset of being afraid to criticize Obama in anything close to harsh terms throughout his campaign lest his old Democrat media chums call their old “maverick” a racist. I will never forget hearing Rush play those clips of McCain trying to calm down the audience at his rally and the surprised audience barely stifling boos in response. Rush admitted that he had to bite his tongue, but you could hear the disgust in Rush’s voice, plain as day.
What a nightmare.
I think McCain was afraid he would be smeared as a “racist” if he got tough on Obama, Jeremiah Wright, etc.
Also, until 2 weeks before the election he was probably strongly hoping to win Colin Powell’s endorsement. IN fact, I would not be at all surprised if there was a nasty game going on behind the scenes with Powell surrogates telling McCain’s camp that Powell was strongly considering endorsing McCain but would be turned away by any strong attacks on Obama, etc.
From Powell’s actual comments on MTP it became clear that Powell doesn’t even qualify as a RINO, but until then I’ll bet that McCain was hoping for support from his “dear friend” Colin Powell.
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