Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts

10/21/08

A McCain "Win" Will Be Theft, Resistance Is Planned

by David Swanson

If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White House in Washington, D.C., which we will surround and shut down until this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed.

A McCain "win" will not be illegitimate because I disagree with his policies, but because he himself has rendered it illegitimate. He and his campaign and allied supporters have sought to illegally remove hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, fraudulently registered people as Republicans without their knowledge and against their will, obstructed voter registration drives, falsely warned students against voting where they attend school, falsely accused community groups of voter registration fraud, falsely alleged the widespread existence of voter fraud, and encouraged supporters to falsely believe McCain's opponent is a foreign terrorist through speeches, recorded phone messages, and flyers. Already in early voting in a number of states there have been cases of votes on electronic machines visibly flipping to McCain or McKinney when intended for Obama. We will see McCain supporters on November 4th challenging people's right to vote, seeking to force people to vote on provisional ballots, and seeking to have provisional ballots discarded. And we will see electronic vote counts wildly out of step with the most recent polls, although not with exit polls -- which we will be denied any access to unless they have been "adjusted" to match the official counts.

Keep reading this rant!...



punditman says...
Although this is obviously a partisan article in support of Obama, I concur with its basic conclusion: that the Republicans will try to win by hook or by crook, just as they have in the past. And yes, that includes cheating. Peacenik, who is predicting an Obama landslide, should definitely pay closer attention to the vote count scandals of the 2000 and 2004 elections, including black box voting. I have confidence that Peacnik will look this up.

9/8/08

The Mighty, Scary Press Corps

by Glenn Greenwald

Criticizing the McCain campaign for refusing to allow reporters to question Sarah Palin, Time's Jay Carney writes:

Political operatives love to talk about circumventing the media and other co-called "elites" -- i.e., independent specialists, observers and thinkers. The operatives convince themselves they can take their candidate's message directly to the people -- on their terms, without all that poking and prodding and skepticism. That's propaganda. In a democratic society, it rarely works for long.

If only that were true. But if there's one indisputable lesson from the last eight years, it's that political propaganda works exceedingly well -- not despite an aggressively adversarial press but precisely because we don't have one. Carney's idealistic claims about the short life-span of propaganda in American democracy are empirically false:

Peacenik just read elsewhere that Palin has agreed to an interview with Charlie Gibson. Just what Greenwald predicted would happen in this article. I would bet that there will be no gotcha questions and any questions about foreign leaders will be pre-screened. The press hasn't asked anyone in the Bush administration a tough question for 8 years. I don't even know why McCain and Palin are worried. BTW a weekend Gallup poll showed McCain jumping ahead of Obama.

9/4/08

Logical consequences: When you believe in war, sooner or later you bring it home

by Robert C. Koehler September 4, 2008

Call it creative self-destruction, maybe.

How surreal it's been this week to watch the Republicans reap a small portion of the divine comeuppance due them, first from a hurricane, then from a pregnant teen-ager. Surely more of the same is on its way, but no one wins, because what is lying in a shambles around the McCain campaign is a harvest of suffering.

The bad ideas of the Republican right, or rather the consequences of those ideas -- from pre-emptive war to abstinence-only sex education to the merger of church and state to let's-drown-government-in-the-bathtub -- started taking over the Republican National Convention, bursting the levees of managed news and disciplined hypocrisy. Suddenly eight years of extreme cynicism began generating (it's a miracle) . . . bad press.


Peacenik
was lucky he was quashing a big thirst at the pub last night and didn't have to watch the hatefest that was the Republican convention. The stage is set. Extreme right wing Republican party versus a Democratic party that at least talks about a few progressive positions. Are there enough sane, moderate, Americans willing to reject eight years of Republican rule? Peacenik thinks so.

8/21/08

McCain's Warped Worldview

**No posts this weekend. Punditman is working on his tan somewhere, and Peacenik is heading north, into the wilderness.....**

by Robert Scheer from TruthDig.com

The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the 10 French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the U.S. government's imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational melange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?

Peacenik doesn't understand when he reads recent Zogby polls showing McCain leading in the presidential race. And Peacenik doesn't understand when he reads articles, like Scheer's, that point out that a big chunk of America supports McCain even though he promises more of the same. More of the same? More of the same? Peacenik stands by his early prediction that, in spite of everything, Obama will be the next president of the United States.

8/5/08

Why McCain Has Caught Obama and What Obama Can Do About It

by Cenk Uygur August 4, 2008
There are two principal reasons why John McCain has caught Barack Obama in the national polls. 1) McCain has changed the whole conversation about this election into one question - do you want to vote for or against Obama? This is genius. Obama needs to switch the conversation if he wants to win. 2) Obama has only played defense so far and has not attacked at all. This is weakness and a sure-fire way to lose an election

Read More...

Peacenik is totally flummoxed by this article by Cenk Uygur. How is it possible that McCain can out poll Obama after Obama's wildly successful trip to the Mideast and Europe. How is it possible that McCain can out poll Obama when McCain's campaign has been a laughing stock and McCain's performance has been incompetent. And how is it possible that a Republican can out poll, even for a day, a Democrat; when this Republican administration has so much baggage; corruption, incompetence, economic disaster, war crimes, impeachable offenses, and on and on. Read Cenk's analysis. Peacenik is very worried about who is pulling the levers in the polling stations. If voters get what they deserve....watch out.

7/29/08

Forget the Surge -- Violence Is Down in Iraq Because Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective

By Juan Cole
www.juancole.com

Editor's note: John McCain's latest stumble in discussing Iraq -- in which he muddled the timeline of the so-called "surge" -- was treated by most of the press as an unfortunate gaffe, rather than further proof that the aspiring commander in chief does not know what he's talking about when it comes to the war and occupation. (One CNN report actually ran the headline: "McCain Broadens Definition of the Surge.") Meanwhile, the Republican nominee's recent attacks on Barack Obama for failing to admit the success of the "surge" was widely reported by the same members of the media, whose dominant and uncritical narrative has long been that, as McCain and Bush contend, the "surge" has been an unqualified success. "Why can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would?" a USA Today editorial asked last week.

Keep Reading...

Peacenik ponders...Why it is that the media and most polticians have deemed the surge a success? Forget the failed timeline, the unmet performance measures, the violence and the ethnic cleansing. Read Juan Cole's sad overview, above. And try and remember the CNN footage from the days before shock and awe when there was a vibrant city life and street life in Bahgdad. When there was a sophisticated, educated, civil society.....


7/23/08

Noam Chomsky: I think McCain will win.

 Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)

punditman says...Chomsky has proven to be one the most astute observers of the US political scene ever, so even one of his throw-away remarks is worth serious contemplation.
I am one of those who is endlessly grateful for Noam Chomsky's activism, his clear and perceptive explanations, and the withering snark he directs at the "Masters".

I know Chomsky has a well-deserved reputation as a scientific genius in linguistics, but I always thought that his political principles were simple (in a good way). Chomsky has taught me to apply the following principles to politics: States are systems of power, not moral entities and must adhere to their obligations under international law. Everyone is responsible for the foreseeable effects of his or her actions. Power is fundamentally invalid unless justified by contigent need, with the burden of proof placed on those trying to justify power. There is far more moral value in criticizing our own states and institutions (for which we are responsible) than in criticizing others.
All of this is a long wind-up to the point of this diary- namely my own panic and dismay upon reading that Chomsky predicts a McCain victory. (I remember he predicted Bush's reelection in 04, though he personally voted for Kerry). I note that I predicted a McCain victory myself, but have since taken a more optimistic view. 

Noam Chomsky's prediction was a throw-away at the end of an interview and he doesn't explain why he thinks that McCain will win.


4/25/07

Code Pink Sings Back at John McCain's "Bomb Iran" Refrain.

punditman says: A little choppy in parts, but their heads and hearts are in the right place.

4/19/07

Unplugged McCain sings "Bomb bomb bomb...bomb bomb Iran"

A fresh bombing campaign directed against a newfangled country makes McCain want to sing with joy.

punditman says:
This unoriginal, devalued Beach Boys refrain was popular back in 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis. McCain has probably had this fantasy for years.

Anyone who thinks this guy is the answer should give their head a shake.