I mean, never mind whether there’s any there there. No matter what the results are, even if it all shows that Obama had plotted bombings with Ayers while snorting coke off his naked crotch, I can’t help but be stunned at the lengths these people are going to. Not even appalled… Just completely stunned. That’s how discombobulated I am.
Just… wow.
Are you of the opinion that people on Obama’s side aren’t trying to dig up the same kind of dirt on McCain?
And why is this so off-limits? The Democrats spent years scrupulously studying every scrap of material they could find from Bush’s younger days. A major story was pushed against Bush by the mainstream media, using forged documents.
As far as I’m concerned, Kurtz has a valid complaint. Forget the Ayers angle - those documents are the only record of the time Obama spent doing executive work. It seems as though they are very much in the public interest. Maybe we’ll find out that he’s a helluva guy and a great leader and the files will be full of gushing letters and accolades.
I do know that if a reporter went looking for McCain’s Navy performance reviews and the military locked them up and refused access that the media had a right to, you’d all be screaming coverup.
The people do have a right to know this stuff. This isn’t his sex life - this is documentary public evidence of the years he spent doing the most important executive job he’s had.
I suspect there’s no coverup of Ayers here. What I do suspect is that someone suddenly realized that those files aren’t vetted, and although the files are public, they were never intended to be scrutinized by the press and every inconsistency or error in them turned into national news. So someone grabbed the files before Kurtz got to them, and they’re furiously going through them to see what might be in there that’s embarrassing. Not to Obama, necessarily, but to the many people who have information about them in that collection.
I realized after I posted that perhaps I was being a little misleading and/or vague. As I said, I’m not arguing that there can’t possibly be something in those files. And it’s certainly reasonable to consider it all fair game. I’m not arguing for kid gloves, here.
It was just something about the… enthusiasm, I suppose. The attitude. There was a kind of, I dunno, glee to it that bothered me. I’m not sure I can really quantify it. It was really a visceral reaction. I just came away from reading it with images of pitchforks and torches. It felt like a kind of - I dunno - bloodthirst, the kind I feel from many liberals when talking about Bush. It was of an intensity that was kind of off-putting to me.
Thanks for prodding me to clarify. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I can’t deny the intensity of my initial emotional reaction, even if it is unjustified.
I think the intensity of feeling among some on the right comes from fear. This could be the first election in a long, long time where the Republicans completely lose control over all three branches of government. There’s a possibility that they won’t even have enough seats to filibuster. And with a left-wing Obama Presidency, and perhaps two or three Supreme Court justices being appointed by the next president, this could be a monumental shift in political direction for the U.S. This is causing a lot of people on the right to lose a lot of sleep these days.
I know I wouldn’t because I’d be all agog at the notion that the media had a “right to” military performance reviews. As someone who’s gotten a few of those over the years, fuck that noise.
I just picked that out of the air as an example. Choose any public document regarding McCain’s past that suddenly becomes unavailable when reporters go looking for it.
Stop teasing me. 
Shame that didn’t occur to them when they were holding inviting corporations to write laws that helped themselves or made all their illegal acts legal, merrily ripped the constitution to shreds, then gutted government oversight and plundering the treasury through war profiteering. Perhaps there wouldn’t be quite the degree of payback that seems to be heading their way.
Have no fear though, if the Dem.s control everything it will go to their heads, they will screw up as bad and they’ll all get kicked out.
Cheer up. Unless ebola or the Black Plague hits the Supremes, the right will still control the Supreme Court. The only justices that look likely to be replaced during the next administration are the only liberals still there. The question is whether we’ll have any balance at all, or if the Court will be entirely right wing for the next thirty years or so.
Especially scary since they controlled all three branches just two years ago.
Scarier still, at least for Admin insiders, since this comes at a point when they have so much to hide.
I’m not getting my hopes up. Obama is no leftist.
And they used to sleep so well on their piles of money as they lied us into war and destroyed our economy.
I wasn’t aware the undead required sleep.
Vampires, like Count Cheney (or Dick the Pepperer if you prefer), do require sleep. Hard work to be that evil, and it’d be impossible without a coffin to take a quick power nap in.
Isn’t that what the man-sized safe is for?
Aren’t the most likely two judges to retire left leaning anyway?
That’s what I pointed out. The choice here is between right and righter. In no way is the Court going to be dominated by the left unless we see ebola or the Black Plague strike during a Democratic presidency, and even then, if it were an Obama presidency, we would likely get centrist judges. For all the right winger screamers to the contrary, Obama is not especially liberal as Democrats go. They’ll be pro Roe v Wade, but beyond that? I wouldn’t count on a thing.
snerk
Well, I am certainly of that opinion! It appears that you do not recall that Obama himself utterly squashed Media Matters’ and MoveOn’s dirt patrols early on. And stuck to his promise.
Obama has consistently avoided that kind of ugly, despicable politics while your guy and his “plausibly-deniable” attack dogs like this vicious Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons throw temper tantrums and hurl out some of the most egregiously foul lies and aspersions that I’ve ever heard against a presidential candidate.
Earlier, McCain nobly promised he just would not stand for the incredibly corrosive “swift-boat” tactics that destroyed his good friend John Kerry with out and out lies, and that he would stop the right-wing political groups – whose role these days is little other than swift-boating Democrats – from doing so also. Hooray for (the early) McCain!
Well, Mr. Expedience has clearly taken it all back. What a surprise. He’s realized that going ugly is pretty much all he’s got (Obama’s going to raise taxes on the middle class, anyone?), so he’s not about to show any courage or principle that would keep him from riding into the White House. Expedience, ya’ know, is his middle name, after all (okay, technically it’s Sidney, but still). So when a reporter challenged those statements in light of the despicable right-wing attacks, including from surrogates, McCraven puddled up just like Odo on Deep Space 9 or that Mercury-like Terminator in T2 after taking a bad hit. “I can’t be a referee of every spot run on television," he begins to blubber (manfully, of course) as his knees weaken and the puddling begins…
Now, I figure you McCainiacs think he’s just telling the “straight” truth. “He just can’t, you know!”, you’ll point out. But hilarious straw-man aside (after all, who said he’d have to do such a stupid thing?), let’s look at how Barack Obama handled this same issue:
Obama, too, made the same pledge early in the campaign. But unlike McCain, he’s stuck to it. Unlike your guy, Obama’s principles don’t just evaporate whenever sticking to them would hurt his election chances. He knows damn well that the candidate has considerable power to stifle that kind of contemptible crap. And early on, he proved it. A 527 by the name of “Progressive Media USA” was taken over recently by David Brock, whose stated goal was to “raise $40 million for ads to ‘soften up’ John McCain in advance of the general election”. When Obama learned of it (which was almost immediately), he called all his bigger donors and personally insisted that they not fund or support that or any other group with similar intentions in any way. The group then folded and released the following: “Progressive Media will not be running an independent ad campaign this year,” … adding that “donors and potential donors are getting clear signals from the Obama camp through the news media and we recognize that reality.”
The same thing happened when MoveOn.org tried also. Obama crushed it before it got off the ground.
So the dirt is coming almost exclusively from one side: The Republicans.
p.s.: I fully expect to see McCain publicly – but oh, so disingenuously! – “distance” himself from Simmons and his group, or at least from the ad. Then they’ll go back inside and chortle with pleasure at how effective it is to throw out this kind of contemptible shit.
Except when it comes to opting in to the federal election funding system.
Don’t get me wrong – apart from that incident, I agree with your characterization of the Senator. But let’s not pretend that one never happened.
Um, wasn’t that contingent on both candidates opting in? And didn’t McCain agree to abide by the federal matching funds limit, and borrow money against his intention of taking matching federal funds, only to unilaterally attempt to opt out of the program first? And weren’t there concerns that his action in doing so violated that campaign finance law…what was the name of that again, the Something-Feingold Act?