Because in Iraq and Afghanistan Obama was part of a CODEL (Congressional delegation) with Senators Hagel and Reed. That’s why they could go onto the bases and so forth – it was part of their official fact-finding tour, and SOP.
Upon leaving the Middle East, Hagel and Reed parted ways with Obama, and his travels were no longer classified as a CODEL.
OK. So McCain was too, when he went on his famous “Baghdad Walk”? Or was that an Armed Services Committee thing?
Yep, another CODEL, I believe – every Congresscritter does them to a greater or lesser degree, and makes more or less political hay from them.
So what is McCain’s next challenge to Obama? a friendly game of HORSE?
I don’t have much use for Republicans, but McCain used to be one of the very few for which I had some respect.
I don’t have much use for Democrats, but Obama is one I could vote for, and for whom I still hold a modicum of respect.
See how silly that sounds?
Bring on the debates, I say. If it’s as lopsided as Dems on this board believe, than Obama will slaughter McCain in a general debate.
Unless of course he has one of those special “Rove Boxes” implanted in the back of his suit like Dubya did during the Kerry debates!
How’s a neo-con bot to function without Cheney whispering the prime directive of profit on the back of slaughter in his ear?
Hilarious.
No, just to claim that Obama’s ability to make a 3-pointer shows that someone who spends so much time on the basketball court is obviously unqualified to lead this country.
True, but not very revealing on its own. Lots of things happen at the last minute in the military.
“They” in this case probably everybody on the base. But who is to say that a general or staff officer at the Pentagon was chasing down other matters, remained ignorant until he heard/saw it on the news, and then called the base commander to remind him that this was not a CODEL? I’ve known plenty of staff officers who caused “fire drills” by flailing around mightily at the last minute – for example, a briefing is going up to somebody (e.g. an Undersecretary of Defense) on a fairly important topic that tangentially touches some colonel’s turf, and so after we’ve already delivered the slides to the USecDef, he calls and demands that we include (e.g.) his organization’s org-chart & mission slides, and let someone from his shop brief for a few slides. Usually we say “you’re too late,” but sometimes the person has a lot of damn rank and… well, we run around like it’s a fire drill.
Given that the military tends to vote heavily Republican, there are any number of people at the Pentagon who could make such a change happen. I don’t know why you think the White House had to be in on it.
If a dog died on my street tomorrow, and there was any political gain for Bush in it, I would not put it past the White House to have been involved. But I was asking for evidence. They’re absolutely craven political hacks… but this feels a lot more like someone at the Pentagon playing games.
It’s like the ‘controversy’ of Obama’s and McCain’s NYT op-eds. The NYT ran an op-ed by Obama where he laid out his vision for Iraq and the Middle East. At a few points in the piece, Obama distinguished where he stood from where McCain stood, but the driving thrust of the piece was his own vision for our approach to Iraq and the region.
McCain apparently wanted equal time, and the NYT was willing to give him space for a similar piece. He wasn’t willing to produce one, though. Instead, he offered up a piece that simply attacked Obama’s ideas, without going into any detail about his own. So the NYT didn’t run McCain’s piece.
(McCain’s campaign, and the right-wing blogs, are whining about this to beat the band. McCain, a longtime opponent of the Fairness Doctrine, apparently wants it applied here. Cry me a river, guys, and get back to me when Rush Limbaugh gives equal time on his show to those who disagree with his positions.)
And so it goes. McCain seems to know that he doesn’t have anything to sell that the electorate wants to buy, so he’s reduced to criticizing Obama.
I thought they were bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Ah, that wasn’t a political statement. That was just George W. Bush living up his Tom Clancy-fueled jingoistic fantasies in a staged moment even David Mamet couldn’t top with the absurdity generator cranked to 11.
I’d pay to see that:
McCain: You changed your shirt, Mr. Obama. I hope our little game isn’t causing you to prespire?
Obama: A little. But I won’t consider myself to be in trouble until I start flip-flopping on Iraq.
Stranger
This is entirely anecdotal, but this whole week while Obama was doing his foreign tour, I saw on TV and heard on the radio clip after clip of Obama in his various locations (Iraq, Israel, Europe, etc.) paired with clip after clip of McCain in his town hall meetings in the US.
Without fail, Obama was talking about his own ideas and proposed policies. I never heard him reference McCain once. (I did hear, IIRC, some jabs at Bush).
Without fail, McCain was attacking Obama’s patriotism (the “he’d rather win a campaign than a war” line) and Iraq plan. I never heard him NOT reference Obama.
The difference is palpable. The McCain campaign is flailing about like a drowning dog, desperate for purchase.
To be fair, I think that the candidates aren’t allowed to criticize their political opponent while traveling abroad. I’ll try to find a cite for that, though.
Yeah, generally speaking it’s considered bad form to publicly dis another pol in front of a foreign audience. I guess the idea is that we present a united front when we’re on the world stage. Kinda silly when you think about it, in this day where everything anyone says can be seen by anyone in the world on youtube.
Now that you mention it, I had heard of that before.
I retract my above comparison as invalid, then.
For some reason I was thinking it was actually some kind of rule, rather than a basic rule-of-thumb.
I agree that it seems kind of silly; especially, as you mentioned, given the prominence of YouTube, etc. It is kind of nice, though, since it gives us a chance to get away from the personal bickering for a bit.
Although McCain sure had fun bashing Obama while in Canada if I remember correctly…
Though troubling, that was somewhat different in that his comments in support of NAFTA were taken by most as simply an implied dig at Obama’s stance. Some, however, did have problems with the fact that the trip was paid for by McCain’s campaign and that an ambassador’s role in organizing McCain’s speech could have been a violation of the Hatch Act.
I’m a little more troubled by Bush’s comments before the Knesset clearly criticizing Obama’s willingness to talk to the leaders of not-necessarily friendly countries and plans to use diplomacy as an equally important tool along with military might. While Bush is not a candidate and not an official part of McCain campaign, his espousing such positions could give the impression of an implied surrogancy and certainly does nothing for the appearance of a united front abroad.