McCain/Palin: Lying Far Beyond the Palin

[BlackKnight]

My best guess is that by criticizing McCain, Rove his hoping to distance him from Bush. If McCain is opposed by Rove, then maybe he really is a Maverick[sup]TM[/sup] who will shake up Washington!

Either that, or even a broken douchebag is right twice a day.

I like my women like I like my metaphors - vulgar and confused.

[Paranoid_Randroid]

@elucidator

Whats that noise? It sounds like a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum…

I knew we shouldn’t have turned on the large hadron collider!

[Menocchio]

@BlackKnight

Add another name to that list … Karl Rove:
Link

Heh. Yeah. I was about to post that myself. It’s worth a chuckle.

But if you go and read his full remarks, he’s actually trying to do something clever. He’s basically trying to tu quoque Obama, which is probably more credible than flat-out declaring McCain an innocent (and there’s no reason he can’t defend McCain half the time and tu quoque Obama the other half). And if Obama is denied the moral high ground, why wouldn’t you vote for experienced war hero McCain and feisty everywoman Palin? (Assuming, that is, that you don’t care about the issues or don’t blame the current Republican Party for the failures of the Republican Party over the last 8 years)

But where Rove miscalculated is that “ROVE SAYS MCCAIN IS LYING” is the man-bites-dog headline, so that’s the part of his statement that will be repeated. It also plays into what I think is the new narrative of the week that the media is now transitioning into. It was WHO THE #$%& IS SARAH PALIN?!? and then SARAH PALIN: SO AWESOME, but now I think it’s becoming JOHN MCCAIN’S PANTS ARE ON FIRE. I might be wrong about that, or something else might jump in first, and who knows how long it will last, but that’s what I see at the moment.

[begbert2]

My dad loves the lies. He’s just got a hold of the Obama Nation and is lapping it up like a fly feasting on shit. (It’s depressing.)

So clearly the truth-free smear tactics still work on some people.

[Sampiro]

Obama has his Fight the Smears page, but the webmanager needs to make a much bigger link to it and publicize the hell out of it. Their campaign (and or the 527 Winged Monkey brigades) needs to also punch the “McLiar” meme a lot more than they are currently, preferably with links to brief and long refutations (ala Snopes- False or Distortion and then the full version) with an email option.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

Holy crap! Richard Cohen has taken a flying leap off of the Straight Talk Express:

Richard Cohen - The Ugly New McCain

This is a guy who admits to having been in the tank for McCain, but now he spares no words in calling him disgraceful.

Here’s the DNC’s catalog of McCain/Palin lies, for your amusement. I think it needs some updating.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

Meanwhile, in the “You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried” department, one of McCain’s aides asserts that McCain is responsible for the invention of the BlackBerry:

Pressed to provide an example of what McCain had accomplished on [the Senate Commerce Committee], Holtz-Eakin said the senator did not have jurisdiction over financial markets — then held up his Blackberry, telling reporters: “He did this.”

“Telecommunications of the United States, the premiere innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” said Holtz-Eakin. “And that’s what he did. He both regulated and de-regulated the industry.”

Shades of “Al Gore claims he invented the Internet!” Yes, I know it’s just as unfair as that was, but oh! How delicious the irony, that this “John McCain claims he invented the BlackBerry” meme is just the sort of mockery that could spread virally and make him a laughingstock.

What goes around comes around, indeed.

[jayjay]

@EddyTeddyFreddy

Meanwhile, in the “You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried” department, one of McCain’s aides asserts that McCain is responsible for the invention of the BlackBerry:
Shades of “Al Gore claims he invented the Internet!” Yes, I know it’s just as unfair as that was, but oh! How delicious the irony, that this “John McCain claims he invented the BlackBerry” meme is just the sort of mockery that could spread virally and make him a laughingstock.

What goes around comes around, indeed.

(Emphasis mine)

No, actually, it’s not. Al Gore actually did heavily support the creation of the commercial internet and World Wide Web while he was in the Senate. McCain voted against the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 that “authorized the spectrum auctions that created the competitive wireless market that gave rise to companies like Research in Motion [the creator of Blackberry]", according to Blair Levin, the former chief of staff of the former FCC chairman Reed Hundt.

And Blackberry is made by Research in Motion (RIM), which is headquartered outside of Toronto. How McCain had any effect whatsoever on a Canadian technology company is beyond me.

McCain was also one of only five senators who voted against the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which also did a lot to open up the market for PDAs like the Blackberry.

However, this particular concept doesn’t work for us that much because it wasn’t McCain himself who said it. It was Holtz-Eakin, who seems to have a much more intensive shoeleather diet than even the candidate himself.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

Aha! So the desperate lunge for pseudo-kudos is even more far-fetched than it seemed at first blush? Oh-hohohohohohohoho!!

[Shayna]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Holy crap! Richard Cohen has taken a flying leap off of the Straight Talk Express:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502406.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

This is a guy who admits to having been in the tank for McCain, but now he spares no words in calling him disgraceful.

Holy crap, is right! :eek:

@Richard Cohen

. . .Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

. . .

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains – his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all – but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story – that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir – the person in whose hands he would leave the country – is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

. . .

And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can – as he did in South Carolina – renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right – what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

Those are harsh words. Yowza.

[gonzomax]

@NurseCarmen

Elections are won in the middle, and the middle is seeing commercials. They aren’t paying attention to news coverage of commercials. That is why the McCain Palin camp is doing it, because it works. Make the big lies, that makes the impact. The debunking of the big lie doesn’t make as much impact to those only marginally paying attention.

apropos of nothing, Larry Craig has been in the local news, and NOW I remember where I had seen Sarah Palin’s glasses before.

Elections are often lost pandering to the middle. A pol has a message of change and then waters it down to a mess trying to get the middle vote. It does not work and it alienates the base who actually backed the original view.

[jayjay]

@EddyTeddyFreddy

Aha! So the desperate lunge for pseudo-kudos is even more far-fetched than it seemed at first blush? Oh-hohohohohohohoho!!

Yes…again, though, this doesn’t have an analogous punch to the “Al Gore invented the internet” meme because a) it wasn’t McCain himself who claimed the credit for this, it was a spokesman (Holtz-Eakin), and b) Holtz-Eakin has already been countermanded by a senior McCain aide:

Washington Wire reports that according to senior McCain aide Matt McDonald, the senator “laughed” when told about Holtz-Eakin’s comment. "He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer,” McDonald said.

[jayjay]

Clarification time…I misread the diaries in question. McCain actually did claim credit, from his own mouth, for being the “guiding hand” behind Congress’s initiatives which helped to create the wi-fi environment we have today. He did not claim, himself, to have helped create the Blackberry. That was entirely campaign adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who trips over his own tongue on average about four times a day.