When President McCranky orders up those bombing raids on Iran, are we likely to wind up nuking, like, Ireland?

Why did Young Johnny pretend to be in North Hollywood?

by Ken

This falls into the category of The Friggin' Unbelievable.

Let me say that I didn't watch a second of the Republican National Convention. Even last night, I was actually kind of sorry that the NFL season-opening Giants-Redskins game didn't, like, go into overtime -- difficult as that would have been for my delicate fan's sensibilities. (Go, Giants!) As it was, it struck me as pretty eerie the way the game ended almost on the stroke of 10pm ET, just in time for NBC to switch over to . . . the other broadcast scheduled for that hour.

I gather, though, that Senator McCranky gave his big speech in front of a green screen that at some point morphed into a blue screen (which I'm told lends itself to editing in background images in exactly the same way a classic green screen does). And at some point, it appears, Young Johnny was seen standing in front of some unidentified palatial building, as shown above.

At this point, let Josh Marshall pick up the story, from his TPM post:

A lot of people were asking tonight: what the hell was that mansion up behind John McCain tonight during the first part of the speech? As I noted below, the TV close-ups only showed McCain's head against the grass in the picture, which made it look like he was reprising his famed green screen performance. And when they panned out, it looked like McCain was showing off one of his mansions.

Well, several readers have written in to tell me that the building is actually the main building on the campus of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California.

Josh duly posted both the above photo and an established one of the school in question.

Which still left the question: Why in tarnation would Young Johnny have been fake-plunked in front of a middle school in North Hollywood? Josh returned to this question in an update:

Several readers have suggested that perhaps one of the tech geeks charged with setting up the audio/visual bells and whistles for the evening was tasked with getting pictures of Walter Reed Army Medical Center but goofed and got this instead. At first I thought, No, that's ridiculous. This is a major political party with big time professionals putting this together. Nothing is left to chance. I mean, is this the RNC or a scene out of Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman? I still have a bit of a hard time believing they're quite that incompetent. But when you figure in what appears to be the utter lack of any logic for this school being behind McCain and the fact that it has 'Walter Reed' in its name, I'm really not sure you can discount this possibility.

To which an editor's note was added: "Special bonus snark: That's not stock photo keyword searching we can believe in."

No indeed.

Is McCranky's record off the record?

Now, until someone can provide an alternate explanation, I think we have to assume that it was indeed the medical center that the RNC staff wizards were going for, and that in their heads one Walter Reed building is the same as any other. This, for informational purposes, is the actual Army medical center:


Do you remember back in 2000, when it was blindingly clear to anyone who was paying attention that Gov. George W. Bush, despite the supposed crash course on policy matters he'd been through with all those outside experts (you know, giants in their fields like Condoleezza Rice), possessed approximately zero percent of the basic knowledge of issues that call for presidential decision-making? We were frequently assured that it wouldn't matter because he would be surrounded by crackerjack staff who would know.

We've seen how well that worked out.

Now we have Senator McCranky, who at one time or another has staked out just about every position you can stake out on every issue of interest to him -- except, in many cases, the sensible position. By now he's up to three or four positions on many issues. (So much for the theory that there are two sides to every question.) And yet it's impossible to find out what he actually believes on any of those issues. In fact, he turns, well, cranky anytime he's pressed on one of his "positions."

It's ironic that the senator should have tried and so spectacularly failed to associate himself with Walter Reed the medical center. It's emblematic of his gruesome record on providing real support for either active-duty military personnel or veterans. When it comes to proclaiming support, he's got one gigantic mouth on him. But when it comes to backing up that support with votes, his record is abysmal. On the searing scandals of the wholesale failure to provide anything like adequate resources for our military returnees in urgent need of physical and/or mental care, as exemplified by the shocking conditions exposed at Walter Reed (and I don't mean the middle school), Young Johnny has been AWOL.

What did Young Johnny not know and when?

Yet the Crankyman himself seems genuinely unaware of it. You can't press him on his scandalous Senate voting record on veterans' issues, because he never seems familiar with his own voting record. (He has a bad history of lying about -- er, misstating -- it.) To some people this is evidence of worrisome memory impairment. I'm more inclined to think it reflects rather a worrisome lack of interest in that tiresome voting stuff senators are pestered to do.

Oh, our Johnny does it, or at least he used to, at least sometimes, but that doesn't mean he paid much attention. I don't know, maybe he just voted the way his senior staff told him to. Or maybe he rolled the very same Lucky Johnny Dice that gave him Governor Who??? as a running mate.

I think it's possible he remembers so little about his Senate votes because he just never much cared about those votes, the way he doesn't seem to care about any policy issues except insofar as they intersect with his ambitions of the moment. Now it may be that he's going to care more once he's in the Oval Office. However, if we're counting on his staff to pull him through, we better hope they're not hanging out on a playground in North Hollywood.

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