Are the Teabaggers really incapable of understanding that the "problem" of voter fraud is a myth?

The "menace" of voter fraud is another of those "truthy" things that sounds like it could be true, maybe even oughtta be true, but alas isn't. Funny how the right-wing apostles of "urban" voter fraud never mention their own very real, very intense years' worth of high-powered election-rigging and -stealing.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the myth of voter fraud."

-- statement by Ocean State Action, in response to RI
Gov. Lincoln Chafee's hush-hush signing of two voter-ID bills

by Ken

Lincoln Chafee has never struck me as the strongest-spined of pols, and possibly is so ragdoll-ish that he seems wimpy even when he's doing the macho-patriotic thing. I suppose it doesn't help him that he's equipped with some sort of conscience, a useless appendage for a pol if there ever was one. He knows when he's done something craven and gutless.

So what did the poor dear do over the holiday weekend but try to hide the craven, gutless thing he did Saturday? Yes, he actually kept it hidden until Tuesday afternoon, when his people finally acknowledged that yes, he had signed a bill, or rather two bills, passed on the final day of the legislative session which call for strict ID requirements for Rhode Island voters. (Yes, there are actually two bills, or rather laws now, one initiated by the state's Senate, one by the General Assembly.)

It sounds like a simple blow for democracy, or at least it sounds like this to simpletons, like the Teabaggers, who promptly -- as soon as they heard about it -- hailed the governor for taking "that first step toward freedom from the manipulation of votes meant to benefit politicians and special-interest agendas, particularly in our urban areas." I think it's safe to say that the governor knows perfectly well that this is a "solution" to a "problem" that isn't.

The governor's three days of evasion might have become comical -- if this were in any way humorous. Here's the Providence Journal's Katherine Gregg reporting yesterday afternoon (links onsite):

In the absence of an earlier acknowledgment, the advocacy group Ocean State Action vehemently urged the governor to veto the so-called "voter identification'' bill that, in future elections, will require voters to provide proof of their identity at the polls.

From Ocean State Action came this statement: "On the last day of the session, after an hour and a half of debate and against the strong objections of progressive legislators, the General Assembly passed a voter identification bill that will disenfranchise low-income voters, communities of color, the elderly and students across the state of Rhode Island.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the MYTH of voter fraud.'' . . .

A mystified Kate Brock, Ocean State Action's executive director, said she called the governor's office at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday to ask if Chafee had signed the voter identification bills, "and I was told that neither S-400 nor H-5680 had been signed by the Governor. Hence the e-blast.''

In mid-afternoon Tuesday, John Marion, executive director of the citizens' group Common Cause, voiced concern that "there is nothing, nothing on the [General Assembly] or governor's website about this. The GA website doesn't even show it having been transmitted to the governor yet. How can they possibly not tell you whether he has signed it or not?''

At 2:54 p.m. on Tuesday, the governor's office made public a list of the bills that Chafee signed into law Saturday.

So now a blue state, with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and an Independent governor, has joined the parade of states pretending to uphold democracy -- the Teabaggers' message of appreciation to the Rhode Island legislature and governor described this as -- when anyone with a working brain, starting with the right-wing hoodlums perpetrating this hoax, know full well that the intent is the exact opposite, to step up their already-muscular efforts all over the country to minimize voting by "the wrong kind" of people.

I get that Teabaggers themselves by and large don't understand. They have, after all, at some point made a decision not to try to understand anything about the real world, perhaps to save wear and tear on their delicate brains. By choice, they see nothing beyond the tips of their noses, except for the lying filth concocted for them by the lying devils of the Far Right, who laugh at the grotesque sheep they routinely hornswoggle even as they pull their chains yet again.

But where the demonic forces of the Far Right are involved, reality has ceased to come into it, or anything else. All that matters is the malicious delusions the puppet-masters work so hard to inject into the dormant brains of their stooges. They count on the dopes' insularity, their total unawareness that people of good faith may live lives that differ in any way from theirs, that there are people for whom mounting right-wing restrictions on voting accessibility in terms of polling facilities and hours, not to mention campaigns of coercion and lies about eligibility and hours, may make voting not merely inconvenient but impossible, people for whom the IDs the Teabaggers take for granted may indeed be an onerous burden.

The grotesque truth about the "problem" of voter fraud is that there isn't one. If there were one, by now someone would surely have pointed it out. Even during the intellectual low point of this all-low-points crusade against democracy, the Far Right's gang rape of ACORN for the sin of standing up for non-overprivileged Americans, it was abundantly clear to anyone who had any interest in reality that the voter-registration "scandal" wasn't one, that it resulted from ACORN's own discovery and reporting of paid signer-uppers who were manufacturing registrations for personal profit not ideological advantage, and that not a single fraudulent vote was charged by anyone to have been cast anywhere as a result.

The reality, of course, is that the danger to fair elections comes entirely from those same demons of the Far Right, who over the last decade or two have deployed heroic reserves of manpower and cash to the effort to steal every election they can get their mitts. If as much effort had been spent on, say, curing cancer or achieving world peace, we would all be living to a ripe old age in a world of international harmony.

But of course, for people who have committed themselves to intellectual vacancy, choosing to live as the pawns of liars and thieves, the chances of ever learning any of this are, well, nil.

I'm pretty sure poor Lincoln Chafee understands all of this, just as he understood the destructiveness of the legislative rampage of the Bush regime he witnessed as a Republican member of the U.S. Senate, and understood why his colleague Jim Jeffords decided he could no longer be part of it. I'm sure he suffered in those years, but he -- like his gutless Maine colleagues Olympia Snowe and Suzy Q. Collins -- didn't do a damned thing about it. They didn't just let it happen, they lent their Senate votes to it.

So yes, I expect Governor Chafee knows what it feels like to hold your nose and do something you know is wrong. He's had plenty of practice. And now in his political "second life," he's doing it again. His sop to his conscience, apparently, is that for the three days between his signing of the bills and his office's acknowledgment that he had done so, he could pretend he didn't.

#

More Mainstream Republicans Deserting McCain: Michigan

topher

Gov William Milliken won't be campaign for McCain any longer

Two weeks ago DWT published a guest post by former Republican Congressman John Buchanan of Alabama explaining why he had changed his mind, after voting for McCain in the primary, and is now supporting Barack Obama. Congressman Buchanan mourned the loss of the "real" John McCain he liked and admired and wrote that he's "proving himself to be a very unfunny caricature" and "is using the same oft repeated big lie strategy of bearing  false witness against Obama that was used against him in 2000. The real John McCain was above such nefarious tactics. He would instead be running an honest and honorable campaign on the real and important issues our country faces in this election."

It was a big deal when former Michigan Governor William Milliken endorsed McCain in the Republican primary instead of Mitt Romney. This morning's Grand Rapids Press is reporting that Milliken, like mainstream Republicans all over America, is having buyer's remorse.

"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."

...During a stop in Grand Rapids on Thursday, Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican U.S. senator from Rhode Island, said he's voting for Obama and urging others to do likewise.

McCain campaigned for Chafee's unsuccessful re-election bid in 2006, but Chafee said he is concerned McCain has swung to the right, a divisive strategy that could make it difficult for him to govern.

"That's not my kind of Republicanism," said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. "I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what's happened now. In eight short years they've taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they've torn it into tatters."

As for McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, "there's no question she's totally unqualified," Chafee said.

And it isn't just Buchanan, Milliken and Chafee who are horrified at the transformation of John McCain into the disreputable troll we see on TV everyday. Michigan, in fact, is filled with them. Former state Senator Phil Arthurhultz, a Republican of Whitehall, is backing Obama and ex-Republican County Chair (Kent) Bob Eleveld, once the head of McCain's campaign in western Michigan, refuses to back McCain at all this year. "I'm not supporting either of them at this point," he said. "Suffice it to say there are a number of people who have been strong Republicans in the past, including party chairs, who feel as I do... I think the straight talk is gone. I think he's pandering to the Christian right. That's some straight talk from me."

Discord in the ranks couldn't come at a worse time for Bush congressional rubber stamps like Tim Walberg and Joe Knollenberg, two Michigan congressmen on the road to losing their seats. Both are down in the polls and are likely to be defeated by Mark Schauer and Gary Peters, both Democrats committed to supporting working families instead of narrow partisan agendas and the special interests of big campaign contributors.

One thing almost all Republicans abandoning McCain, or thinking of abandoning McCain, have in common is their utter disdain, if not outright contempt, for Sarah Palin. One McCain loyalist, Rep Ray LaHood (R-IL) told Chicago's biggest radio station, WBBM, that her 24/7 smear campaign could backfire on the GOP, "doesn't reflect the character of" Obama, and "doesn’t befit the office that she’s running for.  And frankly, people don’t like it.” (Funny how reluctant they are to question McCain's judgment and even his patriotism for this abysmal selection that so jeopardizes the country's well-being.) Actually what's left of the hatered-obsessed Republican does like it. It's what they are. LaHood is retiring but dozens of Republican politicians running for re-election are freaking out about McCain and Palin and the negative coattails that are likely to sink their own races. One of the most endangered Republicans in the Senate, Bush rubber stamp Gordon Smith of Oregon, resigned as chairman of McCain's Oregon campaign and actually uses Obama's photos in his campaign spots! He even tried insinuating that he and popular Oregon Senator Ron Wyden are "a team." Wyden responded to that yesterday:




UPDATE: WILLIAM F BUCKLEY'S SON CHRIS DUMPS McCAIN

In a bid to follow his father's advise of separating the Right from the kooks-- tough gig!-- Chris Buckley announced that he's voting for Obama.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times... a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t-- still-- doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam-- his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

...He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain-- who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

More Republicans Abandoning McCain For Obama

Mike Huckabee sent out a fundraising letter today smearing Barack Obama-- hey, Huckabee may be a Christian minister but, let's be real: he's a Republican through and through and we see what comes first in his world-- and trying to raise money for GOP extremists John Cornyn (R-TX), James Inhofe (R-OK), Sam Graves (R-MO). He neglected to mention that Cornyn, Inhofe and Graves don't really need any money from working folks. They get all they need from Big Oil. All three have voted for every single bill Big Oil has pushed to lower its taxes and raise the price of gasoline and each has been very well-rewarded. Cornyn to the tune of $1,313,825; Inhofe $1,076,573; and Graves $63,983. But less dishonest Republicans, including many who know and have worked with John McCain are taking a very different approach than Huckabee-- forgetting partisan politics and putting their country first.

Led by a former Bush fund-raiser and a former U.S. Senator who bolted the G.O.P. several years ago, a group of current and former Republicans disenchanted with Senator John McCain and supportive of Senator Barack Obama are banding together to start a “Republicans for Obama” effort.

Rita Hauser, a New York philanthropist who raised money for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is helping to organize the push to draw Republicans away from Mr. McCain and will serve as a spokeswoman for the group, alongside former U.S. Senator Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island, who was one of the most moderate Republicans in the Senate and became an independent after he lost his seat in 2006.

...About 20 current and former Republicans make up the group’s leadership committee, including Douglas Kmiec, a Republican who served in the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan and was a supporter of Mitt Romney during the Republican primary [and was denied Roman Catholic communion after he endorsed Obama], and Dorothy Danforth Burlin, a Washington lawyer who is the daughter of former U.S. Senator John Danforth, another moderate Republican.

Later this afternoon the NY Times also reported that former Republican Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa endorsed Obama. Leach worked closely with McCain in Congress and is well aware about how catastrophic a McCain presidency would be for America.

''I'm convinced that the national interest demands a new approach to our interaction with the world,'' Leach, a foreign service officer before being elected to Congress, said in a conference call with reporters.

Leach predicted that many Republicans and independents would be attracted by Obama's campaign but said his decision to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time wasn't easy.

''Part of it is political parties are a distant analog to families and you really hate to step outside a family environment,'' Leach told The Associated Press in an interview.

..."For me, the national interest comes before party concerns, particularly internationally,'' said Leach, who has long been an opponent of the war in Iraq.

''We do need a new direction in American policy, and Obama has a sense of that,'' he said. ''He recognizes that a long-term occupation of Iraq is not only expensive, it's extremely dangerous to the American interests.''

Leach said he was attracted to Obama's call for a dialogue with nations such as Iran that have long been seen as U.S. adversaries.

''He also recognizes that it's preferable to speak with potential adversaries rather than simply shun them,'' Leach said.

And McCain isn't the only Republican under attack by other Republicans today. Right-wing activists in Ohio are reacting against McCain's inevitable choice of empty suit Mitt Romney as his running mate.

WASHINGTON -- Some Ohio social conservatives say they know whom they don't want John McCain to pick as his running mate: former Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney.

In a move that may say as much about their continuing uneasiness regarding McCain as it does about their mistrust of Romney, an alliance of Buckeye State social conservatives is trying to form a group: Social Conservatives Against Romney.

Although McCain is keeping his potential vice-presidential choices a tightly held secret, Romney is said to be on the short list.

"Christians are praying earnestly for the right person," said Diane Stover, a Parma resident who was a delegate for GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, a favorite of many social conservatives, in the Ohio primary. "McCain wouldn't have been our person. But we definitely feel like it would be a huge help to John McCain to pick someone we can be confident will represent the value-voter position. I don't think it helps him (McCain) at all in Ohio if he picks Romney."

...She said she doesn't consider the anti-Romney effort to be anti-McCain, despite saying McCain is not a "real conservative." She said she and other conservatives will support McCain in November, noting that he has had a consistent anti-abortion voting record as a senator from Arizona.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, is too inconsistent on issues such as abortion and gay rights "for someone who calls himself a conservative," Maines said.

Other Republicans for Obama include Tom Bernstein who went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him, Reagan policy advisor Bruce Bartlett, Delbert Spurlock, who was Assistant Secretary of the Army under Reagan, ex-Senator (and Governor) Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, Tony Campell, a former GOP congressional candidate from Maryland... and a whole slew of daughters of prominent Republican figures-- from Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon to Rudy Giuliani and Rupert Murdoch. As I've posted before, one of my neighbors, the daughter of New York Republican congressional candidate Sandy Treadwell has Obama signs all over the mansion he bought her. Of course, the real question is, how many traditional GOP voters will found their way out of the Darkness in November?

Meanwhile McCain has former Democrats who have gone over to the Dark Side, Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller, currently recuperating from another attack of paranoid schizophrenia, on his team. I wonder what Collin Powell and Chuck Hagel are gonna do.



UPDATE: COLIN POWEL

Bill Kristol rarely knows what he's talking about and usually gets everything wrong. But he claimed to have inside knowledge on Fox today that Colin Powell would be endorsing Obama at the Democratic National Convention. I wonder if he'll apologize to the country for all the lies he told when he was on the team ginning up the war hysteria.

IS McCAIN'S FOREIGN POLICY AGENDA EVEN WORSE THAN HIS DOMESTIC AGENDA?

I love it that people have been digging some of the posts here at DWT. One steady digger, Harry, has gotten very pushy lately though. He's always asking when the next post is going up and demanding more, more, more. After I posted on McCain's blatant hypocrisy on fiscal matters, Harry demanded a companion piece on McCain's even more dangerous stance on foreign affairs.

Ken and I have been posting about the dangers of McCain's warmongering and his truculent schoolboy bully attitude towards other countries. After 8 years of Bush and Cheney, it's the last thing America needs! When Bush was running for President in 2000 he laid out a "humble foreign policy" to the voters. Please take a look at him explaining it then:



After he started attacking countries, breaking treaties and making outrageous demands on (small) sovereign nations, he explained that 9/11 changed everything. Yet, reading Against The Tide by Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee paints a very, very different picture. Exactly one day after the Supreme Court made Bush president, Cheney came striding over to the Senate for a meeting with the Republican moderate caucus. Keep in mind that half a dozen far right GOP senators had been defeated and that the Senate was evenly split 50 Democrats to 50 Republicans. Chafee felt that Cheney was coming over to meet with the moderates about getting a centrist consensus together. Was he wrong!

In steady, quiet tones, the Vice President-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: A clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness. We would seek confrontation on every front. He said nothing about education or the environment or health care; it was all about these new issues that were rarely, if ever, touted in the campaign. The new administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us. I knew that what the Vice President-elect was saying would rip the closely divided Congress apart. We moderates had often voted with President Clinton on things that powerful Republican constituencies didn't like: an increase in the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights, and campaign finance reform. Mr. Cheney knew this, but he ticked off the issues at the top of his agenda and did it fearlessly. It made no difference to him that we were potential adversaries; he was going down his to-do list and checking off Confrontation Number 1.

More than anything else, Cheney and his treasonous cabal of future war criminals wanted to attack Iraq. And they were going to do it by hook or by crook. McCain is doing his best to lull Americans into believing he's the Bush they fell for in 2000 instead of the Cheney they got the day after the election. Can't be fooled again? We'll see. The new issue of Newsweek takes measure of McCain's foreign policy pronouncements and paints a picture that makes Cheney look almost moderate! And sane. You see, Cheney and Bush just wanted to attack small, weak countries that couldn't defend themselves. McCain wants to play tough with real countries-- ones that can and will fight back... like Iran, Russia and China.

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil-- but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous-- that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

...The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives-- which would make American safe and the world more secure-- we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy. Every day these problems multiply-- involving trade, pollution, currencies-- and are in greater need of coordination. To have a body that attempts to do this but excludes the world's second largest economy is to condemn it to failure and irrelevance. International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won't make the problems go away.

McCain appears to think that he can magically unite the two main strands in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. But he can't. This is not about personalities but about two philosophically divergent views of international affairs. Put together, they will produce infighting and incoherence. We have seen this movie before. We have watched an American president unable to choose between his ideologically driven vice president and his pragmatic secretary of State-- and the result was the catastrophe of George W. Bush's first term. Twenty-five years earlier, we watched another president who believed that he could encompass the entire spectrum of foreign policy. He, too, gave speeches that were drafted by advisers with divergent world views: in that case, Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to the paralyzing internal battles of the Carter years. Does John McCain want to try this experiment one more time?

A more important question one might ask is if the American people want to try this experiment one more time with John McCain instead of Bush and Cheney.

WHY BE BITTER? HILLARY & McCAIN HAVE SHOWN THE COUNTRY WHAT DIVISIVE HYPOCRITES THEY ARE

Two bitter insiders sing from the same desperate prayer book

All day yesterday I was trying to keep myself from noting how remarkably similar the rotten vicious Clinton campaign was to the rotten vicious McCain campaign-- or at least how remarkably similar the two vile Insider campaigns sound in regard to Barack Obama's stumble. The corporate media, of course, is beside itself with joy. This is, after all, what sells their product. So they're taking great delight in blowing it all out of proportion. To them it's almost as big as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I used to live in one of those small Pennsylvania town-- in Monroe County. Obama's description was extremely polite and understated and Clinton's and McCain's reactions, if nothing else, point out their own shared, smug hypocrisy. And the media-- half clueless and half venal. Right now I'm in the middle of reading the rather extraordinary new book by former Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Against The Tide-- How A Compliant Congress Empowered A Reckless President. I expect that I'll be writing more about Mr. Chafee's book in the coming days. But there were a few pages I read a few days ago that made me think about the role the media plays in these kinds of verbal gaffes candidates make. But I don't want to talk how the media is piling on the Obama "bitter" comment but instead compare a story by Chafee with how the media has pummeled Clinton mercilessly over her whopper of a lie regarding her dangerous mission to Bosnia. I never heard this story before; I don't think the media covered it. And if they did, they sure didn't cover it the way they covered Clinton's Bosnia lie, even though her tall tale seems more innocent than the Cheney episode that Chafee relates early in his book:

I thought back to the Republican convention in Philadelphia just six months earlier, in August, when I applauded Mr. Cheney’s speech. It was uplifting and emotionally charged, but that was before I knew the Bush administration would be so willing to use words dishonestly.

Mr. Cheney recalled for the convention his days as secretary of defense, describing his frequent helicopter flights over Washington and how he looked down on the city with thoughts that were solemn, patriotic, and reverent.

“When you make that trip from Andrews to the Pentagon, and you look down on the city of Washington, one of the first things you see is the Capitol, where all the great debates that have shaped two hundred years of American history have taken place.

“You fly down along the Mall and see the monument to George Washington, a structure as grand as the man himself. To the north is the White House, where John Adams once prayed ‘that none but honest and wise men [may] ever rule under this roof.’

“Next you see the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, the third president and the author of our Declaration of Independence. And then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the Union.

“Then you cross the Potomac, on approach to the Pentagon. But just before you settle down on the landing pad, you look upon Arlington National Cemetery, its gentle slopes and crosses row on row.

“I never once made that trip without being reminded how enormously fortunate we all are to be Americans, and what a terrible price thousands have paid so that all of us, and millions more around the world might live in freedom.”

A day later, I was jolted to read that the staff at Arlington National Cemetery had put out a statement correcting something our candidate for vice president had said in the most inspiring part of his address.

The cemetery staff took note of the reference to “gentle slopes and crosses, row on row,” and noted: “There are no crosses in Arlington National Cemetery.”

They suggested that Mr. Cheney had lifted the image from “In Flanders Field,” a moving poem by Canadian John McCrae, in 1915.

In Arlington National Cemetery the American war dead of all faiths lie under tombstones with rounded tops.

Richard Cheney, who avoided military service as a young man, may never have looked out the helicopter window as secretary of defense to reflect solemnly on the sacrifice of the fallen.

Did he think it was all right to push that emotional button for political gain? To use America’s war dead as a campaign prop?

The cemetery staff stood up for the truth and held Mr. Cheney to account. This was no partisan press release; it came from the professionals who see our war dead to their final resting places, and who work under the motto “Where Valor Proudly Sleeps.” They resented that Richard Cheney had made up a tender story about the hallowed grounds they tend, or had allowed a Republican National Committee speechwriter to make one up for him.

If he was willing to speak falsely about Arlington National Cemetery, what else in his speech would prove inaccurate?

Cheney's lies predicted the next 7 years. Later in the speech at the Republican Convention he claimed that George W. Bush had “the courage, and the vision, and the goodness, to be a great president.” He promptly proved himself a coward with no vision except self-serving greed and the short-term outlook of someone who comes along and wrecks a company. Except he wrecked a whole country. The media doesn't see their own complicity. They can't even see their complicity in how they have created an absurd myth around John McCain. In fact, Big Tent Democrat points out a very telling comparison between Obama's statement about the feelings of people in small town Pennsylvania with what McCain said-- which went largely unreported-- about how people feel in small town Iowa.


UPDATE: ANOTHER PENNSYLVANIA OBAMA ENDORSEMENT

Although Fox and CNN are rolling in their own shit, encouraging Hillary to destroy Obama and the Democratic prospects in November, one newspaper you might expect to have taken seriously the purposeful misinterpretation of Obama's remarks, the Allentown Call, hasn't fallen for the Clinton-McCain trope nor it's hysterical amplification by a disgraceful national media. They endorsed Obama today.

In fact, while both candidates are members of the same U.S. Senate, Sen. Obama is the one who has distinguished himself as the better agent for changing Washington. Remember, on the issues, the differences between the Obama and Clinton platforms are thin or nonexistent. He has set himself apart by enunciating a vision of a different America, one that people recognize as resting on the nation's founding principles. His vision calls upon ''the better angels of our nature'' just as Abraham Lincoln did in 1861.

Obama was also endored by the Scranton Times-Tribune this morning. I guess these guys aren't as concerned with brie as the pathetic hacks in the mainstream media trying to drum up some business for their dying dead tree operations.

LINCOLN CHAFEE ENDORSES OBAMA-- WHY THIS MEANS SOMETHING

Chafee knows McCain well-- endorses Obama

As expected, and right on cue, Willard Romney, like many Republican Party hacks who once claimed they were standing on some sort of right-wing version of "principle," have come out and endorsed a third term for George Bush in the thinly disguised personification of John McCain. Yawn...

Far more interesting today was Lincoln Chafee's surprise endorsement of Barack Obama. Had Chafee switched parties in 2005 or even 2006, he would still be a Rhode Island senator today. Instead he decided to remain a Republican and fight an increasingly lonely battle as a moderate in a party over-run with extremists and radical right maniacs. Chafee was the only Republican to vote against Bush's rush to war. He was the only Republican to vote against Bush and Cheney on many issues in fact. He has now changed from being a Republican to being an independent.

In his upcoming book, Chafee criticizes Democrats who supported the resolution to authorize the war, saying a vote for the war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment. In backing Obama, the former senator said the nation cannot afford another presidential election with two candidates who supported the war.

If that sounds like a slap at Hillary and his old colleague John McCain, it was. He told the Providence Journal this morning that their respective positions on the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the decisive factor in his decision to endorse Obama. He called Obama and offered to help him campaign in Rhode Island, which has a primary the same day as Texas and Ohio.

In his book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, Chafee excoriates not just the GOP, but Democrats like Clinton who acted as enablers for the Bush Cheney agenda in Iraq.

The book excoriates Mr. Bush and his GOP allies who repeatedly fanned such wedge issues as changing the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning. But he saves some of his harshest words for Democrats who paved the way for Mr. Bush to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq. That includes New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom Chafee says put her presidential ambitions above standing up to Mr. Bush and the rush to war in Iraq.

“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president,” writes Chafee. “Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill.

“They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. “The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.

“Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish,” writes Chafee. “That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over.”

Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”

Unlike members of his own party, Democratic senators were not getting the influence, home-state goodies, White House invites and Congressional pork that goes with being in the majority. The Democrats had learned not to trust Mr. Bush before the Twin Towers and the Pentagon burst into flame on Sept. 11.

A bewildered Chafee, seeking an explanation, turned to an unnamed Democratic senator [Jack Reed] who opposed the war but was well-respected by his party’s leaders. This senator tells Chafee “in confidence” what concerned the Democrats. “They are afraid the war will be over as fast as Gulf One. Few will die, the oil will flow and gasoline will cost 90 cents a gallon.”

Obama could not have asked for, or even dreamt of, a better endorsement going into the Rhode Island primary than the one he just got from Chafee.

"IT'S NOT MY PARTY ANY MORE," SAYS LINCOLN CHAFEE AS HE QUITS A GOP THAT HAS FLUSHED ITSELF DOWN THE TOILET OF EXTREMISM-- WHAT ABOUT WALTER JONES?

Last year during his unsuccessful re-election big Rhode Island's senior senator, Lincoln Chaffee, a mainstream Republican reminded voters that he had not voted for George W. Bush for president. It didn't matter to them, as a Republican senator he had helped enable a far-right, neo-Confederate takeover of Congress, by, among other things voting for radical rightists like Trent Lott and Bill Frist for the Senate's leadership and by largely rubber-stamping the very policies and nominations that led him to publicly claim he hadn't voted for Bush himself. Rhode Island voters replaced him (53-47%) with Sheldon Whitehouse, who has turned out to be the most progressive new member of the Senate, and the one to vote least frequently with the Bush Regime. Had Chafee won, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would be the Majority Leader of the Senate and Bush and Cheney would be even less inclined towards modest compromises-- like signing the minimum wage increase-- than they are today.

Yesterday it became public that after the election, in the summer, Chafee disaffiliated from the Republican Party he and his father had led in Rhode Island. He opposes the Bush Regime's agenda in Iraq, the overly greedy tax cuts for the wealthy and their anti-environmental policies.

Yesterday, he criticized Republican leaders for abandoning fiscal conservatism, once a mainstay of Republican politics, by passing tax cuts without spending cuts to balance the resulting loss of revenue.

He said the “starve the beast” strategy that Republicans have used in an attempt to shrink government has undermined social programs that bolster a strong American middle class. He mentioned Pell grants, which help needy students attend college, and Head Start programs, which support the education of low-income children. Instead of supporting those “good social programs,” he said, the party’s approach was “squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.”

The National GOP, including Bush, had to support Chafee in a tough primary before he was trounced by Whitehouse. He had been challenged by Stephen Laffey, a far right-wing loon more in tunr with Cheney than with moderate Rhode Island, the state that gave Bush his highest disapproval ratings. They felt if they had any chance to hold the Rhode Island seat (and Senate majority status) it would be through Chafee. It didn't work out that way. They embittered their own extremists and lost seat. Ironically, Chafee would certainly have kept his seat if he had followed his convictions a couple years sooner-- the way Jim Jeffords had-- and quit the GOP back then.

Unlike Chafee (and Jeffords) Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) is no moderate. He's a pretty garden variety right wing rubber stamp on everything except the war in Iraq. Lot's of fake Republican moderates talk about opposing the war-- Chris Shays (R-CT), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Charlie Dent (R-PA), Judy Biggert (R-IL), James Walsh (R-NY), Phil English (R-PA)-- but when it comes to voting, they're always there foir Bush and Cheney, no matter how heinous and unpopular the legislation being pushed. Not Jones. He's the Republican who has most come around to the view normal Americans hold on Bush's Iraq war policies. He sometimes votes with the Democrats; and he's the only one in the House who does (other than slightly loony libertarian Ron Paul).

The far right end of the GOP down in NC-03 is after Jones' scalp. He won the district by 69% last year, by 71% in 2004 and was unopposed in 2002. The carefully gerrymandered district is overwhelmingly Republican (R+15). He has a primary opponent in Joe McLaughlin, a radical rightist who says he "hangs out with liberals" and doesn't support the troops.

Jones' father represented the district as a Democrat for 26 years and Jones started out as a conservative Democrat. He switched to the GOP before running for Congress. Except on Iraq, his voting record is pretty right-wing: anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-consumer, anti-worker, anti-environment... Of course, in North Carolina, that also describes the right wing Democrats Mike McIntyre and Heath Shuler. So the Democrats are trying to convince Jones to do what Chafee did-- but before the election.

A few days ago, we did a post about a couple of Kentucky state legislators switching from the GOP to the Democrats. One, Milward Dedman, like Jones, used to be a Democrat, switched to the GOP, and came home. Today's Washington Post recognizes a similar kind of sentiment popping up in Colorado's Republican heartland, not necessarily with officeholders yet, but with voters. GOP anti-environmental greed is turning off many of the party's core supporters and has turned a red state purple and leaning blue.


UPDATE: OH, AND SPEAKING OF NORTH CAROLINA...

The very worst of the GOP, Republican closet case and neo-fascist maniac Patrick McHenry looks like he has an opponent for his congressional seat. Our pals at BlueNC report that Daniel Johnson-- not the musician, the 31 year old decorated military hero-- is running against lil' McNutcase. With McHenry looking like he is somehow connected to a series of gay murders and a gay escort and porno ring, a clean cut, All-American hero might be just what this district is looking for as an alternative. We'll be following this race closely; I promise.