No, nothing, no idea.

Or mindless authoritarianism and military worship,

Doubly-Seconded. Also from my stint over at TGW, they apparently believe the same – but sure as heck aren’t voting for the ni–

I hope so, because the Bull Shit line is one of our poorest performers.

POW!

I guess a discussion of John McCain’s offerings wouldn’t be complete without this link:
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/flipflops

Interesting moment last night right after the Biden speech. Biden’s not as good as Barry X from behind the podium, but the speech was solid and heart-felt and dealt out much-needed foreign policy cred and takedowns on McCain in equal measure. It was a very good speech.

Then we have a few words of analysis, and then the commercials. This flippant woman switches her Hillary sign to a McCain one, and says that I can do the same thing. She might has well been telling me about HeadOn or whatever. It’s a silly, pointless thing, especially after the Clintons’ performances the past two nights.

And there’s the big difference. Obama hasn’t always been about policy specifics, but there’s an aura of respect and power about all the proceedings. These stupid McCain ads are just…goofy, really. Pointless. LOLZ, Paris! Tee hee, arugula! Who cares? How does this get traction at all?

It has somewhat thus far, and I’ll even say that Obama’s occasional Bono routine plays into the narrative a little. But there’s gonna have to come a time when McCain has to offer something worth a crud other than Yeah, well, Obama smells. To think that they’re going with this in such an important election is just…depressing.

Well, it’s your choice — do flat-out lies count?

For example, they vow to lower our gas prices through granting more exclusive drilling rights to oil companies who are selling to a nearly maximized demand a product at nearly maximal profits, so therefore they have zero incentive to drastically raise their costs by finding and purchasing the massive amounts of equipment needed and hiring the expensive personnel required to even begin production up-ramping.

John McCain Will Commit Our Country To Expanding Domestic Oil Exploration.

The current federal moratorium on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf stands in the way of energy exploration and production. John McCain believes it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use. There is no easier or more direct way to prove to the world that we will no longer be subject to the whims of others than to expand our production capabilities. We have trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas reserves in the U.S. at a time we are exporting hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas to buy energy. This is the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. We should keep more of our dollars here in the U.S., lessen our foreign dependency, increase our domestic supplies, and reduce our trade deficit – 41% of which is due to oil imports. John McCain proposes to cooperate with the states and the Department of Defense in the decisions to develop these resources.

That’s a policy. It’s a lie, and it’s sold on lies, but it’s policy.

Or take tax policies. They vow to increase tax cuts for the richest and the largest businesses, and say that this will grow the economy and the poor and middle class will benefit. This is a lie, and counter to evidence, but it is policy.

Keep Tax Rates Low: Entrepreneurs are at the heart of American innovation, growth and prosperity. Entrepreneurs create the ultimate job security – a new, better opportunity if your current job goes away. Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will keep the top tax rate at 35 percent, maintain the 15 percent rates on dividends and capital gains, and phase-out the Alternative Minimum Tax. Small businesses are the heart of job growth; raising taxes on them hurts every worker.

Cut The Corporate Tax Rate From 35 To 25 Percent: A lower corporate tax rate is essential to keeping good jobs in the United States. America was once a low-tax business environment, but as our trade partners lowered their rates, America failed to keep pace. We now have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, making America a less attractive place for companies to do business. American workers deserve the chance to make fine products here and sell them around the globe.

McCain’s inconsistent about those policies when he’s talking, but his campaign does publish brief policy statements.

“Why would anyone want to vote for him?”

At least McCain ain’t the colored Muslim fella. That’s the end of the inquiry for a lot of folks around my parts of teh Heartland.

I think that your average McCain voter is either very wealthy and very selfish, or not so wealthy, and bigoted. It really does tend to break into selfish, evil, or stupid.

Also: If the big, huge, gigantabulous reason why Goopers love them some McCain better than the alternative is how experienced McCain is, why not express some dang specifics? If McCain is the most experiencing experienced experiencer in the history of politics, why make every McCain ad/platform some lowest-common-denominator nonsense that any hack could whip up? How does Arugula!!!!!!!!!!!!!! make any argument for McCain’s experience?

I thought tax cuts for rich people and imperial wars of aggression was McCain’s platform. That’s the impression I’ve gotten so far whenever he comes close to actually talking about his policy proposals. He might be leaning more toward a cold war now, though.

In a way I’m much more interested in watching the GOP convention than I have been in watching the Dem convention (which I’ve been really enjoying). I have no idea what they’ll say that could sound appealing to people so for now I’m assuming it will go something like this: “Terrorists! Fear! Scary Muslims! B. Hussein Osama… oops… Obama! 9/11!” followed by or mixed in with “Tax cuts! Government always screws up! Free market good! Ignore the last eight years! Clinton’s fault!” Also: “POW POW POW POW POW” sprinkled throughout.

It’s going to be disgusting and it’s going to leave me hating a good portion of my countrymen, but I just can’t help watching.

The only reason to vote for his Ribbyness is if you believe that the other guy is the antichrist and you are just tired of voting for the totally evil guy ALL the time….

He’s a maverick, you sons-of-bitches! A maverick!

And, since I’m in a questioning mood today, here’s another question: If McCain’s military and POW experience is a concrete, unquestionable qualification to be President, why didn’t McCain run in 1976? or 1980? or 1988? or 1996?

If his experience as a POW is such a boon for an American leader, why didn’t he defeat George W. Bush in 2000?

Answer me that, Johnny One Note!

I’ve actually found it fascinating. If he had run the McCain campaign of 2000, coming out and saying pat robertson’s an asshole, tax policy should be fair, spending needs to be cut, international intervention is for when american interests are actually threatened and the constitutional guarantees are sacrosanct – if he hadn’t decided to change all his core positions to align with bush/cheney he’d be much stronger in 2008.

Now sure, he was never really the “maverick straight talker” of the contrived image, but he wasn’t a lockstep rightwinger either. In this foul year of our lord 2008, to play to the hate, fear and bloodlust of so many americans while independents could genuinely believe they were electing something other than bush/cheney would have been a formidable platform.

But now that he’s walked back every policy position that doesn’t precisely coincide with the previous eight years, he has no policy position that resonates with the electorate. That couple with his inability to either speak or dissemble well prevents him from getting any traction with his vague “cut spending” and his non specific “win a victory in iraq” sloganeering.

What do they have left? They don’t have a product that people WANT to buy. They can only try to make their toxic, defective product appear slightly more palatable than the alternative. It’s a cheap, ugly little campaign, so it revels in it’s cheapness and it’s ugliness.

The good news is it only plays to the choir. The people who might still genuinely go either way are few and far between, and are going to make their decision ultimately on some policy position or another. When the best you’ve got is Lieberman, Giulliani and Romney, you ain’t got much…

mikey

My friends, for five and a half long years, I couldn’t offer people reasons to vote for me. Even if I had any.

Well we know they won’t vote for him just because he is white.

After all we know that Republicans aren’t racist just because, “68% believe that blacks are lazy, or that 23% believe whites are intellectually superior to blacks, or that they are twice as likely to favor a law against interracial marriage, or that 22% of them still desire segregation.”
– General Social Survey

Well, I’m not Johnny One Note, but I think the answer to Ripley’s question is POW!

And also – P.O.W.

Not to mention POW!

And furthermore POW!!!!!

Forget Invesco. Just try and imagine John McCain inspiring a crowd of more than 500 people.

If it’s a serious question, well, he does have some policy positions. A lot of them are on his web site. It seems to me like he doesn’t spend much time talking about them, but, well, I get my news from left-wing blogs, so, what do I know? My guess is he talks about them in speeches, the MSM ignores boring substance in favor of drama and gossip, and then everyone goes “why doesn’t he talk about the issues?” Just like Obama.

Of course, it’s one thing to have policy positions and another to have positions that don’t suck. El Cid got us started: Tax cuts for the rich and fake energy independence. McCain also offers fake ethics reform, unequal pay for equal work, inadequate environmental measures, back-alley abortions, and of course more war. I’m just hitting the highlights.

He’s an old white guy. A regular Daddy-type guy who’ll keep the monsters at bay so we chirren won’t be wetting the bed every night. Plus he’s white.

John McCain: Not the Black Guy

The NTBG candidate.

My friends.

Why would anyone want to vote for him?

Hulllo! He’s not Black!

McCain / Keating 2008

but the speech was solid and heart-felt and dealt out much-needed foreign policy cred

Joe Biden, April 29, 2007

Erik: One problem is that McCain repeatedly mischaracterizes or lies about his own announced policies, occasionally even flatly denying them, and reporters either don’t know or have no interest in dare holding The Maverick ™ accountable.

I’m afraid that the youth today don’t appreciate everything that Senator McCain did: all by himself he won the Vietnam War.

I’ve had the same response to the vapidness of St. John the Insane’s campaign. read more, if you like. http://www.tagg-lines.com/2008/08/mccain-wallows-in-rove-gutter.html

Actually, if I remember right, Bush explicitly ran on a policy of NO imperial wars of aggression, and in fact heavily criticized Bill Clinton for his modest forays into “nation building”.

“Other than comparing Obama to Paris Hilton, what does he have? Why would anyone want to vote for him?”

Maybe it’s his heroic role as POW as recounted in this testimony in the 1992 Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA’s-

SANTOLI: But on the Senate side, we had one person standing in the way of getting in positions that would have been very tough on government bureaucrats who didn’t tell the truth. And that one person was Sen. John McCain.
Cpl. BOB DUMAS, U.S. Army (Ret.): He didn’t want nobody to check his background because a lot of the POWs that was in the camps said he was a collaborator of the enemy. He gave the enemy the information they wanted.

Dr. JAMES LUCIER, former U.S. Senate Chief of Staff: But We do know that when he was there [in the Vietnamese prison], he cooperated with the communist news services in giving interviews there, ah, not flattering to the United States.

USRY: Information shows that he made over 32 tapes of propaganda for the Vietnamese government. Certainly, you do what you need to do to stay alive. Nobody would fault anybody for that. But there comes a point in time when enough is enough.

REP: DORNAN: They made those transcriptions, and in the transcriptions, I heard a POW who heard them comin’ into his cell and said, “Oh, my God, is that Admiral McCain’s son? Is that the admiral’s son? Is that Johnny — telling us that our principal targets are schools, orphanages, hospitals, temples, churches?” That was Jane Fonda’s line. Where are those transcriptions? Believe me — they’re in the archives of the museum, the bragging military phony museum in Hanoi. McCain could not have wanted those [to] turn up in the middle of a presidential race. He knows that. I know that, and a few other people know that, and that’s why he went against Bob Dole’s legislation.

DUMAS: And he didn’t want nobody looking into his background in that camp, what went on in that camp. That stuff is still classified so nobody can see it. And he just had it classified forever, so nobody’ll ever look at it.

LUCIER: That he was given special treatment and was put in a room with two other defectors who were later given special treatment. Although I will say to his credit he refused to be repatriated as a result.

REP: DORNAN: This sounds so good at first. McCain was offered the chance to come home. They called him the “Prince.” And he could have. But nobody ever takes that one step beyond that. If John … Admiral John McCain II … “Junior” … if his son, a lieutenant senior grade, had accepted this princely status and come home in 1967 while the others would sit there for five years, what would the Navy have done, with the son of an admiral who opted to get special treatment and come home? No Navy career. No House seat. No Senate seat. It would have been the end of his career. [Edit.] And they were offering him this chance to go home in one of three groups that came home in ‘68.

http://hope2012.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/songbird-mccain-the-evidence-in-his-own-words-his-fellow-veterans-and-his-captors/

What really puzzles me is, how did he win the nomination? I didn’t pay enough attention to the Republican primaries, but what’s the deal?

How did this sad sack of bones grab the nomination?

What really puzzles me is, how did he win the nomination?

In short, if you remember:

– the money GOPpers hated Huckabee
– the Jeebus GOPpers hated Romney
– McCain had residual mavericky maverick support in NH
– Narcoleptic Fred Thompson took away enough upstate types from Huckabee in upstate SC to give McCain the win in SC.
– Giuliani bet the ranch on Florida and lost

If Thompson had dropped out before SC — and there’s a belief that he stayed in primarily for McCain’s benefit — then Huckabee would most likely have taken that primary and changed the character of the race. There were also some other weird alliances, like the WV caucus where delegates for McCain and Ron Paul switched over to Huckabee in order to deny Romney the win.

So, basically, McCain won by default, because neither the corporatists nor the fundies could seal the deal for their own preferred candidate.

My friends, let me tell you what I do have:

I have the Rupperts, Troofs and Pontoppidans.

As long as there are people out there who are as st00pid as they are, I’ll be in this thing.

I’m afraid that the youth today don’t appreciate everything that Senator McCain did: all by himself he won the Vietnam War.

Huh? Wait…I thought the Viet Cong won the…

Oh. Nevermind.

Tax cuts, drilling & more of the same.

So, to answer the post’s title/question – no.
Vote McCain in 2008: More Than Enough Bullshit For Everyone!

testing.

not spam.

test.

McCain doesn’t even keep the “intellectual consistency” with his own content-free campaign.

He goes off on a riff about his opponent’s “celebrity” and then two weeks later makes his 13th appearance on Leno. It’s like not only are his followers stupid and lacking in attention span, McCain is so full of contempt for them he doesn’t even care about appearing consistent.

In all seriousness?

He’s running on being Bush and Not Bush at the same time.

Susan of Texas Says:

August 28th, 2008 at 19:16
No, nothing, no idea.

Susan of Texas Says:

August 28th, 2008 at 19:17
Or mindless authoritarianism and military worship,

See, there’s three reasons right there. It’s like a perfect little ideology that could fit on a cracker.

The only place where consistent and conservative have anything to do with each other is in the dictionary, where they begin with the same letters.

We export 1.8 million barrels of oil per day.
John McCain wants to help big oil increase that amount.

Ooooh. I linked the Scherer/Carney interview of McCain in another thread, but here it is again:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1836909,00.html

I’m bringing it up again, because Kevin Drum made a beautiful catch:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/08/the_manchurian_mccain.html

Nice.

Every time they pull out that “we can’t vote for someone this inexperienced” mime, Obama’s campaign should pull out this:

GWB Quiz

I think this is a broader question of the entire Republican party. Their platform is not to “offer” anything, but simply to restrict government until it is only in charge of the core federal duties. Their solution to domestic issues has always been to clear a path for the market and let the invisible hand sort it out. This is essentially McCain’s “offer” to the energy, environment, health-care, and unemployment crises we’re facing. Couple that with more social restrictions and war to shore up some loose votes, and you’ve got the GOP agenda.

I think this is becoming glaringly obvious now because the goopers can neither accept or deny the previous president, and no one really remembers what it is Reagan did that was so great. Still, a point made in a recent Harper’s article – the public is eventually going to figure out that you can’t elect government officials who hate government and only want to dismantle it.

mime = meme

Or maybe they will mime it too, who knows.

Dubya always brought to mind the image of the dumb, bullying frat boy. Now when I think of McCain I think of a sssserpent, occasionally poking its head out of a hole to make insssssuations about Obama.

Obama and sssssexy white women. Obama issss The One. Obama knowssss Bill Ayers who once planted bombssssss, jusssst like on 9/11.

McCain seems to channel Rove much more successfully than Bush did.

Why would anyone vote for McCain? Romney has the answer! On NPR the other day, he explained that the economy is in the tank, and Obama doesn’t have the experience to deal with it. McCain, because of his experience with fleecing the country during the S&L scandals and his support of Bush’s economic policy, is the one to take care of current problems. Oh, wait, Romney didn’t exactly say that. You know, I’m not really sure what he said, other than that (a) the economy is in the tank, (b) Obama doesn’t have the experience to deal with it, and (c) Vote for McCain!

A great ad against McSame would hit that head on. “John McCain has said a lot about Barak Obama during this campaign. But what has he said about what HE plans to do?” Then have footage of him talking out of both sides of his mouth about every issue in this election. “Does he even know what he stands for?” That would throw Karl Rove’s theme about Democrats right back in their face.

OK, here’re the short answers:

1. No
2. Nothing
3. Hell if I know.

PS – This Susan Eisenhower chick? Hey, if she offered, I’d fuck her.

But no speeches.

OK, if you insist, I really don’t like to talk about this…it was a difficult time…I was just proud to do my duty…but if you insist…

McNon-negro, POW.

Now, where were we?

Policies. Ummm. You want to hear my policies.

Well, my friends…

my friends…

Could you repeat the question?

Is this…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…….

Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can’t you offer me nothing but bullshit ?”
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,
Taped to his chest there’s the answer,

Oh, Mittens. CNN was saying this morning that McCain has already picked his VP, please, oh please, let it be Mittens.

Brad, in answer to your rhetorical question, I will provide you with a philosophy written on a bumper sticker I saw today in St. Paul, MN (help us! oligarchs are descending upon us!):

Barack Hussein Obama
The reason I’m voting for McCain

WTF??? Here’s all you need to know:

Tax cuts are still magic.
White people are still better.
Government is still evil.
The USA is still gonna win this war.

Any questions, faggots?

I got a question, a purely theoretical one: what happens if McCain – kholile – kicks the bucket some time before November 4th?

POW Sucka!

Look, if you were working for a guy who looked like McCain and he was running against a guy who looked like Obama, whose face would you rather put in commercials? Not only don’t they have anything to offer except four more years of Bush (+explosive temper), they’ve got a down right scary looking codger. What else are they going to show the American public?

I’ve noticed a lot of still shots of McPOW are either profile of his non-goitered side or … of McPOW when he was much closer to Obama’s age. Hmmm.

The debates are going to be fun.