A Spork in the Drawer

All Whine All The Time

Meet John S. McCain, the world's oldest baby:

John McCain said Thursday that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are rising as the economy seems to sink "because life isn’t fair.”

“He certainly did nothing for the first few days,” McCain told Fox News Thursday. "I suspended my campaign, took our ads down, came back to Washington, met with the House folks and got on the phone, and also had face-to-face meetings.”

He's a liar, too.

Later:

MCCAIN: Listen, frankly I wish they hadn’t picked a moderator that isn’t writing a book favorable to Barack Obama, I mean let’s face it. […] Frankly I would imagine that there’s other people out there who aren’t writing a book that’s going to be on inauguration day favorable to Senator Obama but that’s life.

Yesterday:

I think that Gwen Ifill is a professional and I think she will do a totally objective job, because she is a highly respected professional. Does this help that if she has written a book that’s favorable to Sen. Obama? Probably not. But I have confidence that Gwen Ifill will do a professional job.

Flip and flop.

Has St. John taken a position which he hasn't contradicted within days if not hours?

From bad to worse:

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

If his running mate, a noted Constitutional scholar, flops tonight the desperation is going to get truly ugly.

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Let The Whining Commence!

Crybabies:

Republicans said Pelosi may have lost votes with a floor speech they considered too partisan. "We could have gotten it if it were not for this partisan speech that Speaker Pelosi gave,” Boehner said.

Added Rep. Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican who also voted for the bill: “Nancy blew it.”

I neither heard nor have read Pelosi's speech but that's irrelevant; that the Repubs would sink this bill because somebody said something mean is the height of absurdity.

And let's not forget that this might have been a Republican double-cross:

After the vote, Republicans claimed that the Democratic leadership had been warned that fewer than 60 Republicans would vote for the bill. Democrats denied the claim, saying they never would have brought the bill to the floor if they had been told there was so little Republican support.

“We delivered our votes,” Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said.

"I guess the Republican leadership is so weak John Boehner couldn't deliver 50 percent of the votes,” sneered Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) “I thought these were big boys."

Or maybe John Boehner should learn to count heads better.

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ADDED: Here's Pelosi's speech. It's a perfectly reasonable speech so the Repubs are once again working on their victimhood.

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New Adventures In Whining

They're becoming parodies of themselves:

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

[...]

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

It gets worse:

Asked about the series of errors, McCain aides could not provide evidence to back up Schmidt’s assertions.

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

Another, Brian Rogers, responded more directly:

“You are in the tank,” he e-mailed.

Stephen Colbert was probably more right than he knew when he said, "Facts have a liberal bias."

And if this is how St. John plans to run the country we're going to wish for the gentle days of BushCheney.

Think about it.

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Red Baiting

We can safely ignore* today's Richard Cohen column - Biden is a good choice because he makes Obama look small - and instead look at this quote form a story on the netroots:

“If you’re a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great Communists.”

Stay classy, Dick!




*In fact, it's safe to ignore any Richard Cohen column.

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Some Things You Can Always Count On

That the Republicans will always confuse childish temper-tantrums with governance:

This afternoon, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) essentially shut down the Senate floor “by forcing the Senate clerk to read aloud the entire 500 page global warming bill.”

Good gravy but these people need to go.

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His Petulancy Strikes Again

From this morning's presser:

Q Can I just add to that, a couple weeks ago —

THE PRESIDENT: No, you can’t. This is the second follow-up. You usually get one follow-up, and I was nice enough to give you one. I didn’t give anybody on this side a follow-up, and now you are trying to take a second follow-up.

Q Can I just say —

THE PRESIDENT: They just cut off your mic. You can’t, no.

Q A couple weeks ago you said —

THE PRESIDENT: Now she’s going to go without the mic. This is awesome.

"This is awesome"!?

265 days.

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I'm Sure An Apology Will Be Forthcoming

Caught lying:

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

[...]

The Lieberman campaign alleged it was the target of a "denial of service attack," which can involve bombarding a Web site with external communications to slow it or render it useless.

"Our Web site consultant assured us in the strongest terms possible that we had been attacked," former Lieberman campaign spokesman Dan Gerstein said in December 2006.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

No doubt Holy Joe will do the honorable thing. <=Sarcasm

[Via Josh.]

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Democratic Self-Destruction Watch™

Gallup:

A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

Unsurprisingly, the Clinton's have the lion's share of petulant little egomaniacs.

But no worries, it's only the future of the country at stake.

[Via John Cole.]

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Boo Hoo

EJ Dionne:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

[...]

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

Truly.

I don't necessarily object to government bailouts of large financial institutions. What I DO object to is that these bailouts come with no strings attached. No regulations, no commitments to good corporate governance, nothing.

And yet giving money to the "undeserving" poor is a handout that only encourages bad behavior.

Privatizing the profits and socializing the losses, indeed.

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Never At Fault

So former Assistant Secretary of Defense Doug Feith, a/k/a "The Stupidest Fucking Guy on the Planet", has written a book about his tenure at the Pentagon.

Shocking revelation: The mess in Iraq is everybody's fault but his own.

As I said, shocking!

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Scary Monsters

So Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, made an intemperate remark...

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

...and Hillary's campaign starts squealing that Power Must. Be. Fired.

So Obama promptly fires Power.

The Republicans are going to roll over this guy. And I say that as a (however tepid) Obama supporter.

Grow some, Barack.

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Schadenfreude Alert

Whackjobs of the right file a lawsuit:

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security” and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

[...]

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

So much for tort reform.

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Boo Hoo

Bush: Questions to Mukasey on torture "unfair"

Well, if that's the case then I suggest George withdraw Mukasey's nomination in order to spare his feelings further hurt.

"I believe the questions he's been asked are unfair," Bush said in an Oval Office session with reporters. "He's been asked to give opinions of a program -- or techniques of a program -- on which he has not been briefed."

Waterboarding has been around since at least the Middle Ages. I imagine that Mukasey knows what it is without needing to be briefed.

Of course, we all know what's going on here. If Mukasey says the obvious, that waterboarding is torture, then he would have to prosecute those that ordered its use. That means George and Dick, among others.

And we can't have that, can we?

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