Republicans

On This Week, Republican candidate John McCain defends his flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts: He opposed them because they weren't combined with spending cuts.

But he would push through his own tax cuts, even without spending cuts.

Straight talk? Ha!

And you have to hear him defend his embracing of his own controversial pastor's endorsement. More straight talk there, too. Yep.

Yes I mock, though I think the nervous liar's giggle was probably genuine.

Video.

[Memo to George: I note that McCain isn't wearing a flag pin, either. So why didn't you ask that, too, if it's such an important issue?]

Maybe it's just how the NewsHour is selling the news, but here's what we see:

First we get John McCain, opponent of the King holiday, proponent of the Confederate flag over South Carolina, pretending to be a McCain admirer.

Then we get Hillary Clinton, talking about steps backwards and how it is just as hard for her as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And we want to just vomit. What dreck. (What's worse is that we know that somehow, in some way, Clinton really has a progressive racial conciousness, but she simply has a serious problem with expressing any sort of authenticity.)

And then we get a snippet of Barack Obama, who's talking not about how Dr. King was such a remarkable America (which he was), but about Dr. King's message -- and how we are or are not living up to it.

Two panderers eager to kiss a dead man's ass, and one leader who takes up the dead man's message and challenges us.

So which candidate is the most presidential here?

[No transcript or audio here, save for the discussion after.]

3 recessions under Bush presidents. (3 Republican recessions, many would say.) But this one is the worst since the post-War period [audio].

Should we really be surprised?

Snooping at the passport records of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain by the government a private company contracted by the government is a big deal, but it's the kind of thing that some politicians are pushing to make easier and more widespread. How? With "Real ID" -- the national ID card program that, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that Republicans and Democrats opposed, but now is the greatest new Big Brother kool-ade flavor favored by Republican politicians and neoconservative "thinkers."

From Ars Technica, we get the quote of the week:

As I've reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who's fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

No.

And maybe we should add to the scenario Jon Stokes paints: private companies contracted by governments. After all, the passport breaches were not done by government employees, they were perpetrated by private individuals working for a private corporation.

In this day and age where our government "outsources" (read: privatizes) so much of its own business, from school lunches to prisons to heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq, where is the line drawn on privacy in a Real ID world?

Time was that this was a country of people free to live their own lives. Now we have a government that seems bent on controlling and tracking us in all we do, as though we were guilty until proven innocent.

The tipping point for this political agenda was 9/11, when foreign nationals already on CIA watch lists managed to sneak in and skyjack their way into murderous infamy. The Bush Administration, with general Republican enthusiasm, reacted by pushing for radical new powers to spy not on foreign threats, but on Americans -- none of whom had anything to do with 9/11.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-1984, by George Orwell (Chapter 1)

100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 year? Is John McCain kidding? No. None of the Republicans (nor a few Democracts either) is kidding. America, to them, is to be a colonial empire.

Never mind how America was founded, as a rebellion against colonialism.

Iraq is to be an American colony, replete with military bases, a hand-picked government, and precious little involvement of the international community.

Unlike the British Empire, though, the American Empire is supported by mercenaries. The American military is not enough for Republican ambitions, so we have private mercenaries armed with superior weapons, with little oversight, being paid four times what our youngest and bravest adults are offered for putting their lives on the line.

It's like the Roman Empire, except that now our mercenaries collect booty not from the vanquished but from our own taxes. Both concepts are horrid. Both concepts are without honor, at least the honor that we talk about when we talk about it amongst ourselves.

John McCain supports colonialism. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at least claim they are against it.

He's not a natural-born citizen, is he?

McCain's likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a "natural-born citizen" can hold the nation's highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

"There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent," said Sarah Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. "It is not a slam-dunk situation."

McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

So maybe it's a gray area. Isn't this where the self-proclaimed 'strict constructionists' get all holier-than-thou and demand that the Constitution be interpreted as narrowly as possible?

True conservatives who actually walk the walk and don't just talk the talk must proclaim John McCain as not eligible to hold presidential office.

Cue the right-wing hypocrisy....

Americans who are not Republicans are enemies of America.

That's the message throughout the latest swift-boat smears on Barack Obama, faithfully passed on by our mainstream media, whose measure of accuracy seems to stop at the lips of anyone opening his mouth.

Conservative Republican consultant Keith Appell, who worked with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, said Obama's opposition to the war will create a "striking contrast between McCain the war hero and Obama the poster child for the anti-war movement."

"If you are McCain, you want to play up the decorated war hero, loves his country, served his country," Appell said. "You want to play those themes up as much as possible, especially in comparison to Obama and his role in the anti-war movement."

Of course, these same partisans excused George W. Bush's and Dick Cheney's draft dodging, and attacked 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry for being unpatriotic, even though he, too, was a decorated war veteran.

But John Kerry was not a Republican, therefore not a true "patriot" according to the swifties. And that's at the heart of it.

The Conservative Patriotism of the "reinvented" Republican Party is defined thus: Party. Duty. Expedience.

Oh, honor and country may be on the list somewhere, retained for rhetorical purposes. And let's not forget Fire and Brimstone to keep the fear hormone levels high.

So no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he or she could not possibly be a "patriot" because he or she will not put the Republican Party's interests ahead of the nation's.

Thus Barack Obama is attacked with lies, such as that he's a Muslim or he refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Last summer, Obama was photographed by Time magazine at an event in Iowa standing with his hands folded....

It has been repeatedly reported that the moment came during the Pledge of Allegiance, but that's not the case.

Don't let truth get in the way of a good swift-boating.

The silliness of swiftie thinking is outweighed only by their utter contempt for non-Party members and their deep pockets from which they pay for expression of that contempt.

Of course, the swifties don't care about the truth. At least so it seems from their vitriolic television campaigns. To them, Obama is already guilty for being a non-Republican, so petty things like truth or honor don't figure into their mantra. (Only weak "liberals" are interested in truth or honor, and thus want to undermine America.)

And so the onslaught continues, even getting to the point of making pin-wearing a measure of patriotism.

"First he kicked his American flag pin to the curb. Now Barack Obama has a new round of patriotism problems. Wait until you hear what the White House hopeful didn't do during the singing of the national anthem," said Steve Doocy, co-host of "Fox and Friends" on the Fox News Channel.

"He felt it OK to come out of the closet as the domestic insurgent he is," former radio host Mark Williams said on Fox.

I never knew wearing an American flag pin was a prerequisite for patriotism.

Things the swifties approve of? Probably the cheap "patriotism" demonstrated in the grit-stained flags pasted onto the backsides of their cars, the sweat-stained flag t-shirts, and let's not forget the American flag underwear, red, white, blue and ready for skid-marks.

Actual respect for the flag does not even enter their minds.

The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat....

The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery....

The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way....

The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard....

Registered Republican voters not part of the hate brigade must really be in despair. Even Ronald Reagan wasn't this hateful, attacking Americans as enemies of America. It's amazing that some people actually believe the swiftie tripe, but the peddlers push it hard enough, and in enough of their bought-and-paid-for broadcast outlets, that maybe it's not surprising. The Big Lie is a tried and proven technique. Joseph Goebbels must be a true inspiration to the conservative propagandists. After all, didn't the Nazi's do well with rhetorical campaigns pitting German against German? They were quite effective at it, you have to admit.

Tech blogger Dave Winer writes, "What woke me up about the Clintons":

I didn't think it was an issue until Bill started throwing the mud so aggressively. Then I noticed that Hillary was talking about the first two terms as a plural accomplishment, as if she were in office then. The more he attacks and the more she takes credit for the first two terms, the more I think they're fucking with the Constitution.

Further, there are good reasons why the first lady (or first spouse) isn't actively involved in running the government, so we don't have to understand how good their marriage is, and they get a tiny bit of privacy. Then we remember how their marriage was in the middle of everything when they were in charge, and god damn we don't need that mess now. We've got so many other things to deal with.

I'm so opposed to them that depending on who the Republicans nominate I could actually see myself voting for a Republican if Hillary is nominated. I can't believe that after listening to her on Meet The Press a couple of weeks ago I was almost ready to vote for her. What a mistake that would have been.

There is no way I could vote for any Republican running. What woke me up about the Republicans? Let's see....

Flagrant spending.

The war on Iraq.

The Terri Schiavo spectacle.

The big collective "huh?" when Katrina hit.

Bankruptcy "reform" (but only for the poor).

Torture. And not just any torture, either! Better torture! And let's double Guantanamo, while we're at it!

Government establishment of religion.

Invasion of privacy.

Forced pregnancy.

Restriction of the internet.

Privateer profiteering.

The bridge to nowhere.

Impeaching a president over a blowjob. (Yeah, "and god damn we don't need that mess now.")

The list goes on.

So let me restate in my own words what Dave says:

I'm so opposed to the Clintons but no matter who the Republicans nominate I could never see myself voting for a Republican even if Hillary is nominated.

Examples in history of this kind of governmental enforcement of religion are not all that appealing.

It is kind of saddening to see the venal, petty, disgruntled potshots some of the A-list blogpundits are taking at Barack Obama. For them, it seems he's just not enough the hard-line liberal, not enough the Party man. (Funny, that, considering you don't have to look too far back to see these same blogpundits attacking as demanding "ideological purity" critics of the now-discredited and clearly unreliable Yellow Dog Democrats.)

One expects a Dominionist candidate like Mitt Romney, a traditional neo-authoritarian candidate like Rudi Giuliani, and knuckleheaded television clowns to attack Obama. After all, they will attack any Democrat for any number of reasons -- mainly daring to be so unpatriotic as to refuse to be a Republican at least by name.

And one even expects Democratic candidates to criticize other Democrats so as to set themselves apart, for whatever reason. Which is why Hillary Clinton, the darling of some bloggers, is attacking Obama as being too progressive.

When I look at Barack Obama, I look as a skeptic of all the candidates. But of the Democratic offerings, I see someone who's not waving anti-corporate rhetoric like a machine gun (like John Edwards), and who's not invisible behind the managed and massaged messaging of handlers (like Hillary Clinton). Maybe what bothers the blogpundits is that Obama is actually appealing to Republicans.

And it's an appeal unlike what, say, Joe Lieberman has. For one thing, Obama is against the war on Iraq. For another thing, Obama doesn't dress up like a Republican while calling himself a Democrat. (Some of the blogpundits' favorite Yellow Dogs of the past can't make the same claim.) But I think the main thing is that Obama uses measured rhetoric. He's not much of a centrist in terms of policy, but he uses centrist rhetoric.

What that means is that Obama appeals to Republicans who are utterly disgusted with their own party's slate of idiots. This unlike Hillary Clinton, who couldn't not help but mock what Republicans might have supported her (by "seeing the light"). And unlike John Edwards, who I doubt even wants to get any support from Republicans.

Will he win? Of course I have no idea. But he does appeal to me for the mere fact that he's winning independents and conservatives over to his generally progressive views. That, I feel, is the opportunity he offers to changing the political climate in this country.

It means bad news for blogpundits who thrive on divisiveness, whose bank accounts could be severely impacted by the rise of a more of consensus political climate. But they shouldn't worry so much. There always will be idiots to oppose and rant about, and we still may see the Republican Party implode and reinvent itself for the first time in 40 years, and that certainly would be entertaining fodder.