Category: Politics

Kari Chisolm at Blue Oregon:

Is there a veep pick that Obama could reasonably made that would have made you Nattering Nabobs of Naderism happy enough to get on the Obama train 100%?

Sycophancy is what Kari’s advocating here, folks.

Thoughtful support isn’t what Kari wants. It’s slavish boosterism and adulation.

Why the hell would I “get on the Obama train 100%”? I’ve never been on anybody’s train 100% (or 1000%). I don’t even support myself 100%; I know too many of my own flaws.

And the choice of language cues is truly priceless. Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing about “peace with honor” in Iraq.

Apart from the many, many other reasons (can you say “Iraq”?) I would have hoped Barack Obama would pick someone other than Joe Biden as his running mate, the guy’s just a walking, talking gaffe-machine. And unlike John McCain, whose penchant for sticking his hoof in his mouth is only barely beginning to penetrate the media, Biden’s rep for misstatement is decades old.

Here’s just one small piece of an article from 1987:

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as “Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”

He then went on to say that he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship – the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he “ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was “the outstanding student in the political science department” and “graduated with three degrees from college.”

Comments on Assertions

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: “I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.”

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: “I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors – I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.

“With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,” the statement went on. “My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.”

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: “My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse “on half scholarship based on financial need.”

Maybe Biden thought that 76th out of 85 was in the “top half.” His degrees weren’t in math or anything. Maybe McCain can turn that whole 894th of a class of 899 at the Naval Academy into something more positive.

You heard the story about how John McCain’s campaign went after Barack Obama because he didn’t visit wounded soldiers in Germany during his campaign swing last month, then the allegations that McCain’s people were ready with the charge that he had been using the troops as props if he had gone to visit them. “Oh, no!” they cried, “We would never do that!“

Well, here’s an example of how they would.

Currently, McCain is blathering on about how much of a “celebrity” Barack Obama is. All McCain’s people are talking about how he draws huge crowds because he’s such a “rock star.” Not that there’s anything there, of course.

But two short months ago, when Obama drew a crowd of more than 70,000 people to Tom McCall Waterfront Park here in Portland, the storyline from McCain’s supporters was quite the opposite. This is what Robert Knight at the conservative Media Research Center’s Newsbusters site said:

From CNN to the New York Times, the media hyped Barack Obama’s Portland, Oregon rally on Sunday, some comparing him to a rock star.

Unmentioned in national reporting was the fact that Obama was preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by actual rock stars The Decemberists. The Portland-based band has drawn rave reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, which gave their 2005 album Picaresque four and a half stars (out of five), and another four and a half stars for 2007’s The Crane Wife.

How many of the people showed up to hear Obama, and how many to hear the band?

Just over two months later, and the same site’s running a poorly-executed parody cover of Tiger Beat with Obama as the main squeeze.

And, pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt, I see as I’m finishing this post that The Guardian‘s Oliver Burkeman already wrote this piece, along with the information that the band that played in Berlin was Reamonn. He also notes that NewsMax and others were still trying to make the case that the only reason 200,000 people came out to see Obama there was to hear some free pop-rock, while the McCain people are pushing the opposite line.

Several years ago, I had the good luck to get a link from Atrios, and as an exceedingly low-level blogger, I knew that anyone else in the same position would be interested in what sort of short-term spike in readership you get from that kind of thing. So it would be remiss of me to not mention how yesterday’s plug from The Rude Pundit affected page views.

Back in the spring of 2005, the Atrios link to my parody TIME covers (which was the entirety of his post and which are still the most-viewed items on my site) brought in more than 7,500 readers in the first 30 hours. Over roughly the same period of time, as an update to The Rude Pundit’s already-posted article on McCain at Sturgis, about 1,100, which I won’t be sneezing at.

Thanks to both of them for the support and the years of poking through the internet, dredging up chunks of interest and occasionally palming off some of my stuff.

Some years back, one of the guys I shared an office with was an attendee at the Sturgis biker rally in August, where this year John McCain spoke and suggested his wife might participate in the (sometimes topless and/or bottomless) Miss Buffalo Chip pageant. My friend was a solidly middle-class graphic designer who had a nice Harley, and he and a couple of buddies headed out there several times while we worked together.

One of the years he came back with a t-shirt that was just blatantly racist. It was a fairly well-done piece of t-shirt design, but the words on the shirt were hard to ignore, and I told him so. He didn’t wear the shirt into the office any more.

But I doubt that things have changed there much in the past decade. So I have to wonder if McCain’s visit to the land of a thousand (and probably many more) racist t-shirts will go unnoticed.

UPDATE: Thanks to The Rude One for the link. Could the campaign media covering the McCain visit possibly have missed the racist materials available at Sturgis? Perhaps, like my friend, they just thought it was all in good fun.

From Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

By then [late 2003], the White House had finally thought of a way to use [former Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Jalil] Habbush. … The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq — thus showing, finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda…. The letter also mentioned suspicious shipments to Iraq from Niger set up with al Qaeda’s assistance. The idea was to take the letter to Habbush and have him transcribe it in his own neat handwriting on a piece of Iraqi government stationery, to make it look legitimate. CIA would then take the finished product to Baghdad and have someone release it to the media.

C’mon, couldn’t they do any better than faking letters from a guy named HABBUSH? That’s not even trying.

Discussing today’s AP story about letters from then-legislative staffer (and now state representative) Debbie Boone complaining about current state treasurer candidate Ben Westlund a decade ago, Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon writes:

One thing I do know: Rep. Debbie Boone has endorsed Ben Westlund.

The article mentions three incidents from the letter, more than Westlund admitted to back in 2006 when the issue first came to light:

The letter, written by Boone and dated June 30, 1997, describes separate incidents that year in which Westlund, then a Republican House member, touched her hip, grabbed her upper leg and, at legislative party, “reached up my skirt and rubbed my leg.”

“I lowered my voice and said to him directly that he should knock it off,” Boone said in her letter to the Oregon House chief clerk’s office.

The version in the print edition of the Oregonian has more detail than the online story:

The first incident occurred when Westlund touched her hip. “When I responded with a shocked response, he told me to remember that the term ‘harass’ has two words while looking at me with a challenging stare,” she wrote.

Back when a rumor about this first surfaced in a comment at Blue Oregon it was poo-poohed as insubstantial. At the time, Boone and Westlund portrayed what went on as simply an “inappropriate hug”, and a follow-up post by “blueoregon admin” called it “much ado about nothing,” treating it as an “unsupported claim” and “silly.”

Well, it doesn’t look so silly now.

And despite what Boone says about Westlund being a friend now, it’s highly unlikely that Westlund’s behavior with her was an isolated incident. Westlund was nearly 50 years old at the time he was sticking his hand up Boone’s skirt. Most guys don’t suddenly turn into dicks in middle age. Most of the time, they’ve been dicks all their lives. How many other Debbie Boone’s are there? Is it likely that they’ve all forgiven and endorsed Westlund?

What’s really crazy about this is that Boone’s letter has Westlund making a pun about her ass just two years after Bob Packwood — then a member of the same party in the same state as Westlund — was forced to resign from the US Senate because of charges of sexual harassment. Not too bright.

“On the Media” had The New Republic‘s Lee Siegel on this week, talking about how awful the hoi polloi are. My letter to them:

Perhaps it might have been a good idea to have someone other than Lee Siegel commenting on himself, although that is certainly his favorite subject.

Siegel’s “Sprezzatura” was hardly bolstering his argument with witty, erudite lines. As TimesOnline columnist Ben MacIntyre wrote about the episode:

Last year, a commentator calling himself “Sprezzatura” on the discussion board of The New Republic lavished suspicious praise on the magazine’s culture critic, Lee Siegel. “Siegel is brave, brilliant…Siegel is my hero,” wrote Sprezzatura who turned out, inevitably, to be Siegel.

Rather than argue his point honestly, with judgment and wit, Siegel used his pseudonym to create the illusion of a sycophantic booster. It was that aspect of Sprezzatura that made people suspect it was Siegel, something that was finally confirmed not by people in basements poring over his text but by an internal investigation at The New Republic.

What’s truly sad is that here is a man with a regular column at what at least used to be a nationally-respected magazine, who’s well-connected enough even after being exposed as a fraud to get a book deal (and to be considered as an expert on OTM) who felt the need to further extend his ability to voice his opinions by assuming (at least one) fictitious, fawning character. Yet he still has to lie about what actually happened during his moment in the black light.

Here’s another fine comment from Sprezzatura, as chronicled by Ezra Klein at The American Prospect:

I’m a huge fan of Siegel, been reading him since he started writing for TNR almost ten years ago. (Full disclosure: I’m an editor at a magazine in NYC and he’s written for me too.) I watch the goings-on and have to scratch my head. The people who hate him the most are all in their twenties and early thirties. There’s this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein–his “writing” is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition–who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes–the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can’t. Maybe if they’d let themselves go and write truthfully, they’d get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.

I’m sooo glad OTM gave the writer of such delicate, precise insights the opportunity to spread his story without any kind of perspective.

A little rundown of the event as it took place…

Former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), writing to raise funds for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee’s campaign to fight back against Republican smear campaigns:

The DSCC is ready to stop the slander once again. They know how much it will take to deflect the coming attacks. Let’s all do our part to form a great wave of grassroots activism and to give the DSCC the $1,133,768 they need before midnight July 31.

Wow. The DSCC spent something like half that amount just beating another Democrat in the Oregon primary by a whopping 3%. Maybe they should have held onto it.