The McCain Paradox

McCain claims he'll be bipartisan, yet his republican thugs have gone hog wild offending at least half of the American public and he hires Palin just to shore up the evangelicals. If he was thinking bipartisanism in the least, he would've picked Joe Lieberman.

Swamp: William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has an incisive critique of Sen. John McCain's acceptance speech from Thursday night. It's worth reading since it captures what he calls "the McCain paradox."

The paradox includes this: that McCain sounded the trumpet for bipartisanship but has been following a very partisan strategy, including his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate, a move designed to excite the Republican conservative base. read the rest.

The Angry Right

NYT: On Tuesday, He Who Must Not Be Named — Mitt Romney mentioned him just once, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin not at all — gave a video address to the Republican National Convention. John McCain, promised President Bush, would stand up to the “angry left.” That’s no doubt true. But don’t be fooled either by Mr. McCain’s long-ago reputation as a maverick or by Ms. Palin’s appealing persona: the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.

What’s the source of all that anger?

Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.

Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.

Media Responds to GOP Attacks

They were like animals in the lead up to McCain's speech. Frankly, I've never seen anything like it and then McCain acts as if he's a uniter not a divider. Sounds familiar.
Anyway, the media was caught up in the GOP show, which cast stones at everyone who wasn't a republican. See the video they're hollering about here. Media responds:

Swamp: After several primetime speakers at this week's Republican National Convention unleashed a barrage of attacks on the news media for their coverage of vice-presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, network news executives defended their coverage and dismissed the charges as a stale political strategy meant to distract viewers from legitimate election issues.

"It's a time-honored marketing ploy and, every time they bash the media, it means they're not talking about a vision or a plan," CNN president Jon Klein said. "But the best antidote to cynical marketing is solid reporting."

CNN had a dustup with the McCain campaign earlier this week after Campbell Brown's persistent questioning of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on Palin's foreign-policy experience as governor of Alaska prompted the campaign to cancel McCain's scheduled appearance on Larry King Live. (Bounds and CNN have since patched thing up.)

"America has been presented with a total unknown who might be a heartbeat away from the presidency," Klein said of Palin, "and Americans have every right to expect as much information as possible about this person so that they can make an informed choice. Certainly our critics are in favor of Americans making an informed choice, aren't they?" more

Fiorina Hurls the Sexism Charge

Nice try Fiorina. Who didn't see this coming?
Obama and Biden have taken the high road on this Sarah Palin issue. But McCain has launched Carly Fiorina to hurl the sexism charge. She's trying to drive the Hillary Clinton wedge, but the democratic party appears to be unified at this point. Sor-ry. 

CNN: Senior McCain adviser Carly Fiorina said Tuesday that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and other Democrats were engaging in sexist attacks on Sarah Palin, as Republicans continued to invoke Hillary Clinton to criticize the Democratic presidential ticket.

“I am appalled by the Obama campaign's attempts to belittle Governor Sarah Palin’s experience,” said Fiorina. “The facts are that Sarah Palin has made more executive decisions as a Mayor and Governor than Barack Obama has made in his life.

“Because of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the Presidency and the treatment she received, American women are more highly tuned than ever to recognize and decry sexism in all its forms. They will not tolerate sexist treatment of Governor Palin.”

Republicans Pushing Obama Supports Killing Live Babies

Thanks to Sarah Palin, the issue of abortion is front and center, and despicable wingnut republicans at the convention are saying Obama supports killing live babies. It's not true. It feels silly to have to write that. Here's the truth.

Brody: Real quick, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I gotta tell you that's the one thing I get a lot of emails about and it's just not just from Evangelicals, it about Catholics, Protestants, main -- they're trying to understand it because there was some literature put out by the National Right to Life Committee. And they're basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your position on that bill.

Obama: Let me clarify this right now.

Brody: Because it's getting a lot of play.

Obama: Well and because they have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported - which was to say --that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born - even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill, a law already in place in Illinois that insured life saving treatment was given to infants.

So for people to suggest that I and the Illinois medical society, so Illinois doctors were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies commonsense and it defies imagination and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive and it's an example of the kind of politics that we have to get beyond. It's one thing for people to disagree with me about the issue of choice, it's another thing for people to out and out misrepresent my positions repeatedly, even after they know that they're wrong. And that's what's been happening.

More here. 

Right to lifers are attempting to undermine Roe V. Wade and using extreme tactics. They do this because they know many of their supporters are ignorant and easily exploited. This comes from Factcheck.org:

Obama's critics are free to speculate on his motives for voting against the bills, and postulate a lack of concern for babies' welfare. But his stated reasons for opposing "born-alive" bills have to do with preserving abortion rights, a position he is known to support and has never hidden.

Here's background:

Anti-abortion activists accuse Obama of "supporting infanticide," and the National Right to Life Committee says he's conducted a "four-year effort to cover up his full role in killing legislation to protect born-alive survivors of abortions." Obama says they're "lying."

At issue is Obama's opposition to Illinois legislation in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a "born alive infant" entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive.

Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 "born alive" bills as backdoor attacks on a woman's legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been "fully in support" of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee's 2003 mark-up session.

Whether opposing "born alive" legislation is the same as supporting "infanticide," however, is entirely a matter of interpretation. That could be true only for those, such as Obama's 2004 Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, who believe a fetus that doctors give no chance of surviving is an "infant." It is worth noting that Illinois law already provided that physicians must protect the life of a fetus when there is "a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support."

Cindy McCain is Reassured: Palin is a Mother

Update: Here's a transcript of Cindy McCain talking up Palin's foreign policy experience. It's precious. (Palin got her passport in 2007).

Cindy McCain is reassured by Palin's mother-ness. She also throws in Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. Who are these people trying to kid?

Cindy McCain: "You know, she -- the experience that she comes from is with what she's done in the government,'' McCain added, with a certain geography lesson meant to underscore Palin's national security bearings: "Also, remember, Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So it's not as if she doesn't understand what's at stake here.

'She started out like everybody else -- a member of the PTA, small government at home, then a mayor, now the governor,'' she said. "She comes with the kind of experience behind her. And also, I might add,'' said this mother whose own son has served in Iraq: "a son who is about to deploy to Iraq.''

Cindy McCain needs to be called out for being a nitwit. This is just out of hand.