The Media

The proof that Sarah Palin was a bad pick is in the steady stream of negative commentary about her.  Over the last couple of days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times all dedicated large portions of their Op-Ed pages to criticism of McCain and Palin.

The Washington Post points out the problem at the heart of the Palin selection:

It’s hard to recall a time when either major party asked voters to accept a nominee with a thinner record.

The New York Times is even more blunt:

If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.

A Democratic member of the Alaska House of Representatives, Mike Doogan, explains in the Washington Post why Palin is not qualified to be Vice President:

But I do know that, on all these fronts, she is a big, big risk if her ticket wins and something bad happens to John McCain. And that the risk isn’t just McCain’s. Or the Republican Party’s. It’s all of ours now.

And that tells me all I need to know about John McCain’s judgment.

Both Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman used their columns to point out problems with McCain’s pick.  Dowd notes that:

Since John McCain played craps first and sent the vetters to Alaska afterward, Republicans have been defending Governor Palin by saying that, while she has no foreign policy experience — except, as Cindy McCain pointed out, that “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia” — she has a lot of domestic policy experience as a supercharged P.T.A. and hockey mom.

As more and more titillating details spill out about the Palins, Republicans riposte by simply arguing that things like Todd’s old D.U.I. arrest or Sarah’s messy family vengeance story will just let them relate better to average Americans — unlike the lofty Obamas.

And Friedman writes about Palin’s attachments to the oil industry:

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

So, college students, don’t let anyone tell you that on the issue of green, this election is not important. It is vitally important, and the alternatives could not be more black and white.

Garry Willis compares Palin to Thomas Eagleton, and suggests that McCain should have heeded this lesson of history:

The lesson for succeeding races was that a vice presidential candidate should be thoroughly vetted — a lesson apparently neglected by Senator John McCain.

Sam Harris explains the probability of Palin becoming President if McCain wins the election:

The actuarial tables on the Social Security Administration website suggest that there is a better than 10% chance that McCain will die during his first term in office. Needless to say, the Reaper’s scything only grows more insistent thereafter. Should President McCain survive his first term and get elected to a second, there is a 27% chance that Palin will become the first female U.S. president by 2015. If we take into account McCain’s medical history and the pressures of the presidency, the odds probably increase considerably that this bright-eyed Alaskan will become the most powerful woman in history.

Tim Rutten finds hypocrisy in how Sarah Palin has managed her personal life and her political positions:

The point is that the Palins were able to make all these decisions [regarding her daughter's pregnancy and her own decision to not abort Trig, her new baby with Down Syndrome] according to the dictates of their own consciences, formed by their own religious convictions, within the privacy of their own family and according to its values and traditions. What they decided is nobody’s business but theirs; the fact that they were free to arrive at their own decision is everybody’s business. 

The particular brand of social conservatism in which Sarah Palin quite evidently believes deeply would deny other American families and other American women the freedom to make these same intimate decisions according to the dictates of their own consciences, religious convictions and traditions.

I guess the John McCain did accomplish one thing with Palin: the focus of this election has shifted almost entirely to the McCain campaign.

People who know me know that I tend to get very pissed off about the media advancing false arguments in the name of “fairness.”  This is the common practice of the 24 hour news networks to have someone on from both sides of an issue to fight it out on air.  The problem of course is that sometimes, one side is factually correct, and the other is not, and by giving both sides air time, the media lends legitimacy to an argument that is demonstrably false.

So in today’s Washington Post article about Rachel Maddow, I was quite happy to read this:

But she is determined to avoid the left-right pairings that sustain much of cable news.  ”It creates fake balance,” she says. “I’m sorry — we’re going to have a debate about whether or not the Earth is flat? It doesn’t make sense to have a debate about whether offshore drilling is going to bring down gas prices. You know what? It’s not. The fact that it’s false ought to be reported, or you’re advancing a lie.”

I can’t wait for her show to start!

The convention has begun!  I’ll make sure to get any of the headline speeches (and any others that stand out) up as soon as they are available.  Things kick of with Michelle Obama tonight, but the first big speech will be Hillary’s tomorrow.  The media likes to keep pushing the “What will Hillary do?!?!?” question no matter how dumb that is; Hillary will give a great speech about why McCain sucks and why Obama should be President.  You can safely bet every cent you own on that.

The New York Times Editorial Board has responded to John McCain’s latest race-baiting tactics.  And they are not at all happy.  Here it is in full:

We know that operatives in modern-day presidential campaigns are supposed to say things that everyone knows are ridiculous — and to do it with a straight face.

Still, there was something surreal, and offensive, about today’s soundbite from the campaign of Senator John McCain.

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain on the ploy, saying, quite rightly, that the Republicans are trying to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.’’

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjures up another loaded racial image.

The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

It’s ugly stuff. How about we leave Britney, Paris, and O.J. out of this — and have a presidential campaign?

McCain’s dirty tactics may be backfiring on him.  Serves him right for trying to stoke the fires of bigotry and racism that should have no role in this campaign.  Let’s see if the rest of the media has the integrity to call McCain’s latest strategy what it is: disgusting race-baiting.

Joe Klein has a short piece in Newsweekabout McCain how he is now losing on his one big strength: foreign policy.  His assertion that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” was both nonsensical and was a surprising personal attack coming from the actual candidate.  It was probably a result of his frustration over losing ground on Iraq.  Klein explains:

In the end, both Obama and McCain seemed to have a piece of the truth about Iraq, but Obama’s truth was larger and more strategic. Obama had been right about the war in the first place. It was a disastrous idea, a phenomenal waste of lives and American credibility that diverted focus from our real enemy, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Obama was right about the war now: the progress in Iraq was enabling a quicker withdrawal — a plan already hinted at by Bush. And Obama was right about the future: the Iraqis don’t want long-term U.S. bases on their territory, a McCain keystone and the source of his infamous comment about staying in Iraq for 100 years.

There are two things to keep in mind about the past week.  Not only is Obama factually more correct than McCain, but the media is also pushing the Obama argument now.  The media is making the point that McCain is losing on foreign policy, and that probably hurts McCain more than the fact that he is actually wrong on the issues.

Posted By: Nick

 
The subject of McCain’s age has been very touchy.  McCain himself seems to enjoying joking about it in a self-deprecating way, but his campaign has reacted quickly against any perceived age attacks.  Remember that when John Kerry called McCain confused a few weeks ago, the McCain campaign responded that Kerry was trying to attack McCain’s age.

But isn’t it a fair question to ask?  After all John McCain wants to be President of the United States.  He wants to be the guy making all the decisions in the situation room.  He wants a job where he will get no real break, and not a single full night’s sleep for four (if not eight) years.  Why can’t we ask if he’s physically and mentally up to the challenge?

At the age of 72 (which McCain will be when he take office), things can happen.  While McCain’s health records suggest he’s in good shape, his own mistakes while on the campaign trail are starting to cause problems.  In the past few weeks his errors have piled up: He referred to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia; he mentioned the Iraq-Pakistan border; he referred to Vladimir Putin as the President of Germany; there are other examples as well.

The McCain campaign has said he’s merely making innocent mistakes; anyone who is out in public speaking as much as McCain is, is bound to slip up occasionally.  This is true, but McCain’s “slip-ups” are happening quite frequently, and perhaps more problematic for his campaign, they seem to be concentrated on the one subject he claims to be an expert about: foreign policy.  The conclusion to be drawn from these mistakes are not good for McCain: either he is not such an expert on foreign policy; or his mind just isn’t quite as sharp as it used to be.  Both are troubling prospects.

Worse, for McCain, the story is gaining steam in the media.  The Washington Post has a piece up today.  The Politico had a story about it yesterday.  Perhaps the worst case scenario for McCain is that voters really start to believe him when he says that we must be cautious who we pick to lead our nation in a time of war; if they buy into the need for a strong commander in chief, they may just decide that we can’t take a risk on John McCain.

Posted By: Nick

 
So Jesse Jackson is apologizing because he apparently made some terrible remarks about Barack Obama.  So terrible that they can’t be repeated… anywhere.  So the media tells us he’s apologizing.  For what, they cannot say, but trust them, it was bad!

It’s this type of idiocy that has made people lose faith in the American media.  If the apology was worth reporting, then the thing being apologized for is worth reporting too.  Otherwise, it’s a non-story and time shouldn’t be wasted with it.