Friday, September 05, 2008

McCain-Palin: 'Phonies Squared'

By Robert Parry
September 5, 2008

The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has been dubbed “Maverick Squared,” with much of the U.S. news media hailing the pair as reformers who are above partisanship and eager to challenge corrupt Washington.

Read on.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has been called "Maverick Squared."

Robert Parry's headline uses the words "Phonies Squared."

I think that a better name would be "Bush Cubed" since Senator McCain has a record of having voted in favor of the Bush-Cheney administration proposals about 90% of the time. Can America be progressive with a president who may be only a 10% maverick?

We need a consistent and well-planned program of justice, peace, scientific progress, and social welfare -- not phony arguments.

Fri Sep 05, 01:57:00 PM 2008
Anonymous said...

LAIRS SQUARED

Sat Sep 06, 10:08:00 AM 2008
Anonymous said...

Another POV from AsianTimes on Why Obama will lose:

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama(some think) is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.

Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".

Sun Sep 07, 10:39:00 AM 2008
Anonymous said...

Nobody in their right mind should believe a thing that a neo-con partisan hack like Robert Novak might put out about the supposed inner decision making processes of the Obama campaign. Wanna buy some Nigerian yellow cake? Whoever the anonymous author actually might be who posted here as "POV from the Asia Times" might be is simply shilling the prevailing propaganda talking points for Karl Rove, Faux News, Limbaughland and the GOP.

On more substantive issues, I sense that both Obama and McCain made their respective veep choices to placate the conservative wings of their respective parties.

In Obama's selection of Joe Biden, Barack needlessly left himself open to valid criticism for appearing to go wobbly on ending the occupation of Iraq, given Biden's hawkish support for Bush's whole GWOT approach to muscular US militarism abroad. We should all expect some October attack ads geared to exploit the glaring discrepancy between Barack Obama's anti-Iraq war credentials (which won him the Democratic primaries), and Joe Biden's renown reputation for neo-liberal toughness in foreign affairs (which got him the veep slot).

And if you're a progressive, hold your breath during the vice presidential debate. The McCain camp will keep Sarah Palin on script, cocooned from serious questions from serious journalists for the next two months, while she joyously needles the Dems as good old boys. Joe Biden's biggest political liability has always been running his mouth. He is a loose cannon on the deck when it comes to sexism, and responding to charges of sexism.

One wag initially described the Sarah Palin choice as Dan Quayle with a pony tail. But from what I've seen so far, that's a serious underestimation of what she brings to the McCain ticket.

Palin is there to function very much as a pit bull with a lipstick smile, hoping to provoke reactions from the Obama campaign that can then be derided as patronizing or demeaning towards women. In the process, she also fires up the religious right cultural warriors and the NRA faction of the traditional Reagan era Republican base.

Sparkling, smiling celebrity Sarah Palin, striving righteously to break the glass ceiling, is much more like Spiro Agnew packing a taser.

Unfortunately, this superficial stunt may work like a charm on the mainstream media for a month or two - which of course is only as long as it needs to work.

Bill from Saginaw

Mon Sep 08, 11:37:00 AM 2008

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