Want To Help Obama?

Tell everyone to read Frank Rich in the New York Times today. First, I will say, without fear of being wrong because I know it’s true: The Mainstream Media is interested only in selling its product. And as an editor of mine used to tell me 24 years ago, “You’ve got to add some conflict to your reports. Conflict sells.” And there you have it. I do not believe for a minute that McCain is neck and neck with Obama. And he certainly is not ahead of Obama. But the IDEA that the race may be close, the IDEA that McCain can win is being fueled by the Mainstream Media because otherwise this election season is BORING-BORING-BORING. That said, let me quote a few facts about McCain from the Rich article. This is by way of helping any of you who like to have FACTS to show to those who might benightedly consider voting for John McCain. As Rich says, the public does NOT know John McCain. Because the public is as forgetful as the Senator from Arizona himself is forgetful: Rich says, “What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence peddlers. With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.” Rich goes on to say: “McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras. McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.” Rich writes: “Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.” Further on, Rich quotes Josh Marshall’s “Talking Points Memo”, saying: “Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail ‘McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.’ Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.” So, read Frank Rich today and arm yourself with facts about the very senior and very forgetful, lying, unprincipled, even corrupt loose cannon Senator John McCain, who will do anything and say anything and kiss the ass of any Republican to further his campaign for the presidency.