Miner at the Dial-a-View

by Eric Martin

You know you're setting a new standard for shameless dishonesty when even Fox News and Karl Rove call you out.  Karl Freakin Rove!  The man who took the baton from Lee Atwater and [deleted] it up a rat's [deleted].  I apologize for the vulgar imagery, but John McCain refused to do a series of town hall appearances with me, so I had no choice.

It is now patently obvious that the McCain camp is committed to a strategy of lying big and small from now until November (here's one of the latest, a rerun of one of their greatest hits and a foolish attempt to count to infinity). What is perhaps more significant is the reason for McCain's mendacity: running on the issues is a losing play.  He's scared of a straight-up contest.

With good reason in a purely cynical sense.  McCain/Palin are offering the same disastrous foreign policy approach as Bush, a deeper commitment to Bush's hapless, deficit busting economic plan (which greatly benefits the wealthiest Americans while depleting the middle class), a continuation of denial in the face of global warming, the same preference for hiring unqualified cronies to key offices in government (again, favoring loyalty over expertise - heckuva job legion of Brownies!), closeness with lobbyists/industry insiders that will (again) assume positions regulating the industries for which they work for, hostility toward Social Security and other entitlements, etc.

But then, it's not that McCain is in any way unique in promising four more years of Bush.  It's just that McCain is a Republican, and even so-called Republican "mavericks" are committed to essentially the same Republican platform.  The true story of the last eight years is not of Bush the aberration - a Republican gone off the rails that can be redeemed by McCain/Palin's vague promise of "reform."  Quite the opposite. 

Bush, with the aid of a Republican-dominated House and Senate, implemented the modern day Republican agenda to a tee.  That this program was a resounding failure across the board doesn't seem to have deterred many Republicans or caused them to reassess the tenets of that agenda.  In fact, McCain is doubling down in many respects. Palin endorsed the Bush Doctrine without even knowing that one existed.

It's encouraging that, given this record, Bush is hovering at historically low approval ratings and the American people are increasingly disenchanted with the Republican brand.  They recognize that the country is on the wrong track, and that Bush and the GOP had a lot to with it.  Yet, confoundingly, many voters so disenthralled with the Bush administration and the Republican Party aren't making the logical connection between the GOP/Bush and the McCain/Palin ticket.  So while it's promising that the media is finally pushing back against the barrage of lies issued by McCain and his surrogates, it would be far better if the Obama campaign could effectively remind the voters just why McCain is afraid to speak a word of truth.

In this case, the crime may be more important than the cover-up.

Comments

[john b]

bravo on the title, sir. bravo

[cleek]

he's simple; he's dumb; he's the POW!

maybe Obama could get some nice chartsngrafs a-la Perot.

[Eric Martin]

John B wins the T-Shirt, but cleek gets bonus points for, as usual, using the allusion.

[cleek]

FYI, this post is already #4 on Google for "dial-a-view". higher than the song lyrics, even.

[Pinko Punko]

I tried to sing it funny like Beck, but it's bringing me down.

[Gary Farber]

Btw, who wants an A on their report card?

[Smargash]

Foolish love dies hard and ungracefully.

"Yet, confoundingly, many voters so disenthralled with the Bush administration and the Republican Party aren't making the logical connection between the GOP/Bush and the McCain/Palin ticket."

Perhaps the voters haven't given up on the romantic notion that it really should have worked and could have, if only Bush hadn't had the pesky competency deficit. I could have won that lottery. I will next time.

[Big C]

I was taken aback at Karl Rove calling out McCain, but he couched it in language that tried to draw equivalence between the truthfulness of both the McCain and Obama campaigns. In his view, both campaigns stretch the truth and are getting nasty, so shame on everyone.

Well, I did a little analysis by counting up the articles on factcheck.org and Politifact.com and scoring Obama and McCain based on the number of articles they had written about their misstatements since the general election campaign began. I posted the results on my blog here. I counted 30 articles about McCain’s false claims, and 18 about Obama’s false claims, for a ratio of 1.67 to 1. Also on politifact.com, they rate the truthfulness of politicians' statements and ads on a scale from "true" to "false" to "pants-on-fire." It's notable that McCain has 6 "pants-on-fire" statements about Obama while Obama has 0 about McCain.

[gwangung]

Heh.

Facts apparently don't matter in politics.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/09/why_the_facts_dont_matter_in_p.php

[Justin Slotman]

Does this mean Murdoch's decided Obama is going to win? Or at least that all-encompassing Republicanism isn't good for business anymore. I remember reading somewhere that his media operations tend to want to be on whatever side is most popular at any given moment. Maybe Colmes will start getting the flag backdrops and Hannity the sinister shadow lighting and bad makeup.

[john b]

umm for bonus points (and referencing one of my favorite songs):
wives of snowmobile racers decorate their governor's mansions with precision

[The Crafty Trilobite]

Obama is far too new, and too associated with a brand that is just as tainted as the Republican brand, to be taken on faith. (Unlike McCain, unfortunately. This is why undermining McCain's specious credibility is a good tactic, but it's not nearly enough on its own). So he has to convince on the issues. But -- like pretty much all Democrats -- he has so far not articulated the difference between the Dems' economic theory and the Rs', in a way that (a) fits on a bumper sticker, and (b) doesn't sound like "soak the rich."

I don't know whether this is because
(a) "our brains are too highly advanced" -- i.e., the Dems are too wonkish, not good at framing the issues in terms of kitchen-table concerns,
(b) it really is too complicated or too far away from what most people already understand to state simply, or
(c) the Dems are unwilling to p*ss off their own corporate sponsors by telling harsh truths or proposing serious populist changes.

Probably a combination.

Whatever the cause, the effect is that people who don't have time to study the issues for a week rationally conclude that the parties are a wash economically. And, as Obama himself (stupidly) put it, they then "cling to guns and religion" as bases for voting. As that quote shows, Obama is aware of the problem but he hasn't solved it.

Basically, he needs a slogan that gives ignorant people some clue what he stands for economically. For some reason, "New Deal" worked, but the equally uninformative "Change we Need" and "Reclaiming the American Dream" are not really taking off.

I dunno what would. He needs to find a single theme in his (good) laundry list of economic policy prescriptions and express it as a moral imperative.

"Restoring the Social Contract?"
"Workers' Bill of Rights"?
"Building America Together"?
"The Opportunity Society"?

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

Yet, confoundingly, many voters so disenthralled with the Bush administration and the Republican Party aren't making the logical connection between the GOP/Bush and the McCain/Palin ticket.

I think part of the problem here is that the unpopularity of the Bush administration went so far that for many voters (especially those who regret voting for Bush in the last 2 elections) cognitive dissonance mechanisms have kicked in. They are rationalizing that either: (1) Bush isn’t really a Republican – he is not representative of what the GOP program stands for but instead is some sort of freak aberration which doesn’t count, or (2) McCain really isn’t a Republican, so Bush’s record doesn’t matter when evaluating McCain.

In either case, the linkage between McCain and Bush via both of them being members of the same party has been broken. It is as if we’ve pressed a reset button in the public consciousness and gone back to 2000 as if the last 8 years happened in some sort of alternative universe.

The Democrats have contributed to this by spending so much time and energy attacking Bush as the personal embodiment of what has gone wrong rather than the GOP more generally, allowing him to be turned into a national scapegoat who is very conveniently now leaving town carrying all the sins of the GOP on his back.

[Tony P.]

McCain keeps saying that his campaign would not have resorted to lies and distortions, had Obama been man enough to meet him in town-hall debates.

So, Senator: your defense is justification? You're merely lying and distorting in self-defense??

--TP

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

McCain keeps saying that his campaign would not have resorted to lies and distortions, had Obama been man enough to meet him in town-hall debates.

Perhaps they were planning on using the lies and distortions during the town-hall debates, hoping to get Obama flustered and come up with a deer-in-the-headlights moment, and are PO'd that he didn't show up to play their came.

Come into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly...

[Anarch]

Bush isn’t really a Republican – he is not representative of what the GOP program stands for but instead is some sort of freak aberration which doesn’t count...

Recall Digby's maxim: Conservatism never fails, it is only ever failed.

[Carleton Wu]

You know you're setting a new standard for shameless dishonesty when even Fox News and Karl Rove call you out. Karl Freakin Rove!

Let's take it as a given that Karl is not saying this out of some grudging need to speak the truth; he's washed his hands in more foetid sewers than the one he's condemning...

So I wonder- what's his angle? Was there a bad break when McCain went with Palin instead of Romney? Older bad blood from the McCain-maverick years? I just can't see what he's up to, except for my certainty that he hasn't spontaneously developed a conscience.

[Michael Cain]

Let's take it as a given that Karl is not saying this out of some grudging need to speak the truth... So I wonder- what's his angle?

Perhaps he, like Alan Greenspan, has started thinking about his "legacy". If Alan had said some of the things he's saying today back in 2001 in front of Congress, perhaps we would have avoided much of today's deficit and debt problems, and the current meltdown of the financial sector. If Karl's decided he's retired from the business, it's time to start... how can I resist?... putting a little lipstick on that pig*.

* Lest Mr. McCain take offense, let me state that "pig" refers explicitly to Mr. Rove's career :^)

[TTMYGH]

Palin endorsed the Bush Doctrine without even knowing that one existed.

Actually, as Hilzoy noted in a previous post, it's slightly worse than that; after Gibson had defined it for her, she rejected the Bush Doctrine while thinking that she was endorsing it.

But I'm sure she'll change her mind once McCain explains it to her.

[mooseburgers]

I find the constant use of the word "brand" to refer to a political party really annoying. Maybe some people see parties as "brands," I personally don't, and I think using it constantly only encourages our extremely superficial and issues averse political culture