Does McCain really ‘know better’?

***Does McCain really ‘know better’?***

And I quote:

“Bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb, bomb Iran….”

Need I say more? The man is beyond the edge of the edgeless abyss. He is more than beyond than the bottom of the bottomless pit. He is much more than beyond drinking the koolaid.

John McCain “IS” the koolaid.

McCain’s comments reflected “truthiness” even though they be factually wrong. So what’s new?

President Bush is giving a news conference today and one of the subjects will be FISA and telecom immunity. I hope the reporters wear their skeptical hats and refuse to play along by “reporting” what the president says as fact. I hope they challenge everyone of his assertions. Will that happen? I don’t know, but the fact that Obama quickly and competently challenged McCain’s crazee claims may give courage to the media to do the same. Maybe they will ask Obama and the other candidates what they think of telecom immunity.

It seems that the media has accepted Obama, or this exchange may have been buried somewhere like section G, page 21.
I love the quick response, the concise reply/smackdown, and that there has been no reponse (as of this time) from the McCain camp.
Wow.
And Joe Klein using the term “wingnuts” is the icing on the cake.

“They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”

So, if “Kuato” McCain loses the general election or drops his bid for the Republican nomination, can we expect him to re-enlist in the military to ensure that there will be no “surrendering” to al Qaeda and that there’ll be no “taking” of a country by any scary “Islam-O-Fascists”?

Well, Kuato, you may be in luck. When examining the records and rhetoric of the two anointed candidates, a future Democratic administration would seem to offer an extension on the Global War On a Psychological State (or Nefarious Tactic, if you prefer). Looks like we’ll be maintaining this war-state/police-state indefinitely, Johnnie, D or R. There’ll always be work for hardcore war/empire apologists like you with “tremendous” candidates like these.

Wow, I sure hope this is a preview of the debates in the general election, with McCainus spouting patently false Republican talking points and Obama (or Clinton) countering with facts, figures and genuine policy. Ideally, they should preface every response with: “Well, that’s what George Bush said. But he didn’t tell the truth.” That ought to push McCain’s buttons — and (we hope) cause him to lose that famous temper of his on national TV. Then, of course, we use that in ads that question his fitness to be president. And no, that’s not swiftboating, that’s the truth.

perhaps obama could borrow a famous line from ronald raygunz…….”well, john, there you go again………”

Klein says: “it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.”

Well, now that we seem to be permanently “at war”, I guess politicians are out of luck if they were hoping to play some bloody-shirt games. I, for one, am glad we won’t be seeing any bloody-shirt games played by the Republican party until this war is over.

As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.

Um, how should I put this? How ’bout, shut the eff up, Joe. The bloody shirt wave has been Plank No. 1 in the Republican platform for seven years now. A little late for you to get religion on that now, when you and your ilk have been handing the GOP a stick to swing the shirt from the whole time.

the mccain being stupid part is so predictable that i’d rather talk about the other dog bites man piece of predictability: joe klein’s assertion, in the face of mccain constantly saying dumb things, that he “knows” better.

what a rich fantasy life joe klein has!

I was listening to Morning Joe this morning and I almost leaped from my bed and tried to strangle Joe Scarborough through the television. He was saying that Obama should not try to engage McCain on national security because that’s McCain’s “issue”. “Engage McCain on the economy, and other local issues, but national security is McCain’s”.

Well, Joe, what the American people have told us in this campaign season is that the OLD solutions are NOT the future. We don’t want the same old-same old. We want to listen to NEW solutions.

As an aside, I really like Morning Joe show. I like the mix of liberal and conservatives on the show.

I’m glad Obama is fighting back. That’s what I want to keep seeing this campaign season. Mud slinging met with mud slinging.

Also, WHAT do we do with all this information we’re supposedly getting from the tapped phone lines Bush wants to protect? Are we actually GETTING information to keep “our country safe”. This is what I don’t understand and I don’t see anybody asking this question.

Republicans are clearly quite happy with delusional retards as their standard-bearers, so McCain should fit the bill.

Hey: i’m sorry he got locked up in the Hanoi Hilton for five years. But that seems his claim to intellectual and political fame. I can’t think of anything else this guys stands for that’s decent. He’s a stupid war mongering, that doesn’t have enough sense to repudiate and distance himself from a “leader” who is easily the most incompetent and dangerous president ever, and ranks in the top five with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc as the most deranged and reckless.

If McCain doesn’t have the judgement to recognize a maniac and a war criminal when he’s been co-existing with one for seven years … what’s he going to do on the international stage ?

I want to strangle Morning Joe at times as well. And I think Mika is a poor counter to Scarborough, who runs circles around her. It is embarrassing in the way she lets herself be harrassed (sexually and otherwise) on that show and feels she cannot really tell Joe to go to h*ll because of her subservient position to him. I don’t blame her, but the situation her producers put her in.

I do feel this show is a step up from Imus in the Morning, but mainly because it’s the only place you can get so much up-to-date political talk in the morning. But I think it could be done just as well with just Willie Geist and Mika.

And don’t get me started on Chris Matthews. What a buffoon. Too often he lets his bombast get in the way of logical thinking on issues and candidates, and has to be corrected by his guests.

Wow, had to get that out of my system.

Anyway, Scarborough thinks that McCain will own foreign policy in this campaign. I HOPE that the Obama campaign will not cede this point. First of all, on the dust up yesterday, Obama was simply accepting the hypothetical premise that Tim Russert laid out in this question during the debate. Obama knows the AQ is in Iraq, and has spoken to that very topic many times in the past. So it was a stupid non-issue that McCain tried to paint as something significant.

And Scarborough kept saying Obama is talking about the past (McCain’s old Iraq votes) and that will get him nowhere on this issue. Really?? The GOP seemed to very ably talk about Kerry’s past from 30 years ago (SWIFTBOAT) to create doubts about his candidacy.

Suck it Joe, and make up your mind on whether you want to bone Mika or not. This constant belittling of her is what I see 6th graders do who really are hot for a girl but don’t know the proper way to express their infatuation.

Klein said: “As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.”

If Moron Boy really believes that, he’s even dumber than I have been giving him credit for.

Memo to Klein: examine every Republican war campaign since 1898, particularly the whipping-up of anti-German/anti-immigrant mobs (even against people with German names who had been here three generations whose families had first come here for being anti-Prussian), their whipping-up of anti-immigrant fervor in the 1920 election, their pro-German stance 1936-41, etc.

I would imagine even someone as dim as you, Mr.Klein, might spot a pattern.

The funniest part about the whole conversation is the idea that ‘Al Qaida in Iraq’ actually exists, rather that being something the administration started calling some people in Iraq in order to more closely tie the conflict in Iraq to 9/11. At this point, they have to be happy that the definition has been fully accepted. Even the Democratic candidate doesn’t feel inclined to argue the point (not that I blame him).

Why would Iraqi Sunni’s listen to Osama Bin Laden? They were running a whole country with massive oil reserves while he was living in caves in Afghanistan. When we leave (either now or one hundred years from now) the Sunni’s, Shiites, and Kurds will sort it out among themselves and that will be that. Iraq was a nasty, ramshackle place under Saddam Hussein, but it definitely was not the kind of failed state that would allow an interloping, troublemaking Saudi jihadi to have the run of place.

@JKap

True enough, we may be there a very long time. I only hope not. I should point out though, that we don’t exactly have a large military establishment in Vietnam and we thought the better of staying in Saudi Arabia. All depend on the local circumstances. Our presence there helps some groups and hinders others, so we have some support. If they all decided that we have to go, we would have to go. It requires a certain amount of co-operation from the sovereign government to keep a US military base around (except in the case of Cuba, but that’s kind of an exceptional situation – it’s a port and the supply line is kind of short). No doubt, the Bush/McCain policy is to keep us there indefinitely. Time will tell.

McCain is in a no-win situation because he has to pander to the right wing machine to get elected, but he won’t get elected because the righties are increasingly a minority…

petorado – It’s not just that. Even in 2004, exit polls showed that only 34% of voters identified themselves as conservatives, and only 37% as Republicans. Self-described moderates made up 45% of voters, and Kerry won them by a 9 point margin. It’ll be even bigger for Barack. So it’s not just that he has to struggle to win a shrinking base, it’s that that base wasn’t very big to begin with. Even in 2004, Bush ran as if he was fairly moderate and had to describe Kerry as very liberal. McCain will have difficulty doing either.

Re: “McCain is in a no-win situation because he has to pander to the right wing machine to get elected, but he won’t get elected because the righties are increasingly a minority…”

Actually, given the five milisecond memory of the American voters, and the media love affair with John McCain, he can change his tune completely after Labor Day and likely get away with it. Look how long Geroge W. Bush did it.

@skpeticus

It requires a certain amount of co-operation from the sovereign government to keep a US military base around…

To understand one instance of this “cooperation from the sovereign government to keep a US military base around” that you mentioned, I refer to Chalmers Johnson, a U.S. Armed Forces veteran, author, and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego and president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute:

Criminal Law Under the SOFA [status of forces agreement]

The Japanese-American Security Treaty of 1960, which replaced the original pact that was signed along with the peace treaty in 1951, is a short, relatively straight-forward document of ten, normally one-sentence articles. It authorizes the SOFA — “the status of the United States armed forces in Japan shall be governed by a separate agreement” (art. vi) — which is a much longer, extremely complex legal document of some twenty-eight quite dense provisions. The text of the Security Treaty is readily available, usually as an appendix to books on Japan’s international relations; the text of the SOFA is so hard to come by it is virtually classified. Japanese citizens must search widely to find a decent translation. Its official title is “Agreement Under Article VI of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States of America and Japan, Regarding Facilities and Areas and the Status of U.S. Armed Forces in Japan, January 19, 1960.” It has never been modified.8

Among its salient features is article iv: “The United States is not obliged, when it returns facilities and areas to Japan on the expiration of this Agreement or at an earlier date, to restore the facilities and areas to the condition in which they were at the time they became available to the United States armed forces, or to compensate Japan in lieu of such restoration.” To many Japanese and all local government officials this is a deeply resented invitation to the U.S. military to pollute anything it wants to and evade responsibility for cleaning it up. The U. S. military’s record on environmental protection is abominable.

Art. ix (2) says, “Members of the United Sates armed forces shall be exempt from Japanese passport and visa laws and regulations,” meaning that American servicemen accused of crimes in Japan can be spirited out of the country without facing legal obstacles. Article x (1) is truly hated by most Japanese: “Japan shall accept as valid, without a driving test or fee, the driving permit or license or military driving permit issued by the United States to a member of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, and their dependents.” Okinawans pay a high price in crashes and hit-and-run accidents because of this clause, especially after 1972, when driving on the left hand side of the road was restored on the island. Art. xiii (1) aggravates art. x: “The United States armed forces shall not be subject to taxes or similar charges on property held, used or transferred by such forces in Japan.” The current (conservative) governor of Okinawa, Keiichi Inamine, contends that U.S. military personnel pay less than one-fifth of what Japanese citizens pay for the public services they receive and that if the tax rate on their vehicles were equal to what ordinary citizens pay, Okinawa’s income would increase by ¥780 million.9 It should be noted that none of these clauses exists in any of the SOFAs with NATO countries.

By far the greatest SOFA-related popular outrage in Japan concerns art. xvii, which covers criminal justice. This one article is over two pages long and contains twelve complex subclauses. Opinion in Okinawa is virtually universal that it should be thrown out, whereas the U.S. military clings desperately to its every stipulation and in 2003 even threatened to rescind a slight concession it made after the abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan school girl on September 4, 1995, by two Marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen. The offending words are contained in art. xvii (3) (c): “The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component over whom Japan is to exercise jurisdiction shall, if he is in the hands of the United States, remain with the United States until he is charged.” This means that Japanese authorities investigating a crime committed in their country cannot have exclusive access to a suspect held by the U.S. military until Japanese prosecutors have actually indicted him in court. It also means that the Japanese police are hobbled in carrying out an investigation and that prosecutors may thus be reluctant to indict an American serviceman because of insufficient evidence. Press reports following the September 4, 1995 rape that the three military suspects were lolling around the pool at Camp Hansen eating hamburgers while the child victim (her name has been protected by Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, an organization that came into being after her assault) was in the hospital led to the largest anti-American demonstrations in Japan since the Security Treaty was signed in 1960. All servicemen in Okinawa know that if after committing a rape, a robbery, or an assault, they can make it back to the base before the police catch them, they will be free until indicted even though there is a Japanese arrest warrant out for their capture.

[…]

Hardly what I would refer to as “cooperation.” More like tyranny and a potential breeding ground for blowback in the form of terrorism.

@JKap

Very familiar with Prof. Johnson’s work and it is just as you say. The cooperation is not exactly voluntary, but it doesn’t always play and given how hostile the Iraqi population is to our presence, making our bases there stick over the longer term is no slam dunk. We also got kicked out of Uzbekistan in the not very distant past (2005).

That aside, I agree 100% that a long-term presence in Iraq will not benefit US security and comes at enormous costs and likely future reprisals. I am pulling for Obama all the way in hopes that he can get us out, but he is going to have to deal with some very ugly facts on the ground and very entrenched support for the war in many areas of the US. It is not going to be easy or pretty.

I just hope that we don’t have the same kind of fight about it that went on in the sixties, because I have been over the boomer obsession with Vietnam for a long, long time and I’d hate to see us right back there again. I think Obama is the only person with the potential to develop enough political support to get us out of there without creating wounds that will take another generation to heal. Sigh.

@skpeticus

I would submit that the debate about the reality of American Imperialism is almost entirely omitted from discourse in the “mainstream” media (even on a website like the Carpetbagger Report) and public educational indoctrination.

I would also add that neither of the anointed Democratic candidates for President addresses the issue or even pay the subject lip service.

But let’s look at what John “Kuato” McCain has to say about the debate on the issue of American Imperialism (my emphasis):

McCain Says 100-Year Remark Distorted

HOUSTON (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said his remark that American troops could stay in Iraq for 100 years has been distorted, yet he still suggests a lengthy U.S. presence comparable to that in Korea and other countries.

“Of course, that comment of mine was distorted. Life isn’t fair, as Jack Kennedy said,” McCain told a town hall meeting at Rice University. “I was talking about American presence after the war.”

Responding to a student who had criticized his 100-year remark, McCain added, “No American argues against our military presence in Korea or Japan or Germany or Kuwait or other places, or Turkey, because America is not receiving casualties.”

“I think, generally speaking, we have a more secure world thanks to American presence, particularly in Asia, by the way, as we see the rising influence of China,” McCain said. “But the key to it is American casualties, America’s most precious asset, and that is American blood.”

[…]

I would disagree with Kuato on that last point. Not to diminish the sacrifice of members of the U.S. Armed Forces, but America’s most precious asset is our Constitutional Republic. And a global military empire is not what I believe that our Founding Fathers envisioned when they risked their lives, their fortunes and their Sacred honor in declaring independence for America from another empire, the British Empire.

But here we are with 575,00+ troops stationed at 700+ military bases in 130+ countries. And somehow, through some globalist indoctrination apparently, the American Empire is a good thing and ultimately keeps us safe, even when it causes resentment which leads to blowback in the form of terrorism.

Let me give to you my perspective.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

If, say, the Chinese Army were currently occupying the upper peninsula of Michigan, I would be willing to sacrifice my life to fight against our foreign occupiers for what I believe in as the highest ideal embodied by our Constitutional Republic–individual liberty. But for some reason we expect submission from other peoples of the world in deference to American hegemony. As if America can never be wrong.

Nonetheless, the debate is relegated here to the comments section on the Carpetbagger Report. The reality of the American Empire remains but an unquestioned fact of life for most Americans. To me, this really reflects the sad state of political discourse in this country.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter

JKap, that really isn’t quite correct. I know I’m going into an area I’d rather not, but military targets are legitimate; and non-military people who attack them are better seen as guerrillas, not terrorists. Terrorists strike civilian targets, not military targets. And so the guys who place roadside bombs to kill our guys aren’t technically terrorists. I suppose it could be argued that our guys in Iraq are serving as civilian police officers (or peace officers), and so that would make their attackers terrorists; but that’s a debatable point in any case. Thus said, the guys in Iraq who target Iraqi civilians are terrorists. But I’m not sure what you’d call someone who targeted both civilian and military targets; as they’re engaging in both types of behavior.

But for your scenerio, if China invaded Michigan and you fought back against them, you would be a guerrilla fighter; not a terrorist. You’d only be a terrorist if you started attacking American civilians. Terrorism is just a tactic whereby you attack civilians as a way to scare them into giving in. But if you’re attacking military targets as a way of increasing their casualties enough so they’ll leave, that’s just standard warfare. It’s rare that you actually have to kill all your enemies and America’s never been in a war where that happened. Even the Indians survived our wars with them. And the Revolutionary War was a textbook example of a guerrilla force doing enough damage to a superior army to force them to leave.

Anyway, just trying to show off here, so I don’t know if this refutes anything you said.