Sarah Palin can ramble on with the best of them. I’ve heard athletes who speak better than her.
Category: Republicans (Page 16 of 40)
This past Sunday, George Will ridiculed John McCain on This Week for McCain’s foolish claim that he would fire the head of the SEC. He called McCain’s actions “unpresidential.”
Yesterday he went further in his column.
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”
George Will is a respected conservative, but he has never been a fan of John McCain. He has been especially critical of McCain for campaign finance reform, and he hasn’t been shy in the past about questioning McCain’s temperment. Nevertheless, he seemed willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt – until now.
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
Will is arguing that John McCain is unfit to be president of the United States. Throw in Sarah Palin and you have the scariest ticket in American history, following perhaps the worst president of our lifetimes.
John McCain’s latest stunt is to suggest postponing tomorrow night’s debate so that he and Obama can deal with the financial crisis. Last week he said the fundamentals of our economy were strong. Now he’s acting the the roof is falling, and Sarah Palin has apparently concluded that we face another Great Depression without this bailout.
Meanwhile, it looks like the McCain campaign might try to use this as an excuse to scuttle the VP debate.
McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.
Have we reached the point of absurdity yet? Can anyone defend John McCain and Sarah Palin with a straight face?
Photo courtesy of Flickr
The national polls are starting move back towards Obama, as the Palin hysteria subsides, the economy moves back into the spotlight and reporters start to hold John McCain accountable for his disgraceful campaign.
Ruth Marcus, another former fan of McCain, sums it up nicely.
Both candidates are guilty of playing trivial pursuit in a serious season, campaigning from gotcha to gotcha. Obama also has eagerly taken every cheap shot — McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, doesn’t get the economy, can’t count his own houses. Neither candidate is running the honest, confront-the-hard-questions campaign he promised.
McCain’s transgressions, though, are of a different magnitude. His whoppers are bigger; there are more of them. He — the easy out would be to say “his campaign” — has been misleading, and at times has outright lied, about his opponent. He has misrepresented — that’s the charitable verb — his vice presidential nominee’s record. Called on these fouls, he has denied and repeated them.
The most outrageous of McCain’s distortions involve Obama on taxes. He asserts that Obama’s new taxes could “break your family budget,” and that an Obama presidency would inflict “painful tax increases on working American families.” Hardly. Obama would lower taxes for most households, and lower them more than McCain would. The only “painful tax increases on working American families” would be on working families making more than $250,000.
Likewise, the McCain campaign has its story about Sarah Palin, and it’s sticking with it — facts be damned. She said “thanks but no thanks” to that “Bridge to Nowhere,” except that she didn’t: She backed the bridge until it was unpopular, then scooped up the money and used it for other projects. More than a year after McCain began railing against the bridge, Palin, then a gubernatorial candidate, said the state should build it “now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”
Palin sold the gubernatorial jet, on eBay and for a profit — except that she didn’t. She didn’t take earmarks as governor — except for the $256 million she sought last year, and the $197 million wish list for 2008.
The McCain campaign has been hoping that the media’s obsession with presenting both sides would hide their blatant lies. But they’ve gone so far that John McCain himself got caught in a blatant lie about Sarah Palin and earmarks by the hosts of the View!
Another member of the John McCain fan club in the press has seen the light. Richard Cohen admits to being a fan of McCain for years, citing his integrity. He now acknowledges that McCain has abandoned everything he once stood for.
Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.
Read the entire column, then ask yourself if McCain is fit to be president.
FOLLOW US!
CATEGORIES
© 2023 NorthCoastBlog.com
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑