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From the daily archives: Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Josh Marshall nails it:
Let’s face it. Lipstick on a pig is a classic American phrase. And there’s just no better way to describe the McCain-Palin ticket. The ‘Reformer’ whose whole campaign and senate office is run by a crew of high-rolling DC lobbyists? The earmark slayer whose state this year got ten times more earmarks than any other state in the country? Whose city when she was mayor got twenty times as many? The whole operation is just one big bamboozling lie. And lipstick on a pig is just using good American English to explain it. If McCain and Palin don’t like it they should have thought of that before they decided to run as frauds.
He has supported Obama all along, but harbored fond feelings for McCain. No more:
For me, this surreal moment – like the entire surrealism of the past ten days – is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country’s honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.
read the rest: The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
Hey Ed, Dennis Kucinich is plucky. Sally Field played plucky in the movies. Mooselini is not plucky. She’s a theocratic fascist and a pathological liar. Now get down to Florida and tell those people to wake up.
Koch, who backed Bush in 2004, returns to Dems, endorses Obama
Former Mayor Ed Koch has returned to the Democratic fold – at least for now.
Four years after endorsing Republican George W. Bush for president, the former three-term Democratic mayor announced that this time he’ll be backing Democrat Barack Obama.
“I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama,” Koch said in a statement this morning.
“Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs…national health insurance, the right of abortion, the continuation of Social Security, gay rights, other rights of privacy, fair progressive taxation and a host of other needs and rights,” he added.
The former mayor added that while he knows and admires Republican nominee John McCain, his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was troubling.
“Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me,” Koch wrote. “Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.”
today’s moodcat
