By reading Sadly, No!, that’s how:
Upon becoming president, Hussein Obama X’s very first act — after freeing Mumia, signing a reparations bill and implementing Sharia law, of course — should be to oust every single unqualified hack that Bush hired right out of Regent University and banish them from ever working again in any job. God knows how many more of them are out there.
I have never hesitated to beat up the mainstream media and my former colleagues in the press for their failings. What I don’t do is praise good work. Let me point to a couple of samples of good work:
The Washington Post thoroughly debunked the major thrust of Sen. John McCain’s recent outbursts and smears of Sen. Barack Obama’s recent visit to Germany.
And, on the same day, The New York Times weighs in with an editorial on McCain’s spurious and desperate lies about Obama. McCain and his campaign staff are now scurrying away from some of their serial lies.
The McCain campaign has taken an ugly turn. The mainstream media will have to be vigilant to call what McCain is doing what it is. Today, the Times and the Post, to their credit, were willing to do that.
Well, that certainly didn’t take long. On July 3, news reports said Senator John McCain, worried that he might lose the election before it truly started, opened his doors to disciples of Karl Rove from the 2004 campaign and the Bush White House. Less than a month later, the results are on full display. The candidate who started out talking about high-minded, civil debate has wholeheartedly adopted Mr. Rove’s low-minded and uncivil playbook.
In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has been waving the flag of fear (Senator Barack Obama wants to “lose” in Iraq), and issuing attacks that are sophomoric (suggesting that Mr. Obama is a socialist) and false (the presumptive Democratic nominee turned his back on wounded soldiers).
John Edwards calls R. Kelly from the bathroom stall for advice
A code blue: Some choice quotes.
“Ok, where are you now?”
“I’m in the bathroom stall.”
“You’ve just got to stand there and say no comment or just lie. Lie, lie, lie till you can’t lie no more.”
“This isn’t as bad as you think it is. . . . I need to get the rest of the team in on this.”
“I’m guessing there’s no window that you could sneak out of?”
“No, there’s no window.”
“You may have to take a hostage.”
“When it comes to sex scandals, we must set all petty differences aside and all band together. It’s the man code”
“I made my bone by whacking Marilyn Monroe when I was just 16. Yep, that was me.”
“Nobody is getting whacked, ok?”
“If whacking people is not an option, then what do we do?”
“John Edward’s got a code blue.”
“Thanks R. Kelly. I knew you’d come through for us.”
“Alright, John, here’s the plan . . . we’ll get our friends in the press to start covering this thing up ASAP.”
“Someday you may be asked to do a service for the Cheat Team.”
Alright, that’s enough.
“Same Old Politics”
Take a look at Sen. Obama’s latest response to Sen. McCain’s negative ad blaming Obama for rising gas prices. It’s brilliant.
The ad begins with a clip from McCain’s ad rolling on a TV screen. Then a pallid-looking photo of McCain’s face appears next to the TV screen and the words “The same old politics.” are superimposed over the TV and McCain’s face. The word “old” appears right next to John McCain’s seventy-two-year-old nose. The ad then cuts to a vigorous-looking Obama holding a town meeting with his sleeves rolled up. The ad closes with a quick series of color shots and a narrator summarizing Obama’s positions.
I have a feeling that we’re going to be hearing the phrase “same old politics” quite a bit over the next 99 days. It’s an easy but indirect way for the Obama campaign to highlight McCain’s age, and polls have shown that McCain’s advanced age is of major concern for swing voters.
Cross-posted from Facebook.
Amid encouraging recent poll numbers, the Washington Post points out some obstacles to an Obama victory in the general election on Nov. 4.
At the heart of the Obama campaign’s strategy is a national effort to increase registration and turnout among the millions of Democratic-inclined Americans who have not been voting, particularly younger people and African Americans. The push began during the primaries but expanded this month to a nationwide registration drive led by 3,000 volunteers dispatched around the country.
Gaining greater African American support could well put Obama over the top in states where Democrats have come close in the past two elections, and could also help him retain the big swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
There is no guarantee that African Americans will register to vote or, even if registered, would turn out to vote on election day. I covered (in the margins) the bitterly racial mayoral rematch between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in 1993 as a reporter for the New York Daily News.
I can offer anecdotal evidence: The fear that blacks felt of a Giuliani mayoralty (which were later borne out) was palpable on election night. But many of the black Harlem residents that I interviewed that election night, despite seemingly knowing what was at stake, did not bother showing up to vote.
The Obama candidacy is an opportunity for Americans to make a choice. It is also an opportunity for black Americans to make history. Sen. Obama bet his whole candidacy on democracy from the bottom up. The challenge is not just for well-meaning whites to vote for the clearly superior candidate in this election. The challenge is also to African Americans.
Or will they prove Obama wrong?
The big political news of the last week has been Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s embrace of Sen. Barack Obama’s position on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Sen. John McCain’s subsequent embrace of Maliki’s position on withdrawal. As Josh Marshall observes, “Sen. McCain has gone from predicting a decades long presence of American troops in Iraq and attacking any discussion of timetables for withdrawal to endorsing Maliki’s push for a 16 month timetable and tying himself in knots trying to explain why what Maliki’s endorsing is any different from Obama’s.”
On CNN on Friday, McCain insisted that his withdrawal plans are “conditions-based,” and suggested that Obama’s are not.
Nevermind that Obama’s withdrawal plans have always been contingent on conditions on the ground. He has said that he would be as careful getting out of Iraq as Bush was careless getting in. The sixteen month timetable has been Obama’s judgment of how long it would take to redeploy U.S. troops safely given conditions on the ground.
But what, exactly, are the conditions that matter to McCain? Journalists haven’t yet asked McCain that question.
My guess, based on McCain’s recent assertions that he would rather lose a campaign than lose a war, is that McCain’s key condition is the appearance of victory. If sectarian violence increases, or if the Iraqi government starts to crack, look for McCain to halt the withdrawal even if U.S. troops could withdraw safely. If it takes 100 years to win this war, then that’s how long McCain would leave our troops there.
In the end, I don’t think that McCain’s recent embrace of a 16-month timetable changes much other than his rhetoric. There are still deep differences between McCain and Obama and a real choice for the American people.
Cross-posted from Facebook.
Senator McCain crossed a line that he shouldn’t have this week when he said that Mr. Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” It was a lousy comment, tantamount to calling Mr. Obama a traitor, and Senator McCain should apologize for it.
But what we’ve learned over the years is that Mr. McCain is one of those guys who never has to pay much of a price for his missteps and foul-ups and bad behavior. Can you imagine the firestorm of outrage and criticism that would have descended on Senator Obama if he had made the kind of factual mistakes that John McCain has repeatedly made in this campaign?
IT almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind. CONTINUE . . .
I don’t know how well Esquire magazine is doing these days. I was a subscriber to the magazine in college and read it religiously long after I stopped subscribing. But those were the days when you could count on a Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, or a Truman Capote to regularly contribute a piece.
It was nearly sacrilegious when, as a newspaper reporter, I tried to submit my profile of Bill Bradley during the 2000 election to the magazine for publication. It was rejected outright and I’ve not had any occasion to pick up the magazine of late. Esquire might still be publishing first rate fiction and non-fiction. I would not know. I had simply stopped reading.
But a friend told me this week to read a piece about prisoners who tunneled out of a prison. And added, almost as an afterthought, that I should also read the first item that they have in a feature called “What it Feels Like . . .”
For such an august magazine, the Esquire magazine website is simply atrocious, unnavigable, and the search engine leaves a lot to be desired. Needless to say, the two pieces could not be found on the site. I tracked the magazine down some other way (I’m not saying).
I have not read “The Tunnel” yet but my friend was right. That first item that my friend mentioned is haunting.
Since Esquire has not made it available online, I could not provide a link. However, here’s a taste (you’ll either have to buy or borrow a copy to read the rest of the piece):
What it Feels Like . . . To Be a Prison Guard at Guantanamo Bay by CHRISTOPHER ARENDT, 24, student:
I like working night shifts, because whenever they were awake, I wanted to apologize to them. When they were sleeping, I didn’t have to worry about that. I could just walk up and down the blocks all night long.
There was usually one detainee who would lead the call to prayer at five in the morning. That person was in the very last cell. The detainees, they sang beautifully. It was so eerie to hear, because it was such a beautiful song, and to hear forty-eight detainees just get up in the morning and, in unison, sing this gorgeous song that I could never understand–because Arabic is way out of my range of possibility–it was really intense.
Camp Delta is on a cliff that overlooks the ocean. I had never been to the ocean before in my whole life. There have been a few times in the military when I’ve been so stricken by the juxtaposition of how awful what is happening inside the moment is, and how aesthetically beautiful it is at the same time. Seeing the first couple of detainees start preparing for prayer, and then at the same time the sun starting to come up over the cliff base–that was probably one of the most confusing moments of my life. . . .
With this one speech, Sen. Barack Obama did much to begin to repair America’s relationship with the rest of the world and start the hard task of beginning to restore America’s historical role as a moral leader in the world.
We were once a beacon of hope in the world, until George Bush became president and suspended the Geneva Conventions and America began torturing detainees.
People once fled torture and come to our shores for sanctuary. Then we showed the world a different face at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where we had exported methods that we perfected at our own gulag in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; all of a sudden we “black sites” around the world where we “waterboard,” among other abominations, the torture that we are not outsourcing to reginems that we used to condemn for their barbarism.
Obama’s Berlin speech was a herald to the world that electing him president would bring an end to all that.
Bush told the world that “you’re either with us, or against us” and Donald Rumsfeld called Germany and other allies who would not toe the line “Old Europe.” Under this regime, belligerence was our posture, umbrage and insolence our foreign policy.
This was the backdrop against which Sen. Obama spoke yesterday.
And, if he had said nothing, if he had simply showed up and soaked in the audience applause and gone back to his hotel room, his job would have been done. He is a reasonable man who believes in the “art of the possible” and, inately, other people feel that about him.
But speak he did. And what a speech.
The speech was grand without being grandiloquent. It was a relatively short, tough speech that was, nevertheless, heartfelt and full of grace notes. A tone poem was exactly what it was not. The speech had a lot of nuance but with clear policy indications of what to expect in a Barack Obama presidency.
He let it be known, for instance, that, all the love aside, he would ask more of the Europeans and our allies in confronting some of the issues facing the world. What the speech showed is that the Europeans’ answers to these requests and expectations from an Obama administration could very well be different from the ones George W. Bush got.
It all could very well depend on how you ask.
Was it a great speech? I don’t know.
I think it was a great day for America. It was a great day for our allies all over the world. It showed the promise of investing our hopes for a better world in this one man. In his capacity, as a private citizen of the United States, a U.S. Senator and an American politician running for the presidency, and a visitor to Germany, it was what was needed, nothing more, nothing less.
Barack Obama once said, in his quest, that we could “heal the world.” Yesterday, he started on the path to doing just that.