BartBlog

October 22, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Lipstick on a Pygmalion Edition

Plus a Ray of Light on McCain’s Silly Phillie Charge and Other Diversions

“If your actions speak louder than words, you’re not yelling loud enough.”
– Stephen Colbert, October 20, 2008.

What’s up with God’s Own Hockey Mom, that plain small-town Wasilla girl we’ve all grown to know and love, dropping $150,000 bucks of RNC cash on clothes and jewelry from such snooty elitist shops as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman-Marcus? Say it ain’t so, Joe – has Alaska’s neo-secessionist pitbull become a pampered poodle, corrupted by her trip to the lower 48? (Perhaps it was associating with all those liberal socialists on Saturday Night Live is what did it, the same way as Obama meeting Bill Ayers turned him into a 1960s domestic terrorist by osmosis.) Jeepers, next we’ll find out she doesn’t know what the Vice President’s job is, according to the Constitution.

Speaking of Mrs. Bent Mooseburger, why isn’t the following a bigger story among the Big Media bobbleheadery? McCain’s Bullwinkle-Killer spent Alaska taxpayer money to drag the whole fam damily along with her to various events, paying out $21,000 for daughters Piper, Willow and Bristol to travel and hotel in luxury at the public’s expense. Worse, she lied when she claimed that the kid’s were invited to these events and, worst of all, altered the expense accounts after the fact. Alaska law is clear: Gov. Palin’s expense account is to be used only for official state business, period. This used to be the kind of Enormous No-No that got state executives and those playing executives on TV fired, yet the BM has hardly peeped about it. C’mon, Beemers, step up to the plate here.

Speaking of stepping up to the plate (in the head), Cap’n McCrash is indulging in yet another head-scratcher by using Obama’s innocuous political hat-tip to both World Series contenders, The Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, as some kind of example of BHO’s horrible hypocrisy. This is interesting since the Ol’ Straight-Talker himself, appearing on Pittsburgh TV station KDKA last July, recited his usual anecdote about telling his North Vietnamese captors way-back-when that some of the officers in his squadron were the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers, but for purposes of political pandering, changed the Packers to the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers, even though the story was in his friggin’ book!

“When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the pressures, physical pressures on me, I named the starting lineup, defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron mates.”
– John McCain on KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 2008.

“Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron.”
– John McCain, from his book, “Faith of My Fathers” (1999).

“Imagine if Al Gore or John Kerry had changed the facts of a story they told forever in order to appeal to whatever swing state they were speaking in? … Also, the famous Steelers defensive line that McCain was trying to refer to (Mean Joe, L.C. etc.) didn’t become famous until after McCain was out of Vietnam.”
– Chuck Todd and Domenico Montanaro, MSNBC First Read, July 11, 2008.

Keep digging, Johnny!

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October 20, 2008

The Tattlesnake – All Up in the News Edition

What if the Big Media told the truth, part 2,964?

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Let’s go to NBC’s Chuck Todd at a McCain rally in Bent Fork, South Carolina. Chuck, I see Gov. Palin just finished speaking; what was the crowd reaction?”

CHUCK TODD: “Well, Brian, once again Sarah Palin has stirred up the crazy white-trash rabble into a lather of raw hatred against liberals, Democrats and, particularly, Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama. She’s managed to attract every drooling yokel, theocratic imbecile and racist thug on the GOP wingnut fringe here and stoked the flames of bigotry to the point where news organizations can’t even send African-Americans to cover her rallies anymore out of fear they might be attacked by her supporters.”

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Whoa, that’s quite an indictment, Chuck. It looks like Sen. McCain is about to speak; let’s listen in.”

CHUCK TODD: “Don’t bother, Brian. Most of the crowd is leaving as they always do after they’re done gawking at Palin, and McCain never says anything worth hearing – just the same attack-the-opponent, no-new-taxes mumbo-jumbo and embarrassing distortions of the truth he usually spouts. You’d be better off reading the label on a Viagra bottle or sticking needles in your eyes as listening to one of this old crank’s speeches – they’re that tedious and boring.”

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Well, thanks for that report, Chuck. Now let’s go to Andrea Mitchell with the Obama campaign in Indianapolis, Indiana, where the Democratic Party candidate is about to give a major speech on the economy. Andrea, I understand you’re the filthy rich wife of Alan Greenspan, one of the principal architects of our current financial disaster?”

ANDREA MITCHELL: “That I am, Brian.”

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Then just how in hell are you going to do an unbiased report on this major Obama speech on economic policy?”

ANDREA MITCHELL: “Brian, I am what you might call a ‘tripartite schizophrenic’ – one part member in good standing of the wealthy elite, one part wife of a powerful neoconservative whose policies ruined our economy, and one part hard-nosed journalist. Don’t worry, I’ll have on my hard-nosed journalist’s cap for this speech.”

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Why don’t you just recuse yourself from covering Obama altogether?”

ANDREA MITCHELL: “Oh, Brian, you poor idiot – Republicans never recuse themselves in any conflict of interest, don’t you know that? I guess you weren’t paying attention during that Supreme Court ruling that put Bush in office in 2000.”

BRIAN WILLIAMS: “Uh, we’ll be back after these messages.”

October 18, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain the Rudderless Old Fool Edition

“Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.”
– Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822.

“Across this country this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners…”
– John McCain, at a campaign rally on Oct. 8, 2008 in Bethlehem, PA.

McCain’s Freudian slip was not only a nod to those who still support him – frightened hoodwinked hostages of vacuous Republican fanfare, convenient for-profit warmongering, and obdurate personal delusion, traveling on the GOP Bridge to Nowhere in faith it’s still the Yellow Brick Road – but to his own status as the decrepit and pathetic protagonist of a Russian novel, a man who has abandoned every conservative principle he previously claimed to hold dear, and scrapped every ounce of honor or dignity he may have once had to embrace his former abusers and speak drivel he knows to be false; a prisoner of his burning ambition to be president that has become an ugly and embarrassing obsession.

It’s said McCain loves to shoot craps; unspoken is that he often loses. In August, his dwindling audiences yawning and his poll numbers shrinking, he gambled his campaign on an inexperienced first-time governor with a lean resume from a state with three electoral votes, hoping that one throw of the dice would put him in the lead. While it temporarily gave him a boost, his numbers had started sinking, contrary to the Pundits spin, even before the depth of the economic crisis became the Big Media daily news lead. Now Palin has passed the barrier into public punch line while McCain himself attracted snickering at his last debate performance from not only Democratic and independent voters, but even Republicans.

McCain, at the head of one of the most deceitful and detestable campaigns in living memory, has abased his honor and integrity to the point of promoting palpable falsehoods, from the pitiful Joe the Plumber fiction and the ACORN ‘vote fraud’ distraction, to peevishly ridiculing his opponent’s popularity, all the while defending his beauty pageant running mate’s lightweight experience and outright lies connecting his opponent to domestic terrorists, and bizarrely grinning at his effort. McPalin are not just an insult to what’s left of the nation’s intelligence, they are an insult to the history of civilization as well.

So dismal, debauched and hideous is the McCain-Palin monstrosity that even formerly staunch conservative outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, a Republican newspaper that has never supported a Democrat in its 161-year history, just endorsed Obama, along with conservative-icon William F. Buckley’s kid Christopher, and none other than Reagan debate coach George F. Will.

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October 10, 2008

The Tattlesnake – The Turn of the Screwed Edition

And Other Worms in the GOP Apple…

Obama just made two very smart moves:

1.) Buying a half-hour of TV primetime on the Wednesday before the election. If he plays it right, this will be like a presidential address ahead of the election, making any part of America that still has doubts comfortable with Obama in the Oval Office. Better yet, he won’t have Grandpa Crank or a moderator to step on his message, and McCain doesn’t have the cash to buy a half-hour of his own.

2.) Setting a trap for McCain by telling ABC’s Charlie Gibson “…[W]e’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.” Biden also called McCain out for his Ayers-Rezko-Wright malarkey. This painted McCain into a corner: If in the Oct. 15th debate he doesn’t respond to the challenge and bring up the nasty personal attacks his campaign has been making, he risks appearing like a wimp to his own supporters; if he does, he looks like a petty jerk and takes the chance of Obama not only skillfully dispensing with the slurs, but also sticking it to McCain on the Keating Five, lobbyist Vicki Iseman, McCain’s campaign manager and lobbyist Rick Davis, Watergate crazy man G. Gordon Liddy, and McCain’s ties to the anti-Semitic and racist U.S. Council for World Freedom. Obama could rightfully point out that his casual connection to Ayers-Rezko-Wright never cost the taxpayers a dime; McCain’s association with the Keating Five and lobbyists Iseman and Davis, on the other hand, cost the public billions.

Surprise! Sarah Palin’s hired Munchkins up in Alaska just found her innocent in the Troopergate affair on Thursday, one day ahead of the release of the official report, ’cause that’s just the way we do business up here in the Great White North, buster.

Ya know, I betcha Palin’s whole ‘moose hunter and sport fisher’ thing is just a buncha staged photo-ops to enhance her Alaska political career and she never drank a six-pack in her life. (Gotta watch that figure, dere!) I’ve met women who hunt and fish and they don’t have long, beautifully-manicured fingernails of the type Sarah the Terror has had since her first beauty pageant. (In fact, it would be impossible to keep their nails like that and still do such things as ‘field dress a moose.’) This is like the Bush Boy putting on a Stetson hat and pretending to be a real Texas cowboy — the man is terrified of horses!

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October 7, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McPalin: It Just Gets Deeper and Deeper Edition

Random Notes on the Worst Presidential Campaign in Modern History, Tonight’s Debate, and Other Rumorous Swill

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
– Mark Twain

“Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or you’re not ready to articulate it.”
– John McCain in 2000.

Gov. Cosmetically-Enhanced Pit Bull has hit the road, eructating hoary disproved Obama slurs and smears to try and save what’s left of McCain’s Electoral Death March from burial under an FDR-sized landslide next month.

The McCainiacs have become so tone-deaf, and run out of so much of the infamous bullshit alluded to by Howard Beale in “Network,” that McCain’s camp is inexplicably continuing to chase the GOP base that responds to Palin’s cutesy-wink tirades and snippy town-gossip slights. Even if the 30 percent of registered voters that comprise this ballyhooed base turn out to vote, McPalin still loses big, in no small part due to the most badly managed presidential campaign in modern history.

Faced with an economic crisis that may eclipse the Great Depression, the McCainiacs bafflingly went small-bore with discredited petty minutiae: Obama hung around with ‘domestic terrorist’ Bill Ayers; received favors from Tony Rezko; was part of the Chicago political machine that breathed it’s last a decade before Obama entered politics. If they are enthralled by the notion of legions of Working Class Independents showing up to save the day, maybe they should check Frank Luntz’s focus groups of Uncommitted voters who are checking the box for Obama this election — the blue-collar voters of yesterday are the blue-vest voters of today, and they aren’t happy with the Republican Slide to Doom. As the Time blog noted on Luntz’s focus group in August:

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September 25, 2008

The Tattlesnake – October and Other McCain Surprises Edition

Or, St. John and His Cowardly Lyin’

“Presidents have to deal with more than one thing at a time.”
– Barack Obama, Sept. 23, 2008, as quoted by Business Week.

All politicians lie to some degree; it’s a gloomy fact of national politics in America, and the higher the office sought, the more likely and frequent the infractions of the truth.

Some self-servingly shade reality intermittently, others cross their fingers behind their backs and deliver the quasi-whopper occasionally, and then there are the full-out Nixonian scoundrels who’ll tell a lie at the drop of a hat in the ring.

John McCain, in his conduct since becoming the Republican nominee, has crossed the Nixon threshold of deceit, most recently by calling David Letterman at the last minute and telling him he couldn’t appear on his show September 24th because he had to urgently drop everything and fly to Washington to delve into the bailout crisis.

McCain’s prevarication to Letterman blew up in his face when the talk show host discovered McCain was still in New York City for many hours after that phone call; indeed, McCain was being interviewed by CBS’ Katie Couric not far from the theater where Letterman tapes his show and could easily have stopped in and kept his commitment to Letterman. As Dave said sarcastically, showing a live feed of McCain talking to Couric, “Need a ride to the airport, Senator?”

This is self-destructive blowback of the first order: Letterman reaches tens of millions of viewers across the land, many of them the politically semi-literate that McCain is trying to reach with his over-simplified messages of ‘maverick reformer,’ ‘reliable leader’ and comfortable ‘regular guy,’ and Letterman spent most of the show last night, including his notorious Top Ten list, savaging McCain for his absence, his suspension of his campaign, and asking the pointedly mocking question of why Palin couldn’t simply step in and take McCain’s place. He even had McCain’s harshest Big Media critic Keith Olbermann on to further pound the stake into the Republican candidate. Presidential campaigns in America are really won or lost in the comedy sketches of the late night TV hosts and viewers form their opinions of the candidates’ characters based on the kinds of jokes disseminated – by that measure, millions of late night TV viewers now know that McCain is a bald-faced liar; a treacherous old codpiece willing to deceive their trusted TV friend Dave. Hmmm, what else might he lie about as president? Not only was this a nuclear one-night hit, but McCain has now made a foe of David Letterman, an enmity that will carry on until the election – it could very well make the difference in November.

Something else that will make a difference, and also presents McCain as a perpetual dispenser of falsehoods and humbug, is his bizarre abandonment of his former friends in the Big Media and Punditrocracy. McCain’s campaign has lately made it a badge of honor to snub and treat with contempt the very same ‘Guys and Gals on the Bus’ who protectively guarded and excused McCain for his gaffes and deceptions in the past. Once heralded for his access to the media, now only pre-tested loyalists are invited to speak with the coddled candidate on his campaign jet, and the rest are shuttled off like cattle to stand behind a shield of sour-faced campaign staff. The turning of opinion amongst the press corps is growing obvious.

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September 23, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Flying Under the Cuckoo’s Nest Edition

“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail — not the tail that wags the dog.”
– Lewis Carroll

“Welcome to the conservative’s worst nightmare: The law of unintended consequences. Why? Nobody wants to admit it, folks, but the conservatives’ grand ideology is backfiring, actually turning the world’s greatest capitalistic democracy into the world’s newest socialist economy.”
– Paul B. Ferrell, “11 reasons America’s a new socialist economy,” MarketWatch, July 22, 2008.

“The US economy had better have luck on its side. Luck is about all it has left.”
– Clive Crook, “Only Luck Can Save America’s Economy,” Financial Times, Aug. 3, 2008.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke are a couple of dimwitted chuckleheads who shouldn’t be in any position of authority related to solving this current GOP-generated economic catastrophe. Either Paulson and Bernanke didn’t see it coming, in which case they were asleep at the switch; or they did see it coming, and did nothing to stop it. Either way, they are useless at effecting a solution; both should be handed their walking papers. Good replacements might be Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research as Treasury Secretary – he appreciated the danger of the approaching tsunami years ago – and Princeton economist Paul Krugman for the Fed. NY Times columnist Krugman also had to brains to read the signs indicating that the bridge is out up ahead and we were entering the Twilight Zone financially long before most of the various Up with People-Eaters ‘experts’ on The Street realized we were cruising to sure doom. Paulson and Bernanke should exit quickly with their heads held in shame, lucky they haven’t been forced to walk the plank for their egregious ignorance and incompetence. Oh, and the Bush Boy? Keep making speeches about the economy you still don’t understand, Junior, and reminding voters why they don’t need another neoconservative Republican in the White House next year.

The current economic meltdown, which some of us left-wing nuts like Mike Whitney and yours truly have been predicting for years, is the direct result of neoconservative policies, starting with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan said government is the problem, he apparently forgot that the government of the United States is of, by and for the people, so he was actually saying that ‘we the people’ are the problem. And so we are – if not for our demands that rapacious corporations and the greedy wealthy obey the laws, pay us and treat us fairly, and otherwise conduct themselves with some modicum of decency, the Corprocracy could have a field day, in the same way the Mafia could prosper wildly if there weren’t any ‘regulations’ governing their activities. For the last 25 years, the neoconservative Republicans, and especially John McCain, have successfully done all that they could to deregulate banks, business and the markets and it has culminated in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, as even one of the ardent handmaidens of the collapse, flank-coverer Alan Greenspan, recently confessed. This is also a failure of F.A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and every other neoconservative jackass who has come down the pike banging the drum for the delusion of trickle-down wealth, the deception of free international trade, the hallucination of cheap privatized government services, and the myth of self-regulating markets.

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September 20, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Joan of Snark Jumps the Shark Edition

Serial-Liar Mom Palin Tanks Along with the Economy

“The trouble you brew today, you will drink tomorrow.”
– From “Samson and Delilah,” a 1949 film.

There was much early September hand-wringing and angst amongst Obama supporters that, after a strong finish at the Democratic convention in Denver, he was allowing the Palin-McCain ticket — for that’s what it truly is now as the aging Republican’s candidacy is overwhelmed by the media incandescence of Gov. Horse-Hockey Mom — put him on the defensive, dropping his inspirational charisma in favor of dull ‘wonky talk’ on the issues and curling into a timid Kerryesque ball, fighting off scurrilous and specious charges, while fecklessly laughing at or ignoring ludicrous accusations such as that he voted to teach Sex Ed to kindergarten tots. All of this is the standard GOP endgame of the past twenty-some years – wildly slander with Big Lies while the Dem refuses to ‘go negative’ – that results in another humiliating Dem defeat in November.(Bill Clinton, of course, being the notable exception.)

But that was last week. Now Palin is in free-fall, exposed as a pathologically prevaricating, power-abusing, crony-hiring GOP cipher, ignorant on foreign policy and most everything else, and pit bull-tenacious only at regurgitating her prepared Talking Points, kowtowing to the interests of large energy corporations, and using her office to conduct vendettas on those who contradict or are perceived as disloyal to her. In short, she’s Junior in a beehive, albeit more articulate and better at reciting her Bushian bumper-sticker slogans.

Meantime, Sarah’s more boring co-pilot McCain is himself treading sewer water, hauled up in buckets from the same sea of Republican red ink that swallowed do-nothing big business Republicans in 1932; he’s even taken to quoting Herbert Hoover’s peculiar dictum that the economy is fundamentally strong, while banks fail, wages fall, prices rise, and Americans are losing their jobs and homes. Well, what should one expect from a man who thinks shady corporate lobbyist Phil Gramm is the second coming of John Maynard Keynes?

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September 15, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Special Who Said It? Quiz Edition

No cheating with ‘the Google,’ now. Answers below the fold.

1. “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who … God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian … I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. … Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”

A. Sarah Palin at her Juneau Church last June.
B. James Dobson at the Focus on the Family Summit last week.
C. Rev. Sun Myung Moon in 1979.
D. Adolf Hitler in 1922.

2. “I am prepared and need no on-the-job training. I wasn’t a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn’t a governor for a short period of time.”

A. Joe Biden in a Democratic primary debate in December 2007.
B. John Kerry to Newsweek, 2003.
C. Newt Gingrich on Fox News, April 2006.
D. John McCain in a GOP primary debate, October 2007.

3. “If the real thing don’t do the trick, you better make up something quick.”

A. Karl Rove to political science students at Liberty University in 2006.
B. Richard Nixon to John Ehrlichman in the Oval Office, May 2004.
C. From the lyrics to Huey Long’s 1930 campaign song “A Chicken in Every Pot.”
D. From the lyrics to Heart’s song “Barracuda,” played to close out the 2008 Republican Convention.

4. “No, I’m not going to define it.” [After being asked to define 'honor.']

A. Richard Nixon in a press conference, October 1973.
B. Barack Obama on NBC’s The Today Show, October 2007.
C. John McCain in an interview with Time Magazine, August 2008.
D. Rudy Giuliani in an interview with The New Yorker in 2005.

5. “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. … And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

A. Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon, June 2006.
B. Joe Vogler, founder of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party.
C. Barack Obama’s father in 1962.
D. Saddam Hussein in June 2003.

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August 28, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Desultory Dem Convention Notes, D-Day Plus 3 Edition

And Some Free Advice for the Obama Camp (Oh Boy!)

“We don’t need four more years of the last eight years.”
– Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Dem convention in Denver, Aug. 26, 2008.

I confess I haven’t watched every minute of the Denver convention, but I saw most of the major events, and here are a few brief notes:

Where’s the Outrage? In their speeches, Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and even four-years-late-and-a-dollar-short John Kerry (why didn’t he talk like this in 2004?) all admirably piled it on McCain and Bush nice and thick, and came thisclose to the threshold of outrage, but then inexplicably backed off. Did some Peter Hart focus group tell the Dems that independent voters don’t like to see anger and outrage? Bury that guff with your souvenir can of New Coke and the reams of polling data that claim voters dislike negative ads – maybe they do, but they work. One of the consistent complaints I’ve been hearing from the Great Unpolled on the Ground since 2000 is that the Dems don’t seem to really believe in anything because they don’t show emotion and get mad occasionally. (Check Kerry’s reaction to the Swift Boat smears during the last election for a perfect example of what I mean — he should have been livid and roaring in anger at their lies; instead, he went senatorial-serious and ‘disappointed.’ It wasn’t the charges themselves but Kerry’s tepid reaction that some vets have told me caused them to question his suitability for the presidency.) Republicans routinely contort themselves into a lather over all sorts of petty political effluvia such as prayer in schools, yet Dems can’t muster up some good old-fashioned outraged indignation against the party that, in eight years, has gotten thousands of Americans killed or sentenced to a life missing body parts in a war that was based on lies? That let Americans die in the flooded streets of New Orleans and still hasn’t provided adequate help to the survivors? That has failed to competently run any department of the government? That has ignored our Constitution? That has presided over the worst economy since the Great Depression? That has transferred our tax dollars into payoffs to corrupt and sleazy corporations via ‘cost-plus’ contracts? That refuses to do anything about rising gas prices? I could go on, but you get my drift. Isn’t any of this worth some real, live, Old Testament, pound the podium, call ‘em outside, ‘WTF is wrong with these Republicans’ outrage? This is not to say that anyone has to actually foam at the mouth, but how about some convincing anger tinting those condemnations of Bush, Cheney and McCain? I know this isn’t Obama’s style – although I hope he goes ‘Full Denzel’ on McDuffer in the debates — but I expected a little more of Biden. Perhaps that’s coming. It better be, or it’s going to be a long election night with a bad ending.

Missing in Action – any mention that if The Surge has worked in Iraq, then we have won and should be able to leave immediately. Why not apply this logic to McCain’s demands that Obama admit The Surge worked?

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August 27, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Small Wagers of Sin Edition

I’d bet that …

… At least once during the GOP convention, and likely more often than that, the theme from Rocky will be played to bring a speaker on stage, probably Scooter Libby or Alberto Gonzales.

… Also during the Republican convention, some Big Media dunce – I’m looking at you, Charlie Gibson – will ask Joe Lieberman for a ‘Democrat’s perspective on the GOP convention.’

… Even if Obama delivers the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address on Thursday at Invesco Field, the Punditocracy will determine it wasn’t enough to unify the Democratic Party.

… No one in the Official Washington Press Gaggle will raise an eyebrow over McCain sending his wife Cindy to Georgia to inspect the human suffering there. (Of course, if Obama tried this, there would be a locust-like screeching that it smacks of outrageous presumption.)

… By the end of the week, Michelle Obama’s speech Monday at the Dem convention will be adjudged by the Solons of Pundit Planet as a failure, since it fell short of convincing every Democratic and Independent woman in the Known Universe to vote for Obama.

… Keith Olbermann will finally throttle the life out of MSNBC convention co-host Chris Matthews for the good of his audience and the country, right in the middle of the Hardball host’s braying spittle-flecked recollection of his imaginary tough- teen years on the mean streets of Philadelphia. A jury of his peers will not only acquit KO, but also award him a medal for service in the public interest beyond the call of duty.

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August 23, 2008

MSNBC Says It’s Biden

MSNBC reported early Saturday morning that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has picked Sen. Joseph Biden, 65, to be his vice presidential running mate. There is an Obama rally planned in Springfield, Illinois, this afternoon to officially announce Biden’s addition to the Dem ticket.

Predictably, the half-crazed wingnuts aboard the sinking USS McCain and their allies, the 101st Keyboard Commandos, will be sharpening their pitchforks ready to stick it to the Delaware Senator and erstwhile presidential candidate in any spot that looks tender. Here are the soft places they’ll likely poke with glee:

1. Biden was once called the Senator from DuPont, and for good reason. Joe has been very chummy with the chemical giant, as well as other large corporations from his state, which has no corporate tax. These slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — considering they’re from the wholly-corporatized Republican Party — will be shamelessly slung at Biden for being too close to evil Big Bidness, probably via a strenuous Internet email campaign and multiple postings on some of the more frothing hoof-and-mouth neocon websites like Hind-Acher’s Powerline blog and Freeper Republic.

2. Joe will be endlessly drubbed for appropriating without attribution British Labour Party PM candidate Neil Kinnock’s “born the son of a coal miner, first in the family to attend college” bio that derailed Biden’s presidential run in 1988. That this might have been an innocent mistake won’t cut any mustard with the ravening wolves of the right — “Plagiarist!” “Liar!” will be sprinkled like salt on potato chips all over the right-wing Media Vomitorium, with Michelle Malkin no doubt inferring in a screechy nut-pile smackdown that perhaps Biden really is a liberal Brit, and therefore a foreigner not to be trusted. Next Sean Hannity will demand that Pennsylvania-born Biden produce his birth certificate and, when produced, will ignore it. I can see the Fox News splash now: “Is Joe Biden Really an American Citizen – How Can We Be Sure?”

3. Obama will take a hit for naming Biden since Joe has been in the US Senate for over 30 years, longer than John Sidney McBush III. “Some change you can believe in,” the Tighty-Righties will sneer without embarrassment while in the next paragraph they praise their sealed-in-amber candidate, trying to drag the country back to the Age of the Cold War and a victory in Vietnam – I mean, Iraq.

Also, look for McCainiac ads quoting Biden during the 2008 Dem primary debates wherein he called Obama too inexperienced to be president, and for his ‘yea’ vote on the Iraq invasion. I hope the Obama campaign has some quick short answers ready for these slaps up the side of the head.

Biden’s Good Points:

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August 22, 2008

The Tattlesnake – McCain’s Latest Shameful Four-Play Edition

Double-Deuces This Month — And August Isn’t Over Yet…

1. McCain’s Threadbare Surge Suit, Part Deux: The most recent misinformational sludge oozing its way through the Big Media pipeline is John McCain’s continued insistence that Bush’s build-up of US troops in Baghdad, AKA ‘The Surge,’ worked to quell most of the violence over there. This is more bizarre McCain piffle that any decent journalist could demolish in a few hours of research on the Inner-tubes. The increase in US troop strength focused on Baghdad, not the al-Anbar province and the rest of Iraq. For most of the country, and in neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital city itself, it was millions of dollars in baksheesh bribery to Iraqi warlords, courtesy of the flat-broke American taxpayer, and a tacit agreement among the warring Iraqi factions to keep a low profile for a while, to perhaps lull the Americans into finally leaving, that has resulted in a lessening in violence, much more so than any enhanced US military presence. Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, estimated to be 50 to 100,000 strong, are temporarily dormant, and the tribes of Sunni-dominated al-Anbar province, formerly our most dedicated enemies, have taken US bribes to pursue Al-Qaeda, whom they hate a tad more than the American military. Both factions, however, will not be quelled indefinitely. Now, even the marionettes in the al-Maliki government are asking us to get out within 16 months, per Obama’s withdrawal plan. Since the Iraqis follow the election news in the US very closely and clearly favor an Obama victory in November, here’s an October Surprise for the Republicans – if it appears a month before the election that McCain is likely to win, look for an upsurge in violence in Iraq on such a scale as to make McCain’s fevered “The surge is working!” chant as repugnant and risible as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.

2. This is Leadership? There was McCain all over the airwaves last week, delivering a speech per day on the Russia-Georgia dust-up that Putin ungraciously ended with a truce, denying wannabe CinC John-Boy the ability to play the “Russians are coming!” panic card he so obviously salivated over like Flounder in Animal House: “Oh, boy, is this great!” Naturally our leash-trained Punditrocracy and their fellow carnival performers in the BM barked on command to spotlight McCain’s fear-inducing drivel, most of which sounded like it was lifted straight out of some Red Scare pamphlet from the McCarthy Era. For days, I heard all about McCain’s ‘leadership’ for informing us the Russian Bear was back with teeth and claws; of his daily intimate phone chats with Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili; and about how totally awesome it was that he dispatched Tweedle-Dum Joe Lieberman and Tweedle-Dumber Lindsey Graham to illegally conduct US foreign policy overseas without portfolio. Had the vacationing Obama done any of this, he would, of course, have been grimly called to account by the BM for being too presumptuous – the nerve of the guy, pretending to be president when he hasn’t been elected — particularly if he’d attempted, as the arrogant McCain did, to speak for the American people. But one question left unasked in the midst of media praise for the GOP Golden Child — a seasoned military leader who’s never commanded anything that didn’t end in disaster, and a master at foreign affairs who advocated the idiotic Iraq invasion and has supported nearly every Bush catastrophe since – was this: What did all of McCain’s speechifying and posing and dispatching of minions actually accomplish? As far as I can tell, it’s somewhere between zip and zilch. If this is an example of his ‘leadership’ in a crisis, it may be time for the nation to collectively take the gas pipe, should McCain wheedle his way into the presidency.

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August 11, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Double-Take On the News Edition

You Could Get Whiplash

“Somewhere between the stained blue dress and the vice president shooting a guy in the face, between swift boat lies and ‘war on terra’ alibis, the absurd became the ordinary, facts became optional and satire became superfluous.”
– Leonard Pitts Jr., “When Hysteria and Satire Meet,” The Miami Herald, July 17, 2008.

McCain the Antichrist?Huhhhh? I’m not a big fan of Johnny MacFlipFlop, but the Antichrist in the flesh? Whoa! I smell Rove: This is perhaps the only way the GOP will get far-right Christians to vote for McNasty – by convincing fringe Christopublicans his election will hasten the End Times and bring on the Rapture. Oh, brother. Or maybe Obama is the Antichrist, as Time Magazine postulates the McCain camp is trying to depict him, and the Fundies will vote for BHO to bring about Armageddon. Or maybe they’ll vote against the Antichrist, depending on which one it really is – if you’re a wingnut who believes in a Republican Country Club Jay-zus backed by his Invisible Omnipotent Dad, you certainly have a lot of figurin’ to do this election – and these are Godly folk who taint fond o’ that thinkin’ stuff much. What to do, what to do…who’s got the snakes this week?

– The Big Media Fatuous Fathead of the Week Award: It’s a squeaker, but the prize goes to Amy Chozick of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for devoting over a thousand words to speculating whether Obama is ‘too thin and fit’ to be president. (more…)

July 31, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Cup ‘O Joe Info, LIV Knocks, McCain Blown By Cox and More Edition

Coffee Politics, For What It’s Worth: Carl’s sister works in a Starbuck’s located near an Obama campaign office and a McCain campaign office. Every weekday morning for many months the Dems and Republicos have crowded the shop for their AM caffeine buzz and the occasional regulatory muffin. Over time, she’s gotten to know who works where and the McCainiacs are definitely in defeat mode – depressed, surly, downcast — “Limit the damage” is a phrase she hears often from the Republican camp. Meanwhile, the sunny Obamanians are upbeat, funny, and wish the election were being held tomorrow. Not surprisingly, the Dems have more women and minorities working in the office; the Republicans tend to be older white men, just like their candidate. The McCainers are also less likely to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when ordering than the Dems. If worker attitude is any gauge, Obama will win in a landslide. BTW, in case you wondered: The Republicans order lattes twice as often as the Democrats. Latte-drinking Republicans? Another GOP smear bites the dust.

– ‘Low information voters’ is the latest knobby Big Media euphemism for identifying the slack-jawed morons out there. Last month it was the ludicrous ‘lunch pail workers’ who haven’t existed for thirty years. What’s next – ‘Paleo-Americans’?

– Dumbest, But Most Truthful, Quote From a Member of the BM on McCain’s Bus: “Covering McCain is a blast. He genuinely likes reporters: He’ll joke with us about our drinking habits, playfully request our cell phones in the middle of a call and tell some unsuspecting editor or parent that the phone’s owner has just been hauled off to rehab, and engage in gleefully sarcastic banter about both our colleagues and his. The campaign’s atmosphere of hectic improvisation—its freewheeling ‘what-the-fuck-ness’—is entirely absent from the more disciplined outfits he’s run against.”
– Ana Marie Cox, “Running Wild,” Radar Magazine, July/August 2008.

Oh, wonderful, another aging frat boy who wants to be president – “Hey, your kid’s just been carted off to rehab, Mom! Haw, haw, haw!” Yeah, what a scream. Cox – ahem — used to be funny when she babbled on at Wonkette; now she’s just trivial and annoying but, then, she’s working for Time Mag these days, so she’s in appropriate company. If you want to know a good lube for an anal probe, Ana Marie’s your go-to gal – come to think of it, that’s really the role she plays covering McCain’s campaign – keeping the dildo greased for her ‘lovable’ old coot’s victims – AKA the American public.

– I’m copping this from Media Matters just because I think it’s funny, well-written, and puts the subtle yet creepy corporate media bias toward John “Flipper” McCain into proper perspective. It was written and posted to Eric Alterman’s Altercation by Robert Hawks of Carpentersville, Illinois:

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July 26, 2008

The Tattlesnake – Obama Globetrotting Triggers McCain Jealousy Edition

Jealousy Thy Name is McCain: The GOP and the Punditrocracy are livid over Obama turning his world tour, which was supposed to expose his bumbling inexperience as he committed an endless string of gaffes, into a victory jaunt, the images sent back to America showing a confident and relaxed Obama at home and presidential on the world stage. As anyone who has studied Ronald Reagan’s campaigns knows, the successful image is often more important than what was said in the speeches, especially to those with the TV sound muted or who only catch a part of the news, as so many Americans do. Obama, I think intentionally, wanted to show himself as ‘The President,’ getting white America comfortable with the idea of a black man as their leader, and in that he has succeeded beyond expectations. Another aspect is the palpable tinge of jealously displayed by the McCainiacs – they well know that their withered and dull candidate couldn’t attract an adoring crowd of that size overseas and it preys on them to no end. The McCain campaign was out-played and outclassed on this one, as Globetrotter Obama vanquished the amateurish McCain team in their home court.

A Campaign Metaphor? Barack Obama goes to Berlin, Germany, and is greeted by over 200,000 cheering Germans waving US flags; John McCain goes to the German Village neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and chows down on bratwurst and cream puffs. (Did Ron Fournier of the AP pick up the tab?) Isn’t this pretty much the prevailing zeitgeist of both campaigns: Obama’s large and in charge and McCain’s left sitting there forlornly chewing on a sausage?

Speaking of the Out-of-Touch Punditrocracy: Following Obama’s spectacular Berlin appearance, many of the cable news pundits oddly obsessed, as did NBC’s Brian “Broadcast Newshawk” Williams, on Obama admitting that McCain’s ‘surge’ in Iraq had been right and Obama had been wrong. Obama wouldn’t play their game and correctly attributed the current less violent conditions in Iraq to many factors, so they pouted that he was evading the question. As Eric Alterman at Media Matters wrote the other day, “Why is the surge being reported as an undeniable success when it still has not accomplished most of the things it was promised to do and has likely accomplished nothing that will last once its unsustainable numbers are drawn down?” But that’s the kind of question that our infatuated Big Media somehow never gets around to asking McCain. Gee, it’s a good thing we have a liberal media – imagine what they would do to Obama if they were really McCain sympathizers at heart?

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