…And the MSM double-standard on negative ads
October 21, 2010
The GOP Can Dish It Out, But They Can’t Take It
November 9, 2008
June 30, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Big Media Continue to Excuse or Ignore ‘Honest John’s’ McCainery Edition
And Some Questions His BM Camp Followers Should Ask Their Republican Paramour
Political junkies and other perverse creatures who tempt aching necks following this tennis match between John McCain and Barack Obama already know that if Obama had made the glaring blunders McCain has been prone to, he would have been crucified by the Big Media Punditocracy and his political carcass left for the buzzards.
Let’s look at McCain’s recent spate of arrant gaffery, just on Iraq, where he’s been anointed by his friends in the BM as an ‘expert’:
1. McCain said an occupation of Iraq of a hundred years or more wouldn’t bother him. His Pundit Pals said he didn’t really mean that and it was taken out of context.
2. On four different occasions in a 24-hour period, McCain mixed up the Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. His BM buddies excused that by exasperatedly fuming, ‘Of course, John McCain knows the difference – after all, he’s a foreign policy expert! He just misspoke!’
3. McCain has claimed repeatedly that the surge is working, although there has been no recent official report to that effect, no US general on the ground in Iraq has made that statement, and Americans and Iraqis continue to die in attacks over there. I have yet to hear the BM challenge McCain on this unsupported assertion.
4. Then McCain said on the Today Show that it doesn’t really matter how long we have troops there. He’s since backtracked while his reliable Hallelujah chorus in the Corporate Media have echoed the GOP Talking Point that he was, again, ‘taken out of context.’
On June 12, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on McCain’s statements, showing with video clips how many times the Straight-Talk Express has been circling the cul-de-sac — right turns only, of course, ‘my friends’ — and that putting his remarks in context is even more frightening than dismissing them as the senile obfuscations and precinct-captain pandering of a doddering old political fossil. It sketches a picture of McCain as a remote and careless dauphin who really doesn’t give a fig about the troops he pretends to support. Leave ‘em in there to rot as an occupation force, as long as they’re not getting shot at. This is the antiquated foreign policy of a King George III or Kaiser Wilhelm II, not a modern American president.
The Tattlesnake – More Zippity-Doo-Dah From the Fading Right Edition
In the anguished ‘why we lost’ analyses in the days to come from the Fox News-Karl Rove-Bill Kristol neocons and their compadres in the Big Media, still discombobulated over Obama’s landslide victory in what they think is a ‘center-right’ conservative nation – the ‘liberal socialist’ Obama of November 3rd even magically transforming into a ‘fiscal conservative’ 24 hours later to preserve this incredible myth — you’ll read much about how the economic meltdown in late September killed McCain’s chances after he had pulled even or ahead in the polls. Horse pucky. McCain and Palin’s sour performance in the debates, the GOP’s over-the-top negative ads, a miserably run campaign, Palin’s exposure as an ignorant nitwit, plus the general public disgust with the Bush Republican Party had as much to do with his loss as the financial crisis. Also underestimated are Obama’s superior organization, discipline, massive GOTV efforts in most of the fifty states, and that the country, already centrist-liberal except in name, has been trending more to the left for many years.
McCain got an expected uptick in the poll numbers following the Republican Convention, which is commonplace after any major party convention, but he was receding even before the banks and markets hit bottom in late September. In fact, except for McCain’s brief post-convention bounce, the individual poll margins had remained consistent since summer with Obama in the lead, as this chart shows:
CNN 6/26-6/29: Obama 50%, McCain 45%
CNN 7/27-7/29: Obama 51%, McCain 44%
CBS 7/7/-7/14: Obama 45%, McCain 39%
CBS 7/31-8/5: Obama 45%, McCain 39%
Ipsos 6/5-6/11: Obama 50%, McCain 43%
Ipsos 7/31-8/4: Obama 48%, McCain 42%
Time 6/19-6/25: Obama 47%, McCain 43%
Time 7/31-8/4: Obama 46%, McCain 41%
Pew 6/18-6/29: Obama 48%, McCain 40%
Pew 7/23-7/27: Obama 47%, McCain 42%
NBC/Wall Street Journal 6/6-6/9: Obama 47%, McCain 41%
NBC/Wall Street Journal 7/18-7/21: Obama 47%, McCain 41%
(Hat tip to Rich Gallagher of Fishkill, NY, who compiled and posted these numbers at Altercation, Aug. 8, 2008.)
Obama-Biden popular vote percentage: 52.3%
McCain-Palin popular vote percentage: 46.2%
Obama-Biden electoral vote total: 365
McCain-Palin electoral vote total: 173
(Final numbers from FiveThirtyEight.com.)