We live in an age of forgetting.
john mccain
McCain: He’s More Than a Character in Top Gun
Apr 5th
Some people are making fun of John McCain for claiming that he never considered himself a maverick. Little do they know that de-mavericking yourself is the ultimate maverick move. The maverick is back!
McCain is playing 3D maverick chess while his opponents are playing checkers. At least, he would if he played 3D chess, but he doesn’t, cause chess has rules and mavericks don’t play by the rules. So if you do play chess with McCain, there’s a good chance he’s going to flip the board over five minutes in the game and yell something along the line of “I’m a maverick! I don’t play by the rules! Includeing grammar rules! Crazy I pants am not wearing boo-yah!”
Maverick!
Move over, Edward Murrow
Oct 17th
The View and David Letterman: asking the tough questions professional reporters are afraid to raise.
No, I am unfortunately not being sarcastic.
Are People Still Buying This?
Sep 26th
[rant]
“With the longer resume on foreign policy, McCain is expected to overtly raise doubts about Obama’s readiness to become president, arguing that his election would amount to a high-stakes gamble.” (Politico)
Seriously? After everything that has happened over the past two months, it’s Obama who’s the gamble?
You know what language I’ve heard describe McCain’s campaign in the past two months? Risk-taking. Impulsive. High-stakes gamble. And this is from his supporters. They talk about his “act first, figure it out later” brand of decision making as a good thing.
Back in January, I was rooting for McCain to win the Republican primary. Not because he was a weak candidate, but because I thought he was the best Republican in the field. My image of him was the moderate maverick of 2000, and I felt that our country was in such dire straits, we needed the best from both parties to fight it out.
What we ended up getting was someone fundamentally unserious about the business of running this country. The man is a fingernail away from death, and he picked a VP candidate so unqualified that even die-hard conservatives are questioning whether she should stay on the ticket.
He has gone out of his way to recreate fabricated controversies and consider truth as a matter of opinion. He introduced instability and uncertainty into what will probably be the most important decision Congress will make for the past 10 years–the financial bailout package–solely to grandstand, and at a time when what is needed most is calm and stability.
Think about his latest action for a bit. There is a lot of debate on what we should do to resolve the financial crisis–a Congressional bailout, investing money directly into banks, etc. But most economists agree that what we end up doing will determine whether we go into a bad rescission for a year or two or another Great Depression for several years.
What type of a person fucks around at a time like this?
A lot of political analysts focus on that fact that McCain is making big gambles and chat about if these gambles will work out. I have a different take. A person who takes high-stakes gambles is unfit to lead this country, regardless of whether those gambles turn out to work.
[/rant]
Bail in or Bail out?
Sep 26th
To quote President Bush, a man second in elegance only to Winston Churchill, on the state of the Wall Street bailout: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” (quote)
Indeed. But why is this sucker in threat of going down?
I think a lot of the problems at hand could have been avoided if Treasury Paulson called it “The Rainbow Unicorn Package! With Sprinkes!” rather than a “bailout.” You bail out screew-ups, and who wants to do that?
The real stumbling block though is uncertainty. What I find amazing is that not only are economists still debating the structure of the bailout, some of then are still debating whether we even need a bailout.
Take a look at The Washington Post today. On the front page is an article on how some economists are doubting the premises behind the bailout.
But I’ve also read many commentaries by analysts like Steven Pearlstein, someone whose opinion I respect a lot, summing up the current debate and making a sound argument on why we need to do something.
Political debates need engines to drive them. It could be the engine of expert opinion, of special interest groups, of public consensus, of ideology, of a strong leader, or more often, some mix. In this debate, a clear driving force has yet to bubble up.
Ideology hasn’t even helped define the debate. Conservative and liberals have crossed lines to both support federal intervention and argue for doing nothing.
Sec. Paulson, President Bush, and Senate leaders are the default engine, agreeing to a bailout in principle and negotiating the details. That’s where we were on Wednesday. The problem is that the negotiation is fragile and can’t withstand even a small challenge, which is why the plan got tabled when Senator McCain (representing House Republicans) injected himself into the process.
My sense from the negotiations and what I’ve read is that some sort of bailout is needed, but no one wants to own the bailout because the political downside is great and the upside small. People won’t like you more if you support the bailout, but they will like you less. In an election year, that makes action in the House impossible unless both sides give each other cover by signing on to the plan.
Senator McCain did a lot of grandstanding by canceling-without-canceling his campaign and then ducking out of the debate peekaboo, I’m-back! Yet if the Republican leaders in the house are unwilling to get their members in line behind the bailout, then perhaps he has a useful role to play.
Quick Thought
Sep 25th
Is McCain making his decisions with a Ouija board at this point? Seriously. I wish to know if he and Cindy are sitting every night in a room lit by blood candles with a Ouija board in front of them. “Q…U…I…honey, are you feeling something from the ‘t’?”
And why does Gov.Palin have to cancel her events too? I mean, I know why, but what excuse are they giving? Does McCain have an electronic monitoring bracelet on her ankle? Is that why she blinks oddly? “H-E-L-P…S-O-S”? It would suck if she did because who knows Morse code nowadays? How are we even remembering that Morse code used to exist? It hasn’t been used in 50 years.
I’m no political consultant…
Jun 11th
…but if I’m fighting stereotypes of being out of touch with the economic concerns of the poor and middle class and only focused on the interests of the rich, I’m not putting a “Golf Gear” tab on the front page of my web site.
Some sneaky liberals wrote fake user reviews for the McCain Father’s Day Golf Pack.
Update: The fake comments became too popular and were taken down. Someone archived the comments, which you can read here.
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