furiousg

Sarah Palin is just a distraction. I feel bad that she’s let herself be used in this way. What sane person would have agreed to run as VP under these circumstances? Moreover, the point people should be hammering is that McCain has pretty much lost all pretense of running a serious campaign for the White House, and has no intention of treating the presidency seriously.

Manifestly Unserious

Campaigns have their ads, their polls, and their tactics, but at the end of the day, credible people who care about the country know that this is more than just a theatrical game — the future of the nation counts more than the future of a candidate. Those who take affairs of state seriously may take cheap shots, shade the truth now and then, and run the kind of conventional campaigns we’ve all grown accustomed to, but honorable Americans of character don’t gamble with the nation’s well-being. They know there are lines that can’t be crossed for expediency’s sake, no matter how strong the temptation.

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When I think about the respect that John McCain had worked so hard to develop, the stature he’d taken years to cultivate, and the reputation he’d built his career on, it’s breathtaking to see him throw it all away. If there’s a more complete collapse in modern political times, from hero to clown, I can’t think of it.

We’re poised to learn a great deal about Sarah Palin, but we’ve just learned even more about John McCain. He’s fundamentally unsuited for the presidency.

Does Bush Believe McCain Was Tortured?

In all the discussion of John McCain’s recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects. Feel safer?

So Obama says an off-hand comment about people checking their tire pressure to get more gas efficiency from their cars, and the Republicans pounce on this thing pretending that it’s the core of his energy policy. Not only is this kind of attack really immature and disingenuous but it really gets to the core of one of the basic hypocrices of today’s Republican party. While they claim to be the party of personal and individual freedom, they at the same time ignore personal responsibility. We should be doing all that we can in our own personal lives to reduce our own energy usage instead of relying on institutional solutions that allow us to continue to be wasteful and lazy, which is exactly what the Republicans who are calling for off-shore drilling are doing. Looking to government to solve all our problems is a charge the Republicans usually throw at the Democrats.

The worst of this is that keeping your tire pressure at the appropriate levels will save as much or more money as off-shore drilling. Turns out the oil companies just want a lock on land leases they’re more likely to get while Big Oil Bush is still in office.

The iPhone WordPress app is working for me now. Maybe I’ll blog more here…