His general election campaign is being run not on the premise of bringing out the best in America, but rather by playing on the worst. He has stopped being the conscience of the party and instead has become beholden to its lesser angels. It appears that John McCain learned exactly the wrong lessons from his defeat at the hands of George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary. He learned that winning at all costs is more important than how the game is played.

In that primary, the Bush campaign targeted John McCain with an underground thrust of push polls and personal smears to undercut the momentum the McCain campaign had built from beating the Bush campaign in New Hampshire by 19 percentage points. Rumors were distributed that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually the illegitimate offspring of an affair with a black woman. The New York Times reported:

Literature began to pepper the windshields of cars at political events suggesting that Mr. McCain had committed treason while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, that he was mentally unstable after years in a P.O.W. camp, that he was the homosexual candidate and that Mrs. McCain, who had admitted to abusing prescription drugs years earlier, was an addict.
“You had a sense of besiegement daily,” said Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Mr. McCain.

The McCain team had trouble nailing down the origin of the dirt.

“One time in Hilton Head, we chased these punks down the block who were handing them out,” said State Representative James H. Merrill, the Republican state majority leader, “and when we got to them and asked them where they got them, they said some guy in a red pickup truck said, ‘Hey do you wanna make $100?’”

The Bush campaign denied any involvement in the smears but the last eight years have since well demonstrated the credibility and integrity of President Bush and his staff. John McCain ended up losing South Carolina by 11 points. The McCain campaign never fully recovered personally or politically from the loss in South Carolina and is now generally regarded as the key turning point that led to the nomination of then Governor Bush. Since then, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have made a mockery of the law, the Constitution, and sullied the good standing and reputation of America around the globe.

My personal opinion is that 21st century American history would be dramatically different had John McCain won in South Carolina eight years ago.  And he knows it also.

Since the Republican convention, Senator McCain has applied the mislearned lessons of South Carolina and run one of the most negative and personally insulting (as a voter) campaigns I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness. John McCain likes to characterize himself as a maverick and at one time that description was apt, but now it rings hollow.

Choosing a vice-presidential nominee is effectively a candidate’s first presidential act. John McCain failed himself and the nation in this task multiple ways, the least of which was in selecting Governor Sarah Palin.  Palin is clearly not even close to having the level of general knowledge, professional acumen, and thoughtfulness I expect to see in a candidate- especially one that is next in line behind a 72 year old man with a history of cancer. Her ability to think on the fly and express herself coherently is abysmal. John McCain failed in his first presidential decision not by choosing Sarah Palin, and not by doing such a poor job in vetting his VP pick, but by bowing to pressure from the Christian conservative base and not choosing who he wanted as his VP nominee.

Senator McCain wanted to choose Senator Joe Lieberman or former Governor Tom Ridge as his nominee. According to the NY Times:

But both men favor abortion rights, anathema to the Christian conservatives who make up a crucial base of the Republican Party. As word leaked out that Mr. McCain was seriously considering the men, the campaign was bombarded by outrage from influential conservatives who predicted an explosive floor fight at the convention and vowed rejection of Mr. Ridge or Mr. Lieberman by the delegates.

Perhaps more important, several Republicans said, Mr. McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out — and as Mr. McCain discarded two safer choices, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable — he turned to Ms. Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

Maverick John McCain failed to stand up to his own party when it mattered most. Rather than choose a vice president, he chose a running mate. For someone who claims to not be in the pocket of special interest groups, he’s given in to pressure on his very first presidential decision. He’s placed politics over country and is willing to pass the fate of the country at this historic and critical juncture into the hands of someone who is clearly in way over her head.

Senator McCain, that isn’t “country first.” That’s winning at all costs. Being beat in 2000 by a Bush campaign the believed the ends do indeed justify the means doesn’t excuse your adopting the same strategy. Experience only matters when the correct lessons are learned from it. While I remain grateful for your past service, I will not vote for a person who willingly sacrifices their integrity and their best judgement for a chance to reside in the Oval Office. We, the nation, need and deserve better.

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1. I don’t care whether Barack Obama is Muslim or not. Even though there has been overwhelming evidence provided by the Obama campaign and from his life story to verify that he is indeed Christian, let’s assume for the sake of argument that he is a follower of Islam. So what? Why is that anymore of an issue than if he was Catholic like JFK or Mormon like Mitt Romney? The whole “controversy” rests on the assumption that all Muslims support Al Qaeda and terrorism in general. It also assumes that Obama is some sort of Muslim Manchurian candidate. Each premise is ridiculous on its own merit, and exponentially more so when combined together. The average Muslim has as much connection to Al Qaeda as the average Christian has to the KKK. This is why even if I ignore all the evidence to the contrary and believe Obama is Muslim, I don’t care.
2. I don’t care whether Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig Palin or not. There seems to be a rabid amount of concern about whether Sarah actually gave birth to baby Trig or whether Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol did. Why does anybody care? Basic human biology eliminates the very possibility that Bristol is Trig’s mother. According to the McCain campaign, Bristol is due late December. That would put conception nine-months earlier around late March. Trig was born April 18, 2008. You do the math. For the sake of argument, let’s say Bristol was Trig’s mother. So what? Why would I even possibly care? It has absolutely no bearing on anything outside of the Palin family. Therefore, I don’t care.
3. I don’t care what any of the candidate’s preachers or their religious supporters had to say in their church. Preachers, especially evangelical preachers, have a penchant for bombast in their sermons. So don’t bother telling me what Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor), Rev. John Hagee (McCain supporter), or Rev. Ed Kalnins (Palin’s former pastor) said. To act as if everything they said is what the respective candidates believed also is to try to make them accountable by association. Do you agree with everything your preacher has said? Didn’t think so. Very, very few do. Therefore I don’t care.
4. I don’t care if any of the candidates wear a flag anywhere on their body. All the nonsense about lapel pins and symbolic displays of patriotism has hopefully passed like a pointless storm. As I previously wrote, patriotism isn’t about symbolism, but concrete actions. They can tattoo their chests with the flag; I don’t care. Presenting a detailed policy plan to address one of the many problems this nation faces is far more patriotic than any campaign flag display.

It is stunning to me the amount of time and effort that has been wasted on these subjects. There are far too many people who continue to fixate on pointless issues and conspiracy theories that are not only demonstrably wrong, but that would be completely irrelevant even if they were true. It’s comparable to twiddling with buttons on the car stereo to evaulate what kind of vehicle you should get.

America, snap out of it before we end up with a four year lease on another lemon.

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Today, Sen McCain said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times.”

He said this the same day that investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch narrowly missed insolvency by selling itself to Bank of America. Saying that while two of the four remaining large investment banks on Wall Street give up the ghost is a rather clueless statement but he managed to top that later in the day by redefining what economic fundamentals are.

And my opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals — the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America, and I think they’re strong

It’s not just that his opponents disagree, the entire field of macroeconomic theory disagrees with him. American economic fundamentals are the inflation rate, gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment rate,  and other hard measurable factors.  According to Forbes magazine, core inflation “is up 3.6% over the past twelve months, the fastest unadjusted annual pace since May 1991.” Real GDP has been shrinking each year since 2004, and unemployment has gone up considerably since August 2007 from 4.7% to 6.1%. The sky may not be falling but these are not strong fundamentals.

This isn’t just a misstatement or an unusual errant assertion. Senator McCain has increasingly been making statements that are a blatant denial of reality.

Setting aside the normal political blather and partial truths both campaigns have engaged in, John McCain actually had the gall to publicly state that “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations” after Russia invaded Georgia last month. Upon hearing that, I was half-expecting his head to implode from cognitive dissonance or to see him struck by lightning for saying it.

I expected a much more honest and higher level of discourse from him. For a man who sells himself as a straight talker, he’s been anything but the past couple months. What happened to you, John McCain?

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Photographer Jim Goldstein writes about recent political photo manipulation and also links back to Dartmouth University Professor Hany Farid’s impressive collection of Photo Tampering Throughout History. Make sure you click on the images there to see the original and the manipulated result side by side. It’s amazing how many iconic images there are that are fakes.

On the political language front, Author John Ridley writes an impressive post demonstrating how Republicans change characterization of similar circumstances facing their nominee and the Democratic nominee to fit their political perspective.

Voter beware!

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I offer my sincere apologies to Governor Palin for not taking a more skeptical eye towards the photo and distributing an incorrect image of her.

Original Post follows:

The blogosphere and mainstream media is awash in a instant soup of rumor, speculation, and facts about Governor Sarah Palin that are currently being distilled for accuracy, relevance, and importance.  During my research, I came across this picture on author James Howard Kunstler’s blog. Thanks to him, I am now comfortable that we will not have another national round of insipid discussions about whether the latest vice-presidential candidate should be wearing a flag pin as a display of patriotism.

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On Sunday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev defined bold and assertive guidelines that would define its new approach to international relations. This new policy most notably contains what is effectively the Russian version of the Roosevelt corollary of the United State’s well-known Monroe Doctrine. Re-asserting itself as having special “areas of privileged interests”, Russia is effectively trying to turn back the clock to the pre-Perestroika era when the Soviet Union still had the economic strength to impose its will on Warsaw-pact satellites and other disobedient nations in their global neighborhood.

Insisting that the future “world must be multi-polar,” Medvedev rejected the notion that the any nation, particularly the United States, should be the sole decision-maker on the world stage. Stunningly, very few news organizations have even bothered to report on this latest assertion of Russia’s resurgence on the global stage.

Russia has been retreating for years from its experiment with democracy and liberty after President Clinton initially prescribed economic shock therapy and then largely wrung his hands and shrugged his shoulders while Russia disintegrated into a kleptocracy that fed the oligarchs, impoverished the nation, and devolved Russia into a nuclear armed third-world country.

America needed President Bush & Secretary of State Rice to have a strong, coherent, and comprehensive policy towards Russia that would pull them back from their slow slide back towards an authoritarian regime and a cult of personality. Instead we got a long gaze into Putin’s eyes by which President Bush divined “a sense of his soul.” Since then the Bush administration, full of unilateral righteousness, either ignored or rudely dismissed Russia’s concerns.

President Bush concluded after his new age evaluation of Putin that he was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.” Given Russia’s recent actions, it appears that was one of the very few conclusions President Bush got right.

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The problem I ran into in my effort to remove the spin is that I also largely removed my voice and perspective. In addition, investigating source material that verifies the facts in most posts takes a whole lot of time. I will continue to strive to keep my arguments factually grounded, but I’m going to begin writing opinion pieces that are based on facts and experience without necessarily doing the legwork to find the source material and hyperlinking to it in my piece. For this reason, these types of posts will be categorized as being “from the hip”.

Feel free to challenge me on a post and I will do my best to find the source material to back it up if necessary. If I’m wrong, I will certainly admit to it. I’m not as interested in being right as I am in being truthful.

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The next euphemism to enter the complete glossary is below. Click on the phrase below for the political definition and description.

Energy Recovery

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Feeling patriotic is not the same as being patriotic much like having feelings of love is not the same thing as being loving. Saying you support the troops is not the same as doing something to support the troops. Being patriotic is about what you do, not what you feel.

It is patriotic to:

• pay your taxes
• perform jury duty
• vote
• serve in the military
• serve in the Peace Corps
• serve in the government
• volunteer in civic organizations
• engage in peaceful dissent
• correct your country, when it’s wrong
• support and defend the Constitution
• exercise your constitutional rights
• prosecute those who break the law
• defend those accused of breaking the law
• seek justice in the courthouse instead of the street
• immigrate legally into the country

It is unpatriotic to:

• use positions of public trust for personal gain
• engage in rumor and gossip political campaigns, bereft of facts
• place party politics before country
• make political spectacles out of the minor offenses of the opposing party
• block or minimize investigations into the major offenses of your own party
• ignore the spirit of the law while abiding by the letter of it
• suppress voter turnout
• character assassinate those who don’t agree with you
• pardon the legal offenses of those who support you
• question other’s patriotism because they don’t have the same political beliefs
• undermine the Constitution
• deny other’s their constitutional rights
• place profit ahead of national interest
• lie under oath

Both of these lists could be much larger, but I’m sure you get the idea. Symbols of patriotism are important, but acts of patriotism are what really matter. It’s the difference between style and substance. Which one do you care most about?

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He is not Muslim, much less a member of the strictly orthodox Wahhabi sect as one email has alleged. He was sworn into the senate on his own personal Bible. Senator Keith Ellison from Minnesota, however, is Muslim and was sworn in on a Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson. Being Muslim has no more bearing on patriotism than being Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, or Atheist. In a country founded on freedom of religion, the charge itself is unpatriotic.

Apparently he will not only say the pledge, but feels comfortable leading the Senate in the pledge on live cable television. No lack of patriotism there.

A racist Christian perhaps? Again, no. The church he belongs to may be pro-black but apparently not anti-white. Since when has being proud of your heritage become unpatriotic? If it is, we need to cancel all the summertime ethnic pride parades and festivals. Need to kick St. Patrick’s day to curb also.

He does, however, refuse to wear an American flag lapel pin. He told an Iowa television news reporter that such symbols

“became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism.” He added: I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and, hopefully, that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

He later told an audience during a campaign stop in Iowa:

“Somebody noticed I wasn’t wearing a flag lapel pin and I told folks, well you know what? I haven’t probably worn that pin in a very long time. I wore it right after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. “But after a while, you start noticing people wearing a lapel pin, but not acting very patriotic. Not voting to provide veterans with resources that they need. Not voting to make sure that disability payments were coming out on time.”

It is true that Barack Obama won’t wear an American flag lapel pin. The question remains, is it unpatriotic? That depends on how you define patriotism. I’ll address that in my next post.

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