McCainiac(s)

Swallowing bile

• Has anyone ever sounded unfriendlier than John McCain when saying the words "my friends"? It's like how when a guy on the street calls you "buddy" or "pal", he really means "hey, shithead!"
  
• Evidently the McCain campaign has been sequestering the media from the crowd at its campaign events. It's unclear whether this step is being taken to prevent the media from catching McCain's supporters using racial epithets on the record or otherwise venting hysterically, or for the reporters' own protection - according to the Washington Post, after Sarah Palin made reference to her now-infamous Katie Couric interview in Tampa, "supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, 'Sit down, boy.'"
• McCain, who stuck to a mantra of "cut spending, cut spending" when asked initially how the economic crisis would affect his White House plans, yesterday unveiled mid-debate a hugely ambitious $300 billion plan for the government to buy bad mortgages, essentially refinancing them in an effort to keep people in their homes (and taking them off bank balance sheets). Not a bad idea, perhaps, although it's hard to see how it squares with any other aspect of McCain's proposed fiscal policies, which to this point have pretty much centered around making Bush's tax breaks for billionaires permanent. Also, for what it's worth, Obama claims to have thought of it first.
  
• Also in last night's debate, McCain launched attack after attack on...George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the presidential ticket he endorsed heartily in 2004. Really, I know we're not supposed to play the "blame game" here, but between swallowing/authoring the lies that landed us in Iraq in the first place, backing Bush and Cheney, and picking Sarah "What does a vice president do?" Palin to be the dauphine...where exactly is this record of "sound judgment" McCain and his cronies keep referring to? Is it enough to say that you have good judgment ad infinitum if your most high profile decisions continually belie that notion?
• We're reminded again and again what an expedient, effective tactic blaming the media is, but whatever happened to the age-old maxim about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel? McCain once enjoyed such a solid relationship with the press that he routinely referred to the cadre of reporters covering him as "my base"; now they're his most implacable enemy. There's been a lot of speculation that the media figures who have the longest-standing relationships with McCain are disgusted with his apparent abandonment of his personal principles, as well as the manifestly dishonest character of his smear campaign against Obama. More to the point, though, I think that there is a direct causal link between McCain and Palin's decision to open an Eastern front against the media, and the media's decision to treat the McCain campaign's every action with an intense skepticism. After all, I guess there's only so many times that virtually every pillar of the mainstream media establishment can stand being blamed for Sarah Palin's inability to evince basic competence in the standard TV interview format.