I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, John McCain is a phony. Of course, getting the public to see through McCain’s carefully-constructed persona is difficult when the media is so complicit in enforcing the view that he’s a no-nonsense, straight-talking tough guy who’s willing to reach across the aisle to do the right thing. Or as the “journalists” at CNN like to put it….
“The story of his life is a profile in courage, both political and personal. Before John McCain was a maverick senator, he was a Vietnam prisoner of war for six years in Hanoi.”
” Senator McCain known as a maverick, known as someone to challenge his party…he is now going back to the United States Senate, where he won the maverick label, the maverick reputation because his own party’s leadership back in the Senate is very much opposed to the very things John McCain stands for.
Kate Snow :
“Senator McCain known as a maverick here on Capitol Hill.”
“Now, a familiar face that you’re also going to see on the trail is senator — this is Senator John McCain. He, of course, the maverick Republican trying to generate a lot of support there.”
“Then there is the X factor, the maverick Republican John McCain determined to change the rules on political money as soon as next Monday in defiance of his own leaders.”
“A well-known getting the most votes within the Kerry campaign is Republican Senator John McCain. The Arizona maverick would generate tremendous excitement and help attract Republican and independent voters”
“In Washington, fellow Senate maverick John McCain angrily warned the Republican Party to, in his words, ‘grow up and learn to disagree without resorting to personal threats.’”
“It’s one of the main reasons why they picked Senator McCain to be a part of it, because you know he’s a critic, he’s a maverick, he’ll say what he wants to say.”
“Senator John McCain is blasting what he calls crony capitalism. Up next: excerpts from McCain’s latest campaign against the system. Is he trying to sound like Teddy Roosevelt? Another political maverick is back in the spotlight…”
“Did the press pump up the story that the Arizona senator might — might — leave the GOP? Were journalists blatantly used by McCain advisers or can they simply not resist writing about their favorite maverick senator?”
Even when they’re questioning McCain, they can’t help but point out how tough he is. Of course, if McCain was an actual “maverick” he wouldn’t have waited until after an election year to talk tough on torture. I guess in media-land, “maverick” is defined as the first Republican to jump on a Democratic bandwagon. Nevermind what liberals say, the media likes to save their praise until McCain’s pollsters tells him to “reach across the aisle”. Blech.
It’s nice to see that Harry Whittington knows who the real victims are here (via DKos)
Whittington was hit in the face, neck and chest with birdshot Saturday during the hunting trip. After a shotgun pellet traveled to his heart, he had suffered a mild heart attack Tuesday while being treated at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial.
. . .
Whittington, his voice raspy but strong, said the past weekend encompassed ‘’a cloud of misfortune and sadness.'’
‘’My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with,'’ he said.
Apologizing to the man who almost killed you? Sounds like somebody’s been taking advice from Harry Reid.
As you may know, a new Turkish movie called The Valley of the Wolves—Iraq is setting box office records there. Apparently it portrays America in Iraq as monstrous, massacring civilians and removing prisoners’ organs for patients in the U.S., Israel and England.
Yusuf Kanli, the editor in chief of the Turkish Daily News, said the film is grounded in a real event known as the “bag incident,” which cemented the movie’s popularity in Turkey.
“Abu Ghraib is a deep wound, but it’s war, and war is never clean,” Kanli said. “But what happened in July 2003 can never be forgotten by any Turk.”
In that incident, U.S. troops arrested 11 Turkish special-forces officers in northern Iraq and walked them from their headquarters with bags over their heads. It was considered a bitter betrayal by a trusted ally. Turkish newspapers dubbed it the “Rambo Crisis.” Recent opinion polls rank it as the most humiliating moment in Turkish history.
What interests me about this is not only did I have no opinion about the “bag incident,” I had NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT.
In other words, it’s possible for America to do things to other countries that they consider “the most humiliating moment” in their history…and even anti-American America-haters like myself can’t be bothered simply to know it happened.
This is one of the true perks of power: being able to get away with complete ignorance about other people. Generally speaking, for countries as well as individuals, the more power you have the stupider you are. If you have gigantic amounts of power, you can get away with knowing nothing whatsoever. George Bush George Bush George Bush.
I’m curious to know if others knew more or less than me about the bag incident. (Well, more or the same; you couldn’t really have known less.) If you care to, you can comment on my site here.
UPDATE: It turns out it’s not just me. Few other people commenting had heard of this, and even those who had mostly didn’t know its significance.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The response of government at all levels to Hurricane Katrina was “dismal,” poorly planned and badly coordinated, showing that more than four years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, “America is still not ready for prime time,” a House report concludes.
“It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted,” the committee said in the report. “If 9/11 was a failure of imagination, then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership.”
The 78-year-old lawyer who Vice President Cheney accidentally shot in a hunting accident suffered a minor heart attack this morning after a piece of birdshot moved and lodged in his heart, doctors said.
Doctors treating Harry Whittington said the Republican lawyer was moved back into the intensive care unit and will need to remain hospitalized for at least a week.
Some of the birdshot appears to have moved and lodged into part of his heart,” Peter Banko, spokesman for Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital, told reporters outside the Corpus Christi hospital. Banko said the birdshot caused a minor heart attack.
Asked if the birdshot could move more and endanger Whittington’s life, Dr. David Blanchard, emergency room chief at the hospital, said: “When birdshot is in your body, there’s always the risk they can move. We’ll watch very closely for any migration.”
One of the easiest ways you can support this site is to occasionally remember to click through on the advertising links. They’re pretty self-selecting, meaning that if you visit this site regularly, it’s often something you’d probably be interested in anyway. With the ad currently over at the top of the adstrip on the right, you get a real two-fer — not only does your clickthrough help support this blog, visiting the altweeklies home page supports the industry that makes my very career as a cartoonist possible. So do me a quick favor and go say hello.
After the President’s conveniently-timed revelation about a foiled attack on Los Angeles, I contacted a few friends in the intelligence community and was able to get my hands on this IM conversation between Al Qaeda’s number two guy and Bin Laden’s second-in-command (on that org chart, everyone’s a VP).
OsamaMama : u there? 72Virgins : yeah, sup? OsamaMama : martyr 4 life, bitch! 72Virgins : lol 72Virgins : OsamaMama : turn on fox 72Virgins : k OsamaMama : shes hot 72Virgins : who? the angry blonde? OsamaMama : yup 72Virgins : dude, she looks like barney fife with a wig OsamaMama : whatever. anns my gril OsamaMama : girl OsamaMama : i cant tpe today OsamaMama : type today OsamaMama : ARRGGGGGHHHH!!!! 72Virgins : nice. OsamaMama : where you wanna hit the infidels? 72Virgins : i dunno. sears tower OsamaMama : las vegas 72Virgins : space needle OsamaMama : disenyland 72Virgins : disneyworld OsamaMama : i just said that 72Virgins : no, you said land, I said world OsamaMama : aren’t they the same? 72Virgins : no, dumbass 72Virgins : the white house OsamaMama : the washington monument 72Virgins : brb 72Virgins : im back 72Virgins : the tallest building in texas OsamaMama : the tallest building in los angeles 72Virgins : i got skills OsamaMama : what? 72Virgins : nunchuck skills 72Virgins : bowhunting skills OsamaMama : it’s a liger 72Virgins : flippin sweet
Seriously though, it’s hard to know what to think about all of these vague threats when the President is so blatant about politicizing them and mum on the details. Where these guys stopped at the airport or was this “plan” just something jotted down on a bar napkin? If revealing the existence of a spying program undermines our ability to fight terrorism, what are we to make of the President’s self-congratulations being on the cover of every newspaper? If it was so important to keep this incident a secret then, what were the changes that made it perfectly acceptable to blab about it now?
One is a second grader in Manhattan. Over the protests of his American mother, immigration officials have been trying to deport him ever since he returned from a brief visit to his native Canada without the right visa. Another is an Irish professor of literature invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania last month. He was handcuffed at the Philadelphia airport, strip-searched, jailed overnight and sent back to Europe to correct an omission in his travel papers.
Then there are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them.
–In case you missed it, the guest post from Iraq vet Tomas Young is well worth reading.
–A review of the new Neil Young concert movie by Jonathan Demme, here. This was filmed over two nights at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last August. The concerts were closed to the public, but I had the great good fortune of attending both nights, thanks to my friend Louis Black (who is not the comedian), and the greater good fortune of meeting both Demme and Neil Young. Sitting in the third row, I felt like I was attending a private concert in Neil’s living room. Imagine the best concert you’ve ever been to, and imagine that it was immortalized on film. That’s how I feel about this one, and I haven’t even had a chance to see it yet.
