Stewart's Britney / McCain analysis

No one mixes political analysis and humor better than Jon Stewart. In fact, he's the best in the business. The above clip is the gold standard. (Watch the vid, and you'll get the pun.)

Anyway, I really got a good laugh out of this clip; stick with it, it's a little over nine minutes, but it's one of the best I've seen on The Daily Show in quite some time.

Hearing the words come out of McCain's mouth about how he'll balance the budget, win in Iraq, find and kill bin Laden, etc. is high comedy at its greatest. Don't get me wrong, I certainly hope all of those things will happen, but just saying you'll do it without offering specifics is Saturday Night Live-sketch worthy, and definitely fodder for The Daily Show.

I've been writing for a long time now that "winning" in Iraq is a myth. Even if we "win" as politicians define it (and I still don't know what that is), we've lost. And by that I mean trillions spent (before it's all said and done), thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and for what? So we could get cheap oil, which isn't happening, anyway. I tire of typing this over and over, but it does bear repeating, since the right sees fit to keep propagating lie after lie after lie about why we invaded in the first place and why we should stay there. I don't buy any of it.

As far as balancing the budget, George Stephanopoulos was totally right to take McCain to task - he's proposing massive tax cuts, in addition to "winning" the War in Iraq. An economist it does not take to figure out that his math is, how shall I say it? - Creative. This year, we are going to have a $600-700 billion deficit, and that's without any more tax cuts. And Brain McCain is going to reverse all of those losses and balance the budget?!? I LOVE it when McCain tells Stephanopoulos "Look, I'll find you $100 billion tomorrow." One, that's patently absurd, and two, he probably could - but not a dime would come from the Pentagon. But, we could say goodbye to lots of other social and educational programs, to be sure, which McCain and the GOP have been trying to do for years.

It also should be lost on no one how the media is simply pimping and recycling McCain's talking points over and over and over, too. McLame puts out an attack ad calling Obama "arrogant," and the next thing you know, media talking heads the world over are repeating it like the drones that they are. Stewart is right on point here, too; anyone running for president has to have a certain amount of arrogance in him or her, without question. I don't know who's currently "winning" the Arrogance War between the two (nor do I care), but hearing McCain boast about how he "knows how to win wars" strikes me as blatantly arrogant, dismissive of alternate strategies, and, quite frankly, a total lie. As has been mentioned here and on countless other blogs (God only knows no one in the mainstream media has enough sac to ask him) -- "Name a war you've even remotely been in that's won, Senator." Anyone who did have the temerity to ask him to his face would most likely get that creepy smile and stare, and then a deflected answer (McCain has elevated that to an art form).

Probably my two favorite parts of this clip, though, are when McCain vows to pursue Obama to the "gates of hell," and then he just stares blankly ahead, with that creepy, plastic smile (at about the 7:20 mark); and when he says that he would not invade Pakistan because "it is a sovereign nation." And Iraq was... WHAT?

McCain taking the lower road thus far

Anyone remember when McCain pledged to run a clean campaign? To refresh, he vowed in a very public way, on national TV, to run "an honorable and dignified campaign" against Barack Obama. I distinctly remember McCain (and his wife) saying that if any mudslinging were to happen during this campaign, it would come "from the other side." The problem with a promise like that is, what's "honorable and dignified" and "mudslinging" to one person, is perfectly acceptable to another in a political campaign. For example, Karl Rove's definition of what's underhanded in a political campaign would differ from just about any reasonable human being's definition of what that is. (Rove is an unacknowledged consultant to the McCain campaign.)

Anyway, so much for McCain's "clean campaign." Really, McCain broke that promise a long time ago, but lately, he's taken the witticisms to a whole new level, and by that I mean lower level. McCain's latest undignified remarks are regarding his consistent questioning of Barack Obama's commitment to the troops and to victory in Iraq.

First off, as I wrote yesterday, no one has adequately explained just what victory in Iraq is. (Tell me this isn't Vietnam all over again - first LBJ, and then Nixon, both refused to pull out because they didn't want to go down in history as "the first president to lose a war." [Nixon was quoted as much on his tapes.])

I love how McCain in the footage above explicitly states that he's "not questioning his [Obama's] patriotism," yet he then basically questions his patriotism, and as George Stephanopoulos says, Obama's "honor," too.

That's a page right out of Karl Rove's playbook - Bush and Cheney have been doing it for years. Think back to the run-up to the War in Iraq, when they both would say that Iraq "had nothing to do with 9-11," then in the next sentence talk about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Actually, early on, Cheney even went further than that, saying that members of the Iraqi government met with hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague, when the intelligence clearly determined that the meeting had not taken place (this from George Tenet's book).

Hearing an arrogant McCain dismissively sniff that Barack Obama "doesn't understained" [spelling intentional] about Iraq makes me laugh. McCain's comments in recent weeks clearly demonstrate that he lacks plenty of understanding himself when it comes to foreign affairs, including what's going on in Iran and Iraq. The incident last week where CBS spliced his comments together to blatantly omit a whopper of an error is just one of those examples. And I don't buy into the media's explanation that they are "gaffes," either. A gaffe happens when someone makes a mistake, forgets a name, or pronounces something wrong, or forgets a date, but the implication is that people who commit gaffes actually know the facts.

McCain doesn't. When he gets on TV and says arrogantly and dismissively that "it's a matter of history" that the Troop Surge in Iraq (which began in January 2007) was responsible for the Anbar Awakening, which began three months earlier, it's a clear demonstration that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. There's no other plausible explanation, other than that his mind is going, circa Ronald Reagan in his second term.

Chuck Hagel was absolutely right when he took umbrage with McCain on yesterday's Face the Nation, too, when he says that McCain is on "very thin ground," by asserting that Obama would rather "lose a war to win a campaign."

McCain's comments about Obama in the footage above are probably among the most disgraceful I've heard a presidential candidate say about his opponent in my adult life. If there's a worse example of a presidential candidate saying something about his opponent in the last 25 years, I certainly can't think of it.

Also interesting to hear Faux News taking the predictable line courtesy of its GOP sponsors, specifically Chris Wallace echoing the GOP talking point that Obama could have gone to see the troops "without campaign staff" as the Pentagon directed. Hmm, who runs the Pentagon again? It's not a stretch to say that this was an attempt to blatantly embarrass Obama. Should he have gone anyway? Sure, but I'm guessing there's a lot more to this story than McCain's campaign ad is telling us.

And more to the point, I guess it was okay for John McCain to stroll down the street in a Baghdad Market last summer, flanked by dozens and dozens of U.S. troops and helicopters, in what amounted to a campaign appearance, but when Obama wants to do something similar, it's the world's biggest sin, right? Hmm, let's re-examine - McCain, as a declared presidential candidate, pulls scads of troops away from their real jobs so he can stroll down the street in Baghdad, and President Bush lands on an aircraft carrier to laughingly declare Mission Accomplished (when it wasn't), and Obama is politicizing our troops? Uh, sure.

This whole "visiting the troops" pseudo-scandal is being cooked up by Fox News, McCain and the likes of Matt Drudge to try and smear Obama after a very successful trip overseas, and in the end, it shouldn't amount to much. If it does, than this country is in even deeper trouble than I thought.

Sen. Claire McCaskill was spot on when she said that Republicans could criticize just about anything Obama said, i.e. - he took heat for not going to Iraq, then he took heat for going to Iraq, etc. Gimme a break. It's another attempt by the right to blunt Obama's surging popularity.

Sign the petition to jail Karl Rove

And no, that's not a joke - Rove really should go to jail for refusing a Congressional subpoena. Check out the round-up of media coverage above - my favorite is when George Stephanopoulos asks him about the Don Siegelman case, and Rove hems and haws and stutters like crazy. That is the face of a liar. I've been meaning to write about Siegelman for some time now, and I will definitely do it this weekend.

Anyway, go to the Brave New Films Website and sign the petition to jail Rove for defying a Congressional subpoena. I'm not always big on petitions, but it only takes a minute to sign it. Better yet, write your House Representative - find out who it is if you don't know by clicking Here.

Chuck Hagel - a GOPer I like

This is a pretty strong, powerful appearance by Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel on ABC's This Week yesterday morning.

Hagel answers to no one but the people who put him where he is - the people of Nebraska. He's a man I could and would honestly consider voting for if he were to get the Republican nomination for president next year. He hasn't declared that he will run, yet, but all indications are that he will.

I read the Esquire Magazine article that George Stephanopoulos refers to in this piece. In it, Hagel takes a pretty courageous stand against the president. And Hagel's right - he doesn't call for the impeachment of President Bush, but he openly says that it's an option, just as he did yesterday.

I think impeachment should be the last option for any president, including Bush, but the more this administration openly defies Congress, as well as the reality of the situation in Iraq, it could become a more viable option in the months ahead.

I just hope that members of Congress don't say to themselves, "he'll be gone soon, anyway, so let's just let him slide," if impeachable offenses are uncovered, which is looking more and more likely as the days go by. NO. As of today, Bush has 665 days left in office, and that's a long time for America to endure him, if for every single one of those days he plans on thumbing his nose at Congress and the American people.

The Alberto Gonzales situation is clearly the most troubling, but there are plenty of other things that need looking into as well. This is why America sent Democrats to Congress - to bring oversight to an out-of-control Republican-dominated federal government.

And that's precisely what Democrats are doing. Keep it up, ladies and gentlemen. Put the Check back in Check and Balances.Wherever the truth leads, so be it, and that includes any Democrats who are implicated in these scandals.

I just want answers and explanations as to how we got in the mess in the first place.