McCain Gaffe -- It Wasn't on Our Minds
On Sunday's Face The Nation, Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the L.A. Times (yes, Mr. Zell, they still have a Washington bureau, why do you ask?), gave an invaluable insight into the way stories do, or don't, become "news". Asked about the supposed John McCain gaffe, in which the Senator conflated Iran's interests in Iraq (Shiite) with Al-Qaeda (Sunni), McManus explained that it didn't become a major news story this week because "Iraq wasn't what was on voters' minds."
Forget the fact that the supposed gaffe had been spoken by McCain more than once (including on Hugh Hewitt's radio show), or that McCain had even had to be corrected by Joe Lieberman when he described Purim as sort of like the Jewish Halloween (really). Voters decide, by what's on our minds, what stories make the news. Never knew you had that much power, did you?
Thank goodness the polls, by which Mr. McManus divines what's on our minds, always get it right.
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Oh Harry if they don't run it into the ground now it will be nice and fresh when they make a commercial out of it in the general election.
It really doesn't matter what Mr. McCain says or does. The Republican ship of state has a terminal hole in it called the Bush Administration. That McCrazy is taking pictures with Bush, hugging him in what could be called a Broke Back Mountain moment , priceless.
Pls. understand this. It is a senior moment. We are not talking about Irag war. We should be worried that the guy is going senile. He said his mother is healthy. You know healthy in physic is not the same as healthy mentally? He has the look of the onset of dimentia.
His blank stare will do him in and his age.
Well, the way that the press seems to work it is no surprise that the McCain "gaffe" was reported as it did.
The Media has an agenda, believe us; it is not getting Barack Obama elected. It is a lie and a canard to say that the press favors Barack Obama. A case in point: During the Texas "debate" Hillary Rodham Clinton had the gall and the sophomoric attitude to whine that she always got "the first question".
The media would have had a field day reporting how Senator Obama was taking exception about being asked the first question. It would have been a candidacy ending moment for Senator Obama; yet Senator McWar and Hillary Rodham Clinton, have passed the "Commander in Chief test” Talk about "fairy tales". Enough said.
McCain did NOT have a gaffe. It was as intentional as everyone of the thousands of lies that the Bush Fascist Club has uttered. There's a lot to be learned from Hitler's Third Reich-The BIG LIE is at the top of the list. Corporate America exists for the benefit of the super rich that own the political whores we call Congress. Corporate America and the MSM it owns will do all in its power to stop Obama from becoming a President of the People.
Clinton is who they want, since they see they're going to get a Democrat anyway. They want one who is one of them. They don't know and don't trust Obama. You're right, they'll stop at nothing to ensure he doesn't ascend to the White House. Even assassination.
i encourage all of you to look up the term 'petrodollar'. you will find that, historically, opec nations have accepted only us dollars in return for oil. the fed, who prints all of our money, gets a percentage of all money ordered from it. with oil such an absurdly necessary commodity, purchased in such vast quantities, the bankers at the top are making more money than is realistically comprehensible. in 2000, iraq began accepting euros. in 2003, we invaded. iran has begun to accept euros. and, virtually immediately, rhetoric began regarding invading them. clockwork.
incidentally, if enough nations begin to take euros, the value of the dollar falls. as it falls, more people will take the euro instead, and the dollar will become worth even less. we have already seen some of this spiral in action, set off by the credit crises. if it gets bad enough, everything in your bank account will become worth virtually nothing. we are watching the very financial basis of our entire nation (and, to a degree, the world) unravel before our very eyes. i'm not necessarily saying they won't be able to fix it (although my doubts grow every day), but we are definitely living in interesting times.
follow the money.
Let's see. 5th Anniversary of Invasion (those 5 and 0 years are the big ones aren't they?), all week close to 4000 u.s. dead (hey we topped that now!), Winter Soldier testamony, Waxman wants to hear why we electricute our soldiers in their showers, etc. ad nauseum. These assholes like McManus have NO IDEA how many actually do care, we simply no longer have any voice or representation. No media either, no nothing.
I don't know if any of you out here lived through Viet Nam, but I did. The media had all the "blood and guts" on the TV everyday and night. A conscious decision was made after that to not show our men in women dead and wounded on the TV. So I think many of us may not get the real feeling of how horrible war is. The Viet Nam Wall in Washington DC has approximately 50,000 names of Americans who died in that war. 50,000!!!!! I hear the same BS now that I heard then and I was a teenager in the 60's and in my 20's in the 1970's. I was young but I knew I was hearing BS. It's the same now. They say we can't get out because we must "save face". "We can't surrender". Or the bad guys will take over world and come and kill us in our sleep. 50,000!!! When do we start building the next Wall?
I served eighteen months in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) and I concur with what you have stated. When do we start building the next wall, indeed. In Iraq, though, we seem to have built twelve-foot-tall blast walls almost everywhere. From what I've seen, the Iraqis sometimes spray-paint the names of their own dead -- and what they think of us Americans who have killed them -- all over the walls as some sort of weird graffitti memorial to their ruined lives.
Many of us who survived that national trauma thirty-five years ago did try to warn our fellow countrymen about the tsunami of bullshit emanating once more from our deranged and dangerous "governmen
As the village sheriff said to the angry peasant mob in the movie Young Frankenstein: "A riot is an ugly thing. And I think it's just about time that we had one."
try to schedule a protest these days. you will be directed to an official "free-speech zone", far away from anyone that has anything to do with what you are protesting. not that prostesting really does anything. disobediance, preferably civil (we mustn't become what we despise), is the only thing that will change anything. but, for that, you have to be willing to do without. and no one is, anymore. the pandering/depriving polarity of our society, where we are treated like slaves at work and kings at our leisure, has fully paid off in full for those who have been carefully crafting the society in which we live to create corporate slaves. people whose lives are empty voids which they will try desperately to fill with commodity and luxury after commodity and luxury.
well harry that certainly explains why every news day starts off with stories of who was raped or killed or caught having sex with someone that they shouldn't have......
that's certainly what's on my mind every day.
"who's having sex with whom?"
"who entered a 7-11 with a gun?"
"what the hell is bear-stearns?"
i'm glad they know that and cater the news to what i'm thinking about.
You forgot about the collapse of the $150 Million "industry" that feeds off of Britney's antics. The papparrazi are in despair over the dearth of insanity that seemed boundless just a few short months ago. How will the nation cope?
Oh, and some more people died in Iraq today. Must be almost a thousand by now...
Romney has already finished his campaign and was never seriously confronted with his astonishing rewrite of history, saying that the UN inspectors never entered Iraq before the war.
McCain repeatedly doesn't know one side from another in the war he will supposedly guide us through, and no one calls him on it.
When Al Gore ran for president, his honesty was called into serious question because it was said that he had exaggerated the dilapidatedness of a certain schoolhouse he had visited. It was a major issue.
Lies, lies and more lies and the lying liars who tell them are protected and exonerated by the lying press and the corporate liars who own them. Throw away your paper and blow up your TV...the revolution starts at the TV stations!
I think what is on a lot of voters' minds who remember it is what programming would be like if Reagan's FCC had not systematically dismantled the Fairness Doctrine with the aid of the Supreme Court. This is what enabled the Right Wing gasbags to begin postulating outrageous falsehoods under the guise of Free Speech. It also emboldened outfits like Fox News to concentrate on GOP talking points as "news" rather than having opposing views to their propaganda.
Do you really want the government to decide what constitutes political speech, and how much time should be allotted to a given point of view? What if the Republicans get control of the presidency and congress again? Do you want them to decide this for you? Why would you want to give up your first amendment rights? Why is it only Democrat legislators who want to restrict free speech in this way?
The fairness doctrine did not restrict free speech, nor did it determine how much time was allotted to a given point of view. What it did do was help to achieve balanced reporting. Do you, Julie, really believe that we have been getting balanced reporting these last years? A return to that standard would not constitute giving up our first amendment rights at all. It would seem that what you and other Republicans want is all the "free" speech you can buy, knowing that you can buy more than the Democrats.
The Republicans already have.
Maybe what this country needs isn't so much free speech (there's a fine line between free speech and slander, after all) as fair speech.
I think it's fed up but tired. I mean, no one pays attn to We the People anymore. Is another con job outlasting the anger? Time will tell...
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, a couple of positive points emerge from the McCain gaffe in which Sen. Leiberman reminded him that Iran wasn't training Al-Qaeda fighters.
First off, McCain showed that, unlike President Bush, he's a listener. Not only that, he showed he was willing to listen carefully to a view that contradicted his own. Not only that, he showed he was willing to admit a mistake and correct it. And finally, he's confident enough and comfortable enough in his own skin to let those things play out in public.
My question: can we say the same things about about Bush, Cheney, either Clinton, or Barack Obama? It may become a critical question in voters' minds as the campaign develops.
HARRY NOTES: Except it wasn't a gaffe. He repeated this conflation at least twice, and Chuck Todd of NBC speculated on Meet the Press that it may have been, in actuality, a "talking point:" designed to mirror Bush's rhetoric about "the enemy", i.e., deliberate conflation.
You know, I like older people. I've worked and talked with them many times. They have many fascinating stories to tell. Sometimes, unfortunately, they develop Alzheimer's, or more commonly, and almost inevitably over time, one of the dementias. Some younger people even develop a type called "pre-senile dementia."
In a man of McCain's age, the early stages of dementia, if not common, are not rare. So many "senior moments" in such a short span of time point toward brain disease. As sorry as I feel for McCain's suffering as a victim of the US invasion of Vietnam, I personally don't want a president with dementia.
If it's not brain disease, then it points to an incapacity to understand issues. In either case, I would prefer to be entertained by stories of his life than to have him the head of government, given the serious foreign and domestic challenges this country will face in the coming years.
Harry, here's an equally revealing quote from Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, courtesy of Bob Somerby's "The Daily Howler"
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ALTER: Well, first of all, this is something John McCain and those of us who covered him for many years are familiar with, this kind of, it’s almost like out of the old SNL skit where Chris Farley said, “I’m so stupid” and he bangs himself on the forehead and gets kind of charm points for admitting having slipped up.
Here’s that fatigue and it is tiring during all these travel and all that kind of thing or just sort of human error. So, he’s gotten a lot of breaks over the years for being imprecise from the press, in part because there’s a lot of fatigue with playing gotcha games with all these politicians and at some certain point, it does get a little bit silly.
__________
So in addition to the lame excuse that no one's particularly interested in Kid Shelleen's (fka Maverick) foreign policy competence and overall cognitive ability, there's the complementary truth that the media infotainwhores don't have the heart to keep picking on a lovable old man just because he flubs a line once in a while!
Besides, it's rude to call attention to the host's deficiencies when your mouth is full of barbecued ribs.
It probably wasn't a gaffe--more likely an intentional mislead. Basically pushing the propaganda.
If the networks owners stopped signing up rabid right fools and fanatics we might get more balance coverage. But you have to remember they are trying to protect their Bush tax cuts, so there is no chance of balanced coverage.
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