Well that's a debate McCain would win. His judgement may not be as good as Obama's, but his temperament is much better: he'd be so much quicker to push the red button.

Posted at August 29, 2008 12:06 AM in response to Key Word

Perhaps this also has something to do with that prick Fournier? Just guessing (and hoping).

Posted at August 28, 2008 11:55 PM in response to Good news for AP haters

Nicely put.

That's probably the biggest difference between the two candidates: one is able to learn, and learns fast, while the other has learned all he knows decades ago.

And the ability to learn is perhaps the most underrated quality a president should have. Nobody ever says the president should be able to learn. But that's the very definition of intelligence! Intelligence IS the ability to learn and adapt. I wish people would realize that...

Posted at August 28, 2008 11:29 PM in response to Obama's Speech Showed Exactly How He Will Win: He Knows When To Retool

Don't even joke about this! In my country the conservative party HAS "lowered" the unimployment rate by redefining the meaning of the word. No joke!

And they lowered the number and the cost of government employees by letting those same employees privatize their services. Of course these services now cost a lot more, but the one spending measure that "really matters" has gone down.

(I'm starting to think that it might possible to solve most problems, short of death itself, by the simple and inexpensive means of redefinition of meaning and shifting the viewpoint. Elect more conservatives and soon most of the world's problems will be gone, hooray!)

Posted at August 28, 2008 3:09 PM in response to Today's breathtaking, tone-deaf, quote.

I completely agree. It's somewhat like back during the primaries when Hillary accused the media of being tough on her while giving Obama a free pass ("We should ask Barack if he's comfortable or needs another pillow."). The media coverage about him changed in a moment and there were very few positive articles about him afterwards. This is happening again, only more so this time.

The problem is that I think most people don't listen to the candidates and base their decision on that (because the candidates themselves would just say anything to win, so they can't be trusted - which is partly true), nor do they base their decisions on their own research and reasoning (they don't feel the need to do that, because they think all the necessary knowledge has already been poured into their heads by the media); instead, they decide mostly based on what they hear from the media.

And of course the media and the pundits can spin anything either into a good or a bad thing, so the election is really more about which media people trust than about candidates themselves.

One important factor, though, is that all media love excitement and scandals, so whichever campaign produces more scandalous content gets their memes repeated more often (doesn't matter whether they're true or not and how irrelevant it might be). A typical example is the Obama-muslim smear. Every reporter knows it's not true, but they're still asking: "Is it true? Could it be true?" They know the answer, but they repeat it nonetheless, which raises doubts and pollutes people's minds.

All in all, the vast majority of reporters are a bunch of suckers. They think it's their job to make news as exciting as possible, so they report complete and utter crap (in the most excitable way possible) if they think people will find it exciting. And they fall for it every time. They've literally all turned into tabloids, with a few exceptions like The Daily Show (when a fake news show becomes the most trustworthy news source, you know there's something seriously wrong with the country).

The Obama camp should hit the media back with this message.

Oh, and we should never stop repeating how the blogosphere is overtaking the media because their "24-hour news coverage" has become completely irrelevant and the "professional journalists" are now nothing but a bunch of gullible clowns (nowadays, if people want to be informed, the FIRST thing they need to do is turn off the TV). I hope they get this message and adapt to save their own asses, before it's too late.

Posted at August 26, 2008 8:19 PM in response to "Celeb" Ad Working -- But Not How You (Or Focus Groups) Think

So the problem is basically that Hillary's supporters are women and what they really want is attention, not someone to solve (their) problems?

Sheesh...

But seriously, reporters and pundits are profound jerks. They're like someone talking to an insecure woman: "You think your husband's not giving you enough attention? He says he's been working, but do you think he might be -- WITH SOMEBODY ELSE? What should he do to PROVE that he's faithful?"

It's unclear whether they do this in their great quest to make things exciting and marketable, or is the problem simply the 24-hour coverage, where they have to speak non-stop, so they repeat the few things that come to mind over and over and over.

But it's clear they're giving very little thought to what this might be doing to the people. Ever heard of ecology, my friends? Well, apply it! You pollute people's minds!

Posted at August 26, 2008 6:02 AM in response to When We Came Back to TPM Cafe We Discovered All Hell Had Broken Loose

So to clarify: evil is not John McCain, but the *thing* that has obsessed him.

Posted at August 24, 2008 7:08 PM in response to The perfect is the enemy of the good

What you say is definitely true. However, it's something else that makes McCain evil: his ambition to become president at all cost. He said this in his own book about his 2000 run:

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. ... In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."

If you look at him today and compare him to himself 2 years ago, you can see that the old John McCain is completely gone. What he looks like now is either a puppet of his party bosses and campaign managers, or a hollow clueless old man.

That's why it's so dangerous to elect him, because if elected, it won't be him running the country, but his puppet masters with their own hidden and unverifyable agendas.

Posted at August 24, 2008 7:04 PM in response to The perfect is the enemy of the good

It's not just that Powell would probably rather save what reputation he has left and that he would have quite a few disagreements with McCain's warmongering. It's also that having two military officers on the same ticket would not be a good idea, not for winning the election, much less for running the country (who's gonna take care of the economy and other domestic issues?).

But it's understandable that McCain would want to have someone with *real* foreign policy credentials, now that Obama has picked Biden.

(It would be a good idea to REPLACE McCain with Powell though, because Powell has a lot of actual value and experience, unlike McCain whose only "value" is that he's been around for so long and that he was a POW.)

Posted at August 24, 2008 12:00 PM in response to Colin Powell for GOP VP-Not going to happen

(As about the 3AM text messages: This is paranoia and conspiracy theory. The messages took 4 hours to deliver to all subscribers and they had to do it by morning. The delivery was spread even across the night. Some got it at 3AM, but not that many.)

Posted at August 24, 2008 10:52 AM in response to Divide and Conquer