McCain and Palin both show characteristics of socialized antisocial personalities.  That is, their goals are embedded in society so they can't afford not to get along in it, unlike cons who operate outside the law.  The main symptoms one or both of them exhibit are the ability to lie with ease and look at the person they are lying to, lying for their own personal gain frequently, impulsivity, hot temper with neither true remorse nor left-over anger afterwards, obliviousness to the consequences of their acts, contempt for people who don't see things their way.

Ordinary people don't know how to deal with them because most people assume that they aren't being lied to in a major way, etc.  Ordinary people have trouble being confrontive.

How to deal with them: confront them directly with their lies.  Ask directly why they don't want to address the issues.  Be calm and unemotional when doing it.  You won't get answers, probably, but you might get a real look at how they react which may not be pretty.  But it will be telling. 

And then show the results in ads, etc.  I don't know what the MSM will do with them.

Here in Mexico the only coverage we get of the convention is on CNN or Fox.  I'm not going to watch Fox.  At this point I'm not going to watch CNN either: it was incessant, mindless blather.  They yammered over speeches of governors and senators.   I can't believe the speeches were worse than the blather.  And today, the parsing of Hillary's speech.  Good grief!  We've got much more important things to be talking about, like how to reach half the country that seems willing to vote for not more, but worse than Bush whose administration is veering towards, if it isn't already, incompetent and very destructive fascism.

Salter and McCain, according to this story in TNR cited by Andrew Sullivan, have a sad and bizarre relationship.  It appears that Salter has created the McCain hero in a grotesque, narcissistic version of Pygmalion to meet his own needs, and, it seems, McCain's as well.  Salter's rage at perceived insults to McCain is unnerving, to say the least.  It would be worth examining this relationship further.

By the way, in the article, a sample of McCain's prose, when he returned from Vietnam, is supplied.  Salter must have done an awful lot of the writing. McCain wrote:
"'The Oriental, as you may know, likes to beat around the bush quite a bit'; 'A lot of [the guards] were homosexual, although never toward us'; 'you never can fathom the 'gooks.' McCain's conclusions tend to be banal. 'Now I see more of an appreciation of our way of life. There is more patriotism. The flag is all over the place.'"

Would someone explain to me how being a prisoner of war in Vietnam makes you fit to be president of the US? 

Would someone explain how a life spent thinking in military terms, whether as a child in a military family, a member of the military, or in Congress, makes you fit to deal with the whole spectrum of issues a president has to face? 

Would someone explicitly state how John McCain has served his country above himself over all these years?

As last night’s presentation at Saddleback Church demonstrated, the Christian Right remains swayed unthinkingly by Christian subtext. It will not be wooed to vote Democratic in the fall if the Democrats persistently try to soften their actual positions, especially when the original position is correct. For instance, if the Democrats say, well, okay offshore drilling we'll allow; or if they try to sound just as tough on Georgia, or if they back off on the problems of the environment, or don't challenge this international Islamic extremist conspiracy nonsense, whatever. Whether Democrats stick to their guns on issues or not, they are still the Heathen Party (which includes liberal Christians) and they need show first of all that heathen or not, their positions are in the best interests of Evangelical Christians.  At this moment, Right Wing Republicans (who are power-hungry, money-hungry demagogues of the worst sort) can play them for suckers unchallenged so that parishioners at Saddleback Church hear the irresistible siren song of McCain's POW experience, like the story of the guard who drew a crucifix on the ground at Christmas, and they don't hear much of anything else he says.

What Democrats have to do is say, we're not challenging your beliefs, we are trying to show you that the Republicans are in taking advantage your faith and values in their own interests.

This is tricky, obviously, but there is a growing school of Evangelicals, Warren among them, who are moving to see more of the Gospel as concerned with protecting the environment, helping the poor, not getting involved in unjust wars. These Gospel views can be shared by Democrats. That so many Democrats reacted with such visceral hostility to Obama's faith-based initiative idea shows that they are caught in a dangerously rigid position that impedes this reaching out. Because it shouldn't really matter in the long run of whether it is an Evangelical who wants to protect God's creation or help address social inequities because they are following in Jesus's footsteps or a liberal who wants to protect the planet because it's all he has or care for the poor because he is a social utilitarian. In both views, it is what is best for all of us.  

Obama should deconstruct McCain's message (forgive me for using the word) and show that McCain mixes offshore oil with his unassailable Christian human interest story so that Christians will support the offshore oil drilling.

The best of us are capable of self-deception, so it is quite possible McCain has come, as Bush seems to have, that Christianity supports offshore oil drilling and supports horrible messes in Iraq. So what you have to do is separate the two: show that Christianity doesn't support offshore oil drilling: that offshore oil drilling is another blow against taking care of our planet, whether it be God's creation or our only home. To show that having our young men die, and killing innocent civilians in Iraq and making 2 million of them refugees isn't working God's will, it is creating vast suffering, which Christians are supposed to be alleviating.

Andrew Sullivan pointed out in his blog last night that Warren never asked follow up questions. This permitted McCain to continue his linkage of Christianity with interests Republicans have. We need the follow up questions: do you know the facts about this offshore drilling issue? How much money would indeed it save? Do you know the facts about the suffering we've inflicted in Iraq? About the debt we have inflicted onourselves because ofit?  Do you know about torture in the US? Do you know why the war in Afghanistan is staggering? Do you understand the relationship between taxes and poverty? Between taxes and middle-class security? Between taxes and a decent infrastructure? An on and on.  He needs to answer the questions himself and ask them to John McCain.

Obama needs to NOT move to the right on the issues, but to educate better, and do so in a context that Christian conservatives can understand. Because while they may be in a minority, we tend to polarize, and we don't want people polarizing towards the Republican right that feeds on Christian conservatives.

 

 

 

Someone -- some group in the Obama camp (since he's banned outside groups from doing it) really, really needs to go on the offensive.  This being polite is for the birds.  Jesus wasn't polite!  Obama's camp needs to point their damning finger at the equivalent of the moneylenders in the temple.  It needs shout from the rooftops out just how much is at stake in this election, and do it with righteous, articulate, focused anger that can be heard from the upper reaches of the stadium.

Obama is sounding more and more like he's stuck in the middle of the Democratic Party, not that he's independent, or imaginitive, or capable of explaining anything the tiniest bit subtle.  Is he a manifestation what seems to be a tragic flaw in the Democratic Party?  Can no one escape drowning in the gook of fear to clearly distinguish oneself from the Republicans?  Why does he have to make the single biggest foot-in-his-mouth recommendation about Georgia -- that it be admitted to NATO?  He'll be better than McCain, but he's already tangled up in the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid  trap of failing to call a spade a spade.

Given that today alone Marc Ambinder reports
that McCain will be drumming misinformation about Obama's Iraq stance repeatedly, that Glenn Greenwald says that McCain's campaign has hired Gregory Jenkins who kept any signs of dissent from Bush events and who has already shown his hand at a McCain event, that we are being subjected, as Marshall points out today to ridiculous nitpicking by Republicans over whether Iraq wants 16 vs. 20 months for withdrawal from Iraq, to persistent (almost desperate) unfavorable shadings of the truth by the Administration and the McCain campaign,  to many in the MSM simply ignoring important information harmful to McCain or helpful to Obama, and on and on...it seems to me that this way past a dirty campaign and moving into the Republicans being willing to use whatever it takes to hold on to power.  There is no reason to think that people who would suspend our Constitution to protect themselves, their war, their torture policies; their corporations; who would be perfectly willing to lie, evade, trap innocent people, etc. etc., wouldn't be willing to behave with complete ruthlessness in holding on to their power.  It's time to start fighting back!

I am a little befuddled.
If all of our money for the wars is deficit spending, that means, I think, that if we stop spending for the wars, the deficit caused by those expenses will stop growing.  There won't be any money from stopping the spending on wars to repay the deficit: the deficit still represents money owed.  I believe much of it is owed to China!

McCain followed his father and grandfather into the service -- and it seems he did so kicking and screaming a bit.  It's not like he CHOSE it freely because he was noble.  It was like a kid following his father and grandfather to Harvard.  So his choice of the military was somewhat unimaginitive, to say the least. That he suffered in Vietnam no one can or should deny.  But it seems to me he was like the legacy students at the Ivies, and that he doesn't deserve praise for getting his college education via the military, nor did  military training give him anything special in the way of the ability to govern in a civilian society. Nor does it give it to anyone else or we would have lots of famous and worthy presidents from the military. Actually, the Ivies have given us more presidents, though of course not all of them are so great, either.

Hillary doesn't have.  What is this monomania?  Maybe she wasn't defeated in a landslide, but why is she not just sacrificing but murdering her own honor, the honor of her family, and willing to do same with the Democratic Party and the country to be president?  Should she somehow, by some nefarious selling of her soul to the devil, be able to pull this out for herself, she will then be exposing herself to the Republican shredding machine who will surely drag out everything they can about her husband's suspect finances and behavior since leaving the presidency. And they will be much more successful with their attack machine I fear than they would be against Obama where they are more likely to sound racist, hate-filled, fear-mongering and counter-attackable.

It would be so wonderful if she could gracefully, honorably, admit defeat. A close defeat, but defeat nonetheless.  Obama is too polite to say it, but there's pathology here: madness.

Could Connecticut recall Lieberman?

In states like West Virginia, among people who are poor, poorly educated and older....and white, who don't get the fact that perhaps the elegant, well-educated mixed-race person shows the same understanding of their problems and might be able to push through solutions because he doesn't create enemies as he's trying to get his points across...should Hillary be proud of playing on their ignorance and prejudice, being a demagogue, NOT doing anything to temper their prejudices with some insight?  Should she be proud of such victories?

As I read about West Virginia, including about racist attacks (I think only verbal) on Obama campaigners, I wonder how, if Hillary were miraculously to become the Democratic nominee, she could run in West Virginia as a candidate who did not pander to the voters there.

Non-right-wing evangelicals are rightfully distressed by Hagee's preaching. However, there's more than that.  Aside from the many books he sells on his website reflecting his unenlightening edicts on marriage, women's place, and American history, he also sells the books of one Don Colbert, MD who offers a mix of faith and near-quack cures to the gullible.  In Salon recently, a physician rightly criticized PBS for airing an infomercial by one Dr.  Amen.  A physician could also do a scathing review of the work of Dr. Colbert who, by the way, graduated from Oral Roberts med school as did Dr. Amen.