Have you noticed that whenever McCain makes a gaffe he always tries to pass it off as a joke?

According to the McCain camp he was joking when he said $5 million was rich. A joke? I don't think so, McCain had been invited to a political interview to give serious answers to serious questions. He was auditioning for President of the USA, not for a late night spot at the comedy store.

And when McCain was called on his smear ads his response? 'You gotta have a sense of humor'.

And when McCain sang 'bomb bomb Iran', another joke. Hey if McCain is so funny, how come nobody is laughing.

I don't think McCain is telling jokes here, what he is doing is what we Brits call sniveling. Whenever challenged about his own behavior, McCain always comes out with a whiny excuse to say why it isn't his fault.

If he isn't telling a joke, McCain is making sniveling references to his time as a POW: oooh, don't say anything nasty about me, I was a POW don't you know! Which in snivel means 'I will accuse my opponent of being unpatriotic secure in the knowledge that he cannot respond in kind against me'.

Snivel snivel snivel.

Rove swiftboated Kerry, turning his greatest strength into his greatest weakness. Now he has done the same in this election - to McCain. McCain used to be seen as a war hero, after Rove he is now the king of snivell, trying to become President on a sympathy vote.

McCain has built his entire political career on playing the victim. First as a Prisoner of War, then as an honest man who somehow got caught up in the middle of the Keating affair, then as the only Senator dedicated to battling pork against his party. It is a constant theme, and one that has worked for him every time.

McCain is understandably worried that the GOP base will fail to turn out for him. So his strategy is to claim to be the victim of unfair charges of racism. The only problem being how to get Obama to accuse him of racism without the press also accusing him.

Like every other post-segregation politician playing the race card, McCain is using code. Some of the code is obvious, but other parts are not:

The Spears/Hilton 'celebrity' ad juxtaposes two notoriously promiscuous white women with Obama to play to an old Klu Klu Klan claim that black men just want to rape white women. Lieberman's comment was carefully chosen: 'just relax and enjoy it': the sterotypical words of a rapist to his victim.

The point here is not to play to the remaining hundred or so Klansmen, its to bait the Obama camp into making a response so that McCain can play the victim. When Obama refused to take the bait, they pretended that he had and McCain chanted 'race-card, race-card, race-card'.

The followup to the 'rape' ad is the 'Moses' ad. This really makes no sense as a campaign ad. The main message seems to be that McCain couldn't find Obama doing very much that is embarassing. Even the clip where Obama is talking about a shining shaft of light, he is clearly being ironic - the only other person in shot is laughing.

There are only three strong images in the spot - Obama, the desk in the White House and a very very white Charlton Heston playing Moses. The subliminal semiotic is 'black man, not a leader' followed by a very very white man who is.

McCain's race baiting is all about his unenthusiastic GOP base. They are not too excited about McCain already and they will become even less happy with him after he moves to the center to try to win the election.

McCain's only chance is to get the GOP base to support him by presenting himself as the unfair victim of dishonorable race-card tactics by the Obama team.

So to do this they deliberately race-bait in a manner that makes the intention clear without definitively crossing the line as far as a GOP supporter is concerned. Anyone with a brain knows that kicking the only black reporter out of the press area (and the white reporter who asked why it was happening) and the Britney/Hilton 'rapist' ad were intended to be interpreted as racist. But such subtleties are lost on the reptilian brain stem employed by members of the GOP base.

The objective here was to elicit a chorus of 'racist'. And when Obama refused to oblige they invented the charge and McCain repeats 'race-card race-card race-card race-card' at every opportunity.

Hence Obama's response that the tactics are cynical, not racist.

The Ted Stevens corruption trial is scheduled for 24th September. While it might be possible to hold the trial and return a verdict in the six weeks before the election this is by no means certain.

More interesting for the GOP is the fact that the last day on which a candidacy can be withdrawn is September 17th. The filing deadline has already passed.

So given that Stevens has clearly no intention of stepping down before the trial and given that with no obviously electable alternative it is highly likely he will be nominated, the best outcome the GOP can hope for here is that they go into the election after weeks of hearing about the Veco funded extension. The most likely outcome is that Stevens has been convicted.

Given those circumstances its not just the Senate race that the Alaska Republicans need to be worried about. Corruption on this scale clings to everything.

Is the McCain campaign really unaware that Britney Spears is currently suffering from a mental breakdown? Or are they like the rest of us only too aware of the fact that she is suffering from bi-polar disorder and has been hospitalized on 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold orders on at least two occasions as a danger to herself?
 
The sad fact is that Britney Spears is seriously ill and it is hard to believe that the level of media attention she has received over recent years has not at the very least contributed to her condition.

The premise of the McCain ad was at best juvenile, an attempt to subliminally link a black man to two white women known for their promiscuity. In the context of US politics it can only be considered a coded racist message. The Klu Klux Klan was built on the claim that the only thing a black man was interested in was raping white women. Two can play at that game.

Many US politicians use race to sell their campaigns. Some like McCain and before him Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond and the rest use it to send coded messages to racist supporters. Support for the Confederate flag, speaking at the CCC convention (nothing to do with the KKK you understand), opposing the MLK federal holiday are all means to that end.

But no previous US politician has run a campaign that has been so callously indifferent to the entirely precdictable results of their action as John McCain has. It's not just the unscripted gaffes (bomb bomb Iran) that might lead to war, it is the deliberately scripted events such as his Baghdad stroll that predictably lead to the deaths of 21 Iraqis. Now they are using a young woman suffering from a severe mental illness in their race baiting ad.

Fournier's idea of 'accountability journalism' is that the press holds politicians accountable while the press is accountable to no-one.

There is absolutely nothing new in Fournier's approach, or for that matter in politicans who bluster on about how they will hold people accountable.

What would be unusual would be for a politician to stand up and say 'hold me accountable'. As in 'hold me accountable if the pretext for my invasion of a country turns out to be untrue', 'hold me accountable if my tax cuts lead to a runaway deficit', 'hold me accountable if my attorney general is unable to give a straight answer when asked who was responsible for authorizing the use of torture'.

The press have failed to keep the Bush administration accountable - Fournier included. And it is very clear that Fournier has no intention of keeping McCain accountable either. We will see no AP articles examining the inconsistencies in McCain's policies or the fact that there are simply no numbers in his economic 'plan' to add up.

To hold others accountable you have to first accept accountability yourself.

Back in 1992 I was part of a group that set out to change the way the media worked. You are currently using the result - its called the World Wide Web.

The fact that politics played a major part in the design and deployment of the Web has been pretty much ignored by every media pundit since. Everyone assumed that we were just a bunch of pointy headed geeks who didn't really understand the full implications of what we were doing. And those of us who knew exactly what we were trying to do were certainly in no hurry to make our intentions known.

The first thing I did when I returned from meeting Tim Berners-Lee at the Annecy conference where the Web was first shown in public was to tell the people running the Clinton-Gore '92 campaign about it. You think that Dean invented online campaigning? Not true, take a look in the Google News archives of Usenet from '92 and you will find the press releases that the team at the MIT AI lab were sending out for the Clinton, Perot and Green campaigns.

Most net users would say that the US 'mainstream' media has become much worse over the past ten years. I say nonsense.

In the first place, stop talking about the 'mainstream' media as if the Web is a minor player. Today the Web is just as mainstream as cable or network TV. Its not the scope of the media that is the issue, it is who they answer to. The term 'establishment media' is far more accurate. Fox News is no more accurate when it is online rather than on TV.

The Establishment media has not become any worse over the past ten years. The change that has happened is that we are much more aware of how bad it has always been.

In particular the headline that caused me to see the need to break the power of the establishement media was 'It was the Sun what won it' in Murdoch's London paper after the Tory party was re-elected in the spring of 1992. True or not, it was a plausible claim. Murdoch is not a UK citizen and clearly puts his own interests before those of the UK so why should we allow him to choose our government?

Murdoch won the '92 campaign for the Tories using the same tactics that it is generally believed Karl Rove invented: smears, lies and innuendo endlessly repeated, a one man echo chamber.

The idea we had in '92 was not to replace the established media, the Internet was far too small for that to be possible, a computer capable of running a decent Web browser cost in excess of $5,000 and there were no public ISPs. We didn;t think we could replace the establishment media but we could introduce a feedback loop so that the lies and distortions would be exposed.

So now 16 years later the Associated Press greets their faovrite candidate with donuts with sprinkles, gives fawning coverage and then proceeds to ambush his opponent.

Did we fail? I don't think so. In the post Web media landscape there is room for every type of media outlet from partisan to independent. But what there is no room for is media outlets that sell themselves on their independence while being covertly partisan.

Fox News makes no real secret of their partisan leanings, they only deny them as yet another way to annoy liberals. They can survive on partisan coverage for as long as their ratings hold. But AP sell themselves to newspapers as providing an unbiased view. The fact that their reporters deliver coverage with sprinkles for their favorite canidate McCain has been noted and that will damage the AP brand going forward.

Josh,

I don't think it is possible for Obama to shift his position because it was never set out as clearly as the McCain people claim.

Obama's position has always been that his objective is to withdraw from Iraq and that plans for withdrawal will begin to be put into effect the minute he takes office. But he has never committed to any timetables, specific troop reductions or even to have all troops out of Iraq by the end of his first term as far as I am aware.

This is entirely consistent with what I believe is the consensus amongst his netroots base:

1) The US SHALL NOT establish any long term presence in Iraq or control of Iraqi resources.
2) The US SHOULD take whatever measures are necessary to avoid further Iraqi casualties in the short term.

The real difference between McCain and Obama is that establishing a long term presence in Iraq is an objective for McCain's people. They want to have a military base in the region that allows them to plan their next wars against Iran and Saudi Arabia. I am not joking on the last one, I have a very very well known neo-con tell me how it would be necessary to deal with the Saudis over lunch a couple of weeks back.

All things being equal the netroots would probably tolerate long term bases in Iraq on the South Korean, West German or Japanese model if their likely use was limited to protecting the civilian population during the transition to a more stable form of government. The reason they are not going to stand for them is precisely the reason that the neo-cons want them: the real purpose of wanting those bases is to start the next war. The neo-cons have already cause the deaths of between half a million and a million Iraqis and they care so little about that fact that they don't want anyone to even count the number they have killed.

This is the problem with the US believing itself to be the worlds only superpower. Fools like Bush and Cheney will believe themselves to be invulnerable and start a whole series of unnecessary wars for no other reason that they can.

The SCOTUS decision might well turn out to be bad for the GOP and good for gun control efforts.

It is bad for the GOP in the same way that Roe vs Wade has benefited them: it takes the issue off the table as far as most of their supporters are concerned.

With gun ownership rights for hunters and handgun owners protected by SCOTUS decree it is going to be rather harder for the hard core gun nuts to play the gun grabber card.

Some folks are still over-excited by the possibility that Hilary continues on to the convention. Unless you are the McCain campaign I would not worry about it.

At this point the outcome of the contest is all but assured. The superdelegates are politicians and they want to back a winner. So why are they waiting?

Well the first reason is that some of them are pledged not to make a decision until after the primaries are over. In some cases this is a formal obligation (not always observed). In other cases the superdelegates are leaning Clinton supporters but want to make sure that they back a winner. In some cases there may be an agreement not to pledge for Obama until he is over.

Then there is the block of superdelegates who want to see if they can be the person to put Obama over the top. I expect that group to pledge support en-mass Tuesday night and put him over. Then the waverers will come on board giving a majority of about a hundred.

In theory everything could change between now and the convention but I would not get all steamed up about it. The fact things can change are only to the benefit of the Democrats at this point. Re-raising the half votes issue is a card the party can play if they decide they want to kill a media cycle if they are losing it.

This trick has already been played twice. Once to get out of the whole wright embroligo the first time round, the second time to cut off the media cycle when McCain was losing it badly.

The bigger problem for the GOP however is that their swiftboating strategy does not work if there is any doubt left in the nomination race. Even if they do pull out the most abominable dirt you can imagine on Obama, their reward is to fight Hilary.

One final thought, the GOP gameplan at this point is to run on 'experience'. Which is somewhat of a dangerous game if you consider McCain's options for veep.

At this point Obama has two priorities: first to unite the party round him, second to put up a veep who can call McCain out as the incompetent boob he is. He could do much worse than to pick Hilary as veep.

McCain's recent campaign interview was somewhat shrill:

""He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,"

If you are peddling an unpopular position that is rejected by 60% of the population it is probably best not to use the condescending tone that McCain's PR handlers have him adopt here.

They think they can get away with it on account of McCain's military career. But McCain's military career was based on personal courage and family connections, not a grasp of military strategy. McCain graduated second from bottom in his class. He was never on track to become an Admiral and only made Captain on the basis of his war service record. Pilots who lose two planes in peace time don't get to fly a third.

Besides which, his personal record of judgment on Iraq is
comically bad. He strutted around a Baghdad market in a bullet proof vest surrounded by over a hundred troops an pronounce the conditions 'normal'. He then opined that Petraeus tours Iraq without armored transport only to be contradicted by a statement that Petraeus never leaves the green zone except in an up-armored humvee at a minimum.

In fact given McCain's record of making optimistic statements on Iraq that have proved to be false hopes it is hard to see how he considers himself in a position to 'educate' anyone on matters in Iraq. He can't even keep the factions straight or understand the dynamics of the thousand plus year old Sunni-Shia divide.

There is a lot being written about Obama's alleged 'Jewish problem'. What this seems to mean is that there is one particular group of people who have a habit of thinking that they speak for the entire community who have a particular problem with Obama.

But that problem has nothing to do with what Obama has said about Israel. Obama has a 100% rating with AIPAC and there really is nothing to distinguish Obama's policy from Clinton's.

There is no real difference on their position on the war(s) either. Both are committed to win against Al Qaeda, both are committed to withdraw from Iraq and likely to mean it, neither is going to start an unprovoked war with Iran.

Some of the difference is explained by racism, but thats not what drives the big lobbies. Their problem with Obama is that he is his own man and does not depend on them for support.

Worse, Obama has much more support and much more visioble support from under 40s in the community they purport to speak for. Obama does not need to tug his forelock to AIPAC, if he becomes President they need him more than he needs them.

That is the real reason for the racist anti-Obama email campaign that has been directed at anyone with a Jewish sounding name the past few months.

M. J. Rosenberg may or may not be right in saying that the Israel Lobby cost Clinton the nomination. I suspect he is, but it actually does not matter, I think that this will be the lesson that is learned from the 2008 primary and that is what will have the lasting effect.

If Clinton had not voted for the war there would have been no opening for Obama to run. In fact if Clinton had refused to back Bush on the war the establishment media would have been forced to report the war very differently. It would have galvanized opposition to the war much earlier and the history of 2004 would have been very different.

Clinton could still have won by expressing regret for her vote in 2006. But she didn't and then went on to compound the error by voting for the AIPAC drafted Kyl-Lieberman motion 'lets bomb Iran'.

There are only two explanations for wanting to start a third war with Iran when the US is already losing a war in Iraq and in danger of losing a war that actually matters in Afghanistan. The first is that you want the US to remove all Israel's potential adversaries while it is still capable of doing so and the second is that you want to curry favor for people who do.

Note that this is not the same as 'support for Israel'. This is the type of scheme that a bunch of thousand miles away expatriate irredentists dream up.  Then they tell everyone at home that anyone who disagrees with their little plan is a racist, anti-Semite or whatever.

Until recently the likes of AIPAC have got away with this scheme. But now it is falling apart, not least because there is much more discourse between people living in Israel and people living in America and both can read the other's press. It does not take much effort to discover that the AIPAC/Lieberman position is a minority one in Israel, out on the far fringes of the right of Likud.

But AIPAC has been undermined in a second way, despite the fact that AIPAC's traditional support base in the US has been liberal Jews and despite the fact that rather a lot of 'big-blogs' are written by liberal Jews, it is hard to think of any major liberal blogger who toes the AIPAC line.

Support on the right is somewhat more complex. There is certainly an element on the right who sees the opportunity for a new 'Southern strategy', the right replaces the Democrats as the unquestioning supporters of Israel. But this approach has two problems, the first is that Jews are not southern red-necks disgruntled by the ending of segregation. The second is that most of the targetted population know that the GOP has a large anti-Semitic faction that is currently looking for scapegoats to blame the whole Iraq fiasco on: Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, Bolton, Rice. We can be sure of one thing: no white males need apply for this particular position unless they are a Jew.

Carrying water for AIPAC is no longer an electoral advantage in the Democratic party. Their positions are political poison with the net-roots.

This is what happens with all political lobbies in the end - they overreach and become poison.

Experience is a good thing. But only if you are able to learn from it. Over the past eight years, Bush has demonstrated both a remarkable lack of curiosity and an even more remarkable determination not to learn.

I was particularly struck by the incongruity of Bush's bellicose, unpresidential address to the Knesset and his subsequent attack on Obama as 'naive' and 'inexperienced'. I would suggest that it was an example of projection, but that would suggest a rather greater capacity for self-awareness than Bush has ever demonstrated.

Contrary to what the GOP is currently claiming, it is not necessary to make a decision to gain experience from it. Over the past eight years the US and the world has learned much from the catastrophic decisions of the Bush administration. Not only have they consistently got the decision wrong, they have been wrong in predictable and predicted ways.

Every government talks to its enemies - even if only through a megaphone. Bush has frequently spoken to Hamas and Iran and Cuba, his speeches frequently include passages that are directed at  their leaders.

What Bush really means by refusing to talk is refusing to talk without issuing threats and most of all refusing to listen.

Taking the example used by Bush in the Knesset speech, appeasement was not talking to Hitler, it was giving him half of Czechoslovakia. One of Churchill's more famous lines was 'jaw jaw is beter than war war', they were made at the White House at a private luncheon. The exact context is unknown but Eisenhower had recently warned of the risk of war in Indochina.

Far from being Churchillian, the Bush position sounds rather more like that of the 'America First' faction that argued against US involvement in European affairs.

If we are going to talk about appeasement then surely we should consider the words of the principal opponent of the appeasement policy within Chamberlin's own party - Winston Churchill.

It was not who Chamberlin spoke to that bothered Churchill but what he said. Specifically Churchill objected to giving Hitler half of Czechoslovakia in return for a promise of 'peace'.


Obama has justifiably called out McCain for breaking his pledge on civility 'so much for civility'. He should also call out the Administration for having its spokespeople deny that Obama was the target in public, while saying the opposite in private, off the record briefings. So much for straight talk.