There is a huge differene between Christians, the followers of a large number of separate, often mutually antagonistic, religions, and christianists, political radicals who use the symbols of Christianity in order to gain secular power. Christianists deliberately confuse the two.
In these excerpts from a letter by Tony Perkins, the technique is quite clear. They highlight the importance for liberals of distinguishing religious discrimination – which is wrong – from the political marginialization of intolerant right wing hate groups and provocateurs – an essential action in a working democracy. In addition to confusing far right wing fanaticism with Christianity, note the gross distortions of reality and paranoid sense of victimization so typical of christianism:
The stakes are enormous. We face a national menace to religious liberty:
In Boston, a Christian adoption agency was shut down for refusing to place orphans with homosexual couples.
The implication is that The Gay State proactively shut down the agency, who said,”Thanks, but no thanks,” to gay couples. Not true. I looked it up. Christianist Catholic Bishops chose to shut down Catholic Charities’ adoption services. – despite the unanimous support for same sex adoptions by CC’s board:
Eight members of Catholic Charities’ board stepped down in protest of the bishops’ stance. The 42-member board had voted unanimously in December to continue considering gay households for adoptions.
And it clearly was a political decision by Catholic christianists, because Catholic Charities had, in fact, placed “orphans” with gay couples in the past:
Social Services to provide special needs adoption services to children with severe emotional and physical needs since 1977. The contract expires June 30.
In the past two decades, Catholic Charities has placed 720 children in adoptive homes, including 13 with same-sex couples. The bulk of adoptive children in Massachusetts are placed by DSS, rather than outside agencies such as Catholic Charities, the agency said.
Next:
In New Mexico, a Christian-owned studio was fined more than $6,000 for refusing to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony.
Not quite true.It was a christianist-owned studio. Furthermore, it was an anti-discrimination case. You can refuse to do any job you don’t want to do, of course, but not on the basis of race, creed, gender or sexual preference. If someone refused to photograph a Christian evangelical marriage because they were Christian evangelicals, the same laws would apply. You cannot discriminate. That is the law and it is a good law. It protects Christians as well as lesbians and it is sheer bizarroworld nonsense to flip this around and claim the law discriminates.
Finally:
In San Francisco, the city council officially condemned Christian opposition to homosexual adoption as hateful and discriminatory rhetoric.
That’s absolutely not true. The San Francisco city council condemned a specific, intolerant christianist organization that was organizing what was clearly a cultural/political hatefest that certainly is fair game for criticism or denunciation (as is any other group, including political parties and religions).
Christianists are NOT Christians. More precisely, christianists may be Christians in their private life – or not, as the Jewish nut David Klinghoffer illustrates – just as many christianists may have brown eyes. Their actual religious beliefs are an irrelevant identity to the political activity that uniquely characterizes christianism and makes it a non-religious group that uses the symbols of Christianity.
Perlstein deconstructs the racist subtext of the prevailing right wing trope about the cause of the mortgage meltdown:
…let me write about the sewer through which are right-wing friends are navigating to try to win this election. Specifically, this: the right-wing crusade to blame the Negroes for the financial meltdown continues apace. And by now, it’s getting into Protocols of the Elders of Zion territory. Watch this clip of Fox’s Neil Cavuto. See him sandbag Hispanic congressman Xavier Becerra, pinning upon him and his swarthy fellows responsibility for the collapse of America’s financial system by “pushing for more minority lending.” Why didn’t people like him warn that “loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster”?
[…]
The pattern being drawn across the right—the Big Lie so notorious it’s hard to believe they’d even dare it—is that this financial mess is something black people have done to white people.
They’ve been saying this for a while now. Here’s a post of mine from almost a year ago:
Just in case any of you have the mistaken impression that the housing meltdown (what Atrios refers to as “Big Shitpile”) has anything to do with rapacious lenders and a bunch of greedheads who made sick profits using complicated financial instruments that even they didn’t understand, think again. Guess whose fault it is?
Last week’s 360-point drop in the Dow was fueled by the announcement of NYAG Andrew Cuomo that he is subpoenaing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for information on all mortgages they had bought from Washington Mutual as part of a general investigation into mortgage loans. Fannie Mae stocks fell 10 percent, Freddie Mac 8.6 percent, and Washington Mutual a whopping 17 percent, turning what was already a bad day into the worst drop in over a year. Cuomo has decided that the reason for the mortgage meltdown is — you guessed it — big-time fraud.
All this is just a search for scapegoats. The reason we’re in a mortgage meltdown is this. For years the federal government and everyone else has done everything possible to encourage people to buy their own homes. One of the biggest liberal criticisms of the market was that low-income people — particularly blacks and Hispanics — were excluded from ownership through “blackballing,” “red-lining,” and other forms of discrimination.
So the banks and mortgage markets responded. They invented “sub-prime” loans for high-risk customers and tried to spread the risk by bundling them into broader financial instruments. Eventually the market became overextended and we’re all suffering the consequences. Only demagogues like Andrew Cuomo think this has anything to do with legerdemain.
See? The banks and mortgage markets were just trying to help out the blacks and the Mexicans like the liberals kept telling them to and this is the thanks they get for it. Now everybody’s blaming them when the lazy blacks and Mexicans refuse to pay their bills … as usual. (Try to do someone a favor…)
This is why we need to deport all the illegal immigrants and get “tough on crime” like the Republicans are urging us to. This crass exploitation of the poor banking and mortgage industry has got to stop. It’s costing real Americans their homes!
I have no way of judging whether the Wall Street bailout is a necessary evil or an impending disaster. But we’re in this mess, ultimately, because our political elites thought it was good social policy to encourage banks to give mortgages to uncreditworthy people, resulting in what Sailer months ago called the “Diversity Recession” (if this doesn’t work, make that the Diversity Depression). In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus “creditworthiness” was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness. Because, after all, isn’t everyone entitled to credit? Therefore, I propose any bailout bill start with these words: “It is the sense of Congress that credit is not a civil right.”
It’s hard to believe they can say this stuff with a straight face considering the pending trillion dollar bailout of their rich friends, but shame isn’t part of their personal reality. Perlstein points out the particularly breathtaking hypocrisy of this line with this observation:
And you know what makes this whole conservative hustle all the more brazen? They spent the entire 2004 Republican Convention bragging about their supposed triumph in increasing minority homeownership.
They even had a cute little name for it: the ownership society.
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday that Americans’ preference for long-term, fixed-rate mortgages means many are paying more than necessary for their homes and suggested consumers would benefit if lenders offered more alternatives.
In a standing-room-only speech to the Credit Union National Association meeting here, Greenspan also said U.S. household finances appeared generally sound, despite rising debt levels and bankruptcy filings. Low interest rates and surging home prices have given consumers flexibility to manage debt, he said.
“Overall, the household sector seems to be in good shape,” Greenspan said…
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.
All those poor people who were promised they could afford their homes and adjusted rate mortgages because the housing market was going to go up, up, up, and they’d be able to refinance in a couple of years, should have known that their crazy Old Uncle Alan was just kidding. It’s all their fault.
There’s something funny going on over at Intrade with respect to the pricing of the Obama and McCain contracts.
Right now, Obama is trading at 52.3 points. That is, Intrade implies that he has a 52.3 percent chance to become the next President.
Now, I happen to think that is a patently absurd price. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Over at BetFair, another large UK-based gambling and futures site, you can also buy an Obama contract. But the price there is 1.62, which implies a 61.7 percent chance that Obama will become the next President.
That is a huge spread, 51.5 points versus 61.7 points. ..
It does seem to be Intrade specifically that’s out of line, rather than Betfair. At Iowa Electronic Markets, yet another political futures exchange, the probability of the Democrats winning the popular vote is about 61 percent…
It’s pretty obvious that this is not some sort of random walk. Rather, every so often, some individual trader or some small group of traders are shorting all the Obama contacts in bulk and resetting the entire market. The markets then organically climb back upward until the rogue trader strikes again six or eight hours later. The volumes on these contracts have been very high for the past week as a result.
Most likely, this is just some idiot degenerate gambler who is trying to have some fun. Between the Obama and McCain contracts, there appears to be about $400,000 in contracts changing hands every day, which is a lot by Main Street standards, but minuscule by either Vegas or Wall Street Standards.
What’s a little weird, however, is that this rouge trader is not only selling Obama contracts and buying McCain contracts …. they also seem to be buying Hillary Clinton contracts[.]
This is the exact mirror image of the Obama trading — in fact, the trades seem to be occurring at exactly the same times. So someone is betting on some sort of disqualifying event happening to Obama.
I don’t think this is any cause for alarm… if Joe Biden contracts were being bought up as part of this scheme, that might be more concerning, but they aren’t. Still, if I were the Secret Service FBI (**), I would probably want to know the identity of this trader.
Two criticisms. First of all, I don’t think this is the work of someone having a little bit of demented fun; this has all the hallmarks of a classic Republican ratfuck. Second, in his link, Nate picked the wrong idiot degenerate gambler to use as an example.
Yes, Virginia, There Is A Foreign Policy Debate Friday
by dday
The first Presidential debate is scheduled to focus on foreign policy, and I imagine those tuning in, whose knowledge of the subject is limited, would rather hear the candidates talk about the current economic mess. But the past week or so has also revealed a series of crises in global hotspots around the world. This includes but is not limited to Iraq, and I would hope that Jim Lehrer understands the full spectrum of global decisions that the next President will have to make, and really make a sustained effort to force the candidates past simplistic slogans and into the heart of what they would do in foreign policy.
• First we have the Marriott bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan, the second big suicide attack in the Muslim world in the space of the week (along with the bombing of the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen). Given that the Marriott is typically home to international businessmen and Western dignitaries, so those similarities exist as well. This was a signal from the Taliban in response to the recent spate of US forays into the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) region. Given that the Pakistani Prime Minister was due at the Marriott, it could have been worse.
Clearly there’s a real problem with Pakistan. At least 300 have died in suicide attacks just this year. We’ve launched something approaching a shadow war in the FATA region, without any partnership and in fact increasing resistance from elements in the Pakistani government and the military, which is actively repelling raids. It threatens a split between the Army and the leadership of Prime Minister Zardari, and that has potentially disastrous results. In short, the country is on the brink.
More than any other terrorist attack in this volatile country, the devastating truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel over the weekend has presented government and military leaders here with a stark choice: Go all out against extremists or risk the nation’s collapse into chaos.
That is the growing consensus among many Pakistani analysts and commentators, who fear that without rapid, determined and ironfisted action by officials and security forces, this nuclear-armed land is in danger of becoming a failed state, with Islamic radicals in control.
Brandon Friedman has more on this, and he believes that John McCain will end up altering his position on Pakistan with one more broadly in line with Barack Obama. But the question is how to best articulate that policy – maintaining a stance that respects Pakistan’s national sovereignty, but one which understands that a safe harbor for those who wish to do Americans harm is not advisable. This is best accomplished by the locals, not yet another occupying force. But the locals may have competing interests. It’s a complex, dangerous situation that represents the most dangerous trouble spot on the globe, and it demands attention.
• Across the border, Afghanistan is falling apart because the central government is weak and the Taliban has figured out how to fill in the cracks.
The new Taliban movement has created a parallel government structure that includes defense and finance councils and appoints judges and officials in some areas. It offers cash to recruits and presents letters of introduction to local leaders. It operates Web sites and a 24-hour propaganda apparatus that spins every military incident faster than Afghan and Western officials can manage.
“This is not the Taliban of Emirate times. It is a new, updated generation,” said Waheed Mojda, a former foreign ministry aide under the Taliban Islamic Emirate, which ruled most of the country from 1996 to 2001. “They are more educated, and they don’t punish people for having CDs or cassettes,” he said. “The old Taliban wanted to bring sharia, security and unity to Afghanistan. The new Taliban has much broader goals — to drive foreign forces out of the country and the Muslim world.”
That’s just distressing. From a humanitarian standpoint alone we have a responsibility to keep the Taliban on the run. But if they’ve become the de facto government in much of the country, military force against them will take on the look of an invasion, and it will have trouble succeeding. In fact, the US considers that violence will worsen in the country over the next year, due to a winter offensive, and the troops simply aren’t going to be available to stop that. In fact, the latest report on Afghanistan is so bad that the Administration won’t release it:
U.S. intelligence analysts are putting the final touches on a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan that reportedly describes the situation as “grim”, but there are “no plans to declassify” any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar with the process. […]
According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a “grim” picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors.
There’s talk of a joint security force between the Afghans, the US and the Pakistanis to police the border, but it’s unclear why the Pakistanis, who are resisting foreign actions in their territory, would agree to that.
• Ehud Olmert has been forced to resign as Israeli Prime Minister resulting from a bribery scandal, and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is set to take over as head of Kadima and the favorite to be the next leader. Needless to say, any turmoil in Israel impacts the greater Middle East. Livni has been the chief negotiator with the Palestinians, but if she can’t form a government, there will be early elections, and a return to Likudnik power would be a disaster for any hopes for peace. Yet polls are showing that Bibi Netanyahu would be the victor if elections were held today. That’s genuinely scary. And what’s worse is that John McCain considers Middle East peace a low priority and would discourage Israeli-Syrian peace talks. This is the same neocon boorishness that has decreased our standing in the world and made us less safe, and it should absolutely be a part of any debate where Americans are trying to assess the candidates on foreign policy.
• Africa is at a crossroads. Much of East Africa is susceptible to extremism and has been ignored by the Bush Administration for years. Somalia, where a proxy force from Ethiopia raided a couple years ago and took down the Islamic Courts Union, is becoming increasingly unstable as the insurgents regroup, and if a harbor is established it could be another opportunity for attacks to be launched. The southern region, where a modicum of stability appeared to exist, has been rocked by the resignation of Thabo Mbeki in South Africa amid allegations of corruption, as well as eleven members of the cabinet (UPDATE: That was a false alarm). Mbeki has spent lots of time and political capital trying to put together a unity government in troubled Zimbabwe, which is incredibly tenuous. A forgotten Africa is both vulnerable to extremism and Chinese influence.
• The headline here is that North Korea is backing away from the nuclear deal with the United States, but the reality is more complex. The US was dragging their feet in removing North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, and with the instability surrounding the possible illness of Kim Jong Il, there could also be a jockeying for power among competing forces in Pyongyang. We have bought ourselves a little time, but it seems like both sides are stalling. With Pyongyang asking the IAEA to remove seals at their largest reprocessing facility, the gains of the past couple years are almost entirely lost, and this is a failure of the Bush Administration to live up to their commitments. Will that get mentioned?
• Meanwhile, the lax standards in Chinese manufacturing are still killing people, and the chemicals that are put into our foods, our supplies and most everything we buy (at a cheap price) are toxic. Can we have a serious argument about trade and relations with China without recognizing this?
• And then there’s Iraq, of course. We now have a fair bit of proof that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad is what led to the drop in violence, not the surge. There’s more to Iraq than Baghdad, of course, but there are also more explanations for the security gains in those outlying areas (the Sunni Awakening in Anbar, for example). Meanwhile the political situation remains stalemated, as legislation for the provincial elections has failed for the fifth time. And the Awakening forces are growing more violent, which will get worse if the Maliki government follows through on locking them out of the security forces. As long as the debate here is played out over whether the surge was a success, we won’t be having a real argument about the future of Iraq. It’s dishonest.
It’s time to get serious. The belligerent Bush foreign policy is making a dangerous world more dangerous. Our shrinking moral authority and lack of cooperation with allies has enhanced this. I don’t know if we’re losing the war on terrorism because I have no idea what a war on terrorism is, but the public thinks we are. And the choice in this Presidential election is between the same old neocon know-nothingism or a measured approach that recognizes both the challenges we face and the best way to combat them. That is more than important enough to fill 90 minutes on Friday night. I just hope (against hope) that the debate is about the real issues.
The late selection of vice presidential nominees has led to a gaffe-filled contest in which each campaign is pointing the finger at its rival’s running mate.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) has, in recent days, lived up to his reputation as a gaffe machine, breaking with his running mate on a few occasions and, in at least once instance, drawing a soft rebuke from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Democrats would no doubt like to return fire, but are left to lament the bubble Republican candidate John McCain’s campaign has erected around his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and note her limited record is hard to contrast with McCain’s 26 years in Washington.
On Tuesday, as Washington and much of the world were focused on the proposed financial bailout for Wall Street and the gathering of world leaders at United Nations headquarters in New York City, the influential website Drudge Report was dominated by the back-and-forth between Biden and Obama.
This is really getting ridiculous. The Drudge Report is a right wing oppo laundering site. It always has been. I really cannot believe that it has seriously morphed into an “influential” website that reporters use to gauge the importance of current events.
Of course, the Drudge Report is covering the “back and forth” between Obama and Biden. It’s creating a drumbeat to benefit the Republican ticket. It’s what he does! His raison d’etre. When did the Washington press corps decide he was Walter Cronkite?
Now none of this is to say that Biden shouldn’t shut his trap. He should. But the fact that anyone in the media gives a damn about this stupid, trumped up story at a time like this is mind-boggling, particularly since Sarah Palin is parading around like a beauty contest winner instead of a serious candidate for national office, the world is blowing up and the economy is melting down.
The political media need to spend a little less time reading the Drudge Report and a lot more time doing their job. Drudge is not a source, fellas. He’s a hack. What’s on his web site all day isn’t indicative of anything but what the Republicans want you to think is important.
Instead, why don’t you read this and then go forth and be reporters instead of obsessing over what Drudge is emitting every half hour.
Perhaps the American people have been paying closer attention than we think:
By a 2-to-1 ratio, Americans blame Republicans over Democrats for the financial crisis that has swept across the country the past few weeks, a new national poll suggests. That may be contributing to better poll numbers for Sen. Barack Obama against Sen. John McCain in the race for the White House.
In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Monday afternoon, 47 percent of registered voters questioned said Republicans are more responsible for the problems currently facing financial institutions and the stock market; only 24 percent said Democrats are more responsible.
Twenty percent blame both parties equally and 8 percent say neither party is to blame.
It occurs to me that all the years of Democratic fecklessness may finally be paying off. Who could believe that a group so lame could have engineered something this complicated? Perhaps there was a method to their madness after all…
Seriously, this is really the only logical point of view. The Republicans are the ones who’ve been robotically repeating their mantra of deregulation, free markets and the horrors of Big Government for a quarter century. There is no one alive on the planet who doesn’t associate all those things with conservatism — they proudly run on it every election and regurgitate it like mama birds every time they go on television. They can run, but they can’t hide.
McCain is going to try to say he’s always been against the great malefactors of wealth, but let’s just say he doesn’t have a lot of credibility on that either.
Here’s Jonathan Alter, doing a great job yesterday on MSNBC on laying out exactly what’s wrong with McCain’s reformer image:
JONATHAN ALTER: [Y]ou remember the Keating Five scandal that he was a part of, which, by the way, it’s crazy but there’s been very little about it in the press in the last few weeks. And McCain thinks he’s getting a hard time, he’s really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country. But his reaction to that, you would have thought, would have been more regulation of the financial services industry. Instead he moved forward on campaign finance reform after being caught in that scandal, but did nothing – nothing – to try to prevent another savings and loan crisis from happening down the road. He was missing in action when it came to even learning the basic lessons of a scandal that he said taught him all kinds of things that he would never forget.
It’s been 20 years since Keating. McCain has built his reputation as a reformer on the back of that scandal, presenting himself as a man who came too close to the fire and became a zealous convert to reform. But lest Americans’ ever become persuaded that McCain is somehow “different” than other Republicans, it’s probably a really good time to remind them about this episode.
McCain’s role in that scandal was very specific: he pressured regulators into going easy on his friend Charlie’s savings and loan. And he’s done nothing but promote the virtues of deregulation ever since then, spending most of his time warmongering and tilting at windmills on campaign finance reform (which he’s conveniently abandoned in his own presidential bid.) His reformer image is a total fraud.
And I don’t think anyone needs to make the case that the Republican party is completely and irrevocably corrupt and inept. Who would hire the guy who drunkenly rammed his truck into your living room to take their kids to school? It’s time for them to go.
I don’t know who this guy is, but you have to admit that he’s got at least some of it right. And he does have a way with a phrase:
Press TV interviewed Paris-based financial analyst Max Keiser on the US financial meltdown on September 20. What follows are his free-wheeling comments on the US government bailout of Wall Street and the potential consequences for America:
• • •
“We have a treasury secretary in America – Hank Paulson. I’m afraid he’s gone insane. He’s become like the Colonel Kurtz of Treasury Secretaries. He’s gone native. He’s co-opted trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money and he’s playing hedge fund like a rogue trader. We have got a rogue trader in the Treasury Secretary’s office. He’s being aided and abetted by Ben Bernanke who’s been discredited as the entire Federal Reserve Bank has been utterly discredited. We’re looking at a possible inflationary depression in America and the worse is yet to come, much worse is yet to come.”
“To pay for all this insanity from Hank Paulson, they have two options. They can either raise taxes or they can inflate the money supply. They can destroy these things US dollars [waves a dollar bill at the camera]. Dollars 30 years ago used to be backed by this stuff – gold [waves a gold coin at the camera]. Now thanks to Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke US dollars are backed by these – bananas [waves a banana at the camera]. They’re absolutely worthless. Anyone buying US dollars today is going to lose money.”
“For the average American, this is what they will experience. The price of food and oil are going to skyrocket due to hyperinflation. The only way they can possibly pay for all these bailouts is to inflate the money supply. This means hyperinflation in America like you had in Germany in the 1920s. This is what the average American will experience: destitution, poverty, social unrest due to flagrant bank mismanagement – and it could have been avoided. But unfortunately the banks in the USA are run by greedy, insane private marketeers and this is the result.”
[…]
“Unfortunately the fear at this point is that is that the laws have been changed. Hank Paulson has done a power grab. When George Bush came into office he did a power grab. When 9-11 happened they did another power grab. They have dictatorial powers now. So now you’ve got this lunatic, Hank Paulson with a multi-trillion dollar hedge fund who’s basically running the economy like a rogue trader.”
“Hank Paulson has a multi-trillion dollar hedge fund and he doesn’t appear to be in control of his own mental faculties. He appears to have gone insane.”
[…]
“The problems are here but the people who created this nightmare are gone. Cheney has already got his Halliburton corporation headquartered in Dubai. He’s already out of the picture. All these crooks are going to be leaving this country. They’re not going to stay for all of the rioting there’s going to be in America.”
Nah. We don’t riot in America. We shop. Of course this time, some people may call it looting, but it’s still shopping to us. We’ll just be packaging our debt and selling it to someone else to worry about. Nothing wrong with that.
And Paulson does have some resemblance to the Col. Kurtz so memorably portrayed by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.
Boehlert has a masterful column today about the media’s failure to report on this impending crisis as it developed. While they were obsessed with puerile, campaign trivia, the economic system was melting down — and the public, according to poll after poll, was clamoring for information.
The press had its Story of the Year, thank you very much, and it wasn’t going to budge off it, not even a little.
Preoccupied with covering a presidential campaign that reporters and pundits deemed to be fun and entertaining, the press, for much of the year, walked away from its responsibility to inform the public about an array of different topics simultaneously. Instead, the press, and especially television news, pretty much announced that it could only (or would only) cover one big story at a time (the campaign), unless a hurricane arrived, and then it would cover two.
“Rather than focus, in those [preceding] days and weeks, on the incidents that led to today’s [stock] plunge, general-interest news outlets focused fairly myopically on … the presidential campaign,” noted Megan Garber at CJR.org.
And that wasn’t just a hunch. It was a fact. Here’s what the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last month after undertaking an extensive study of the media’s handling of economic news: “While the public considers the economy its No. 1 concern, for instance, the media have been far more interested in the presidential campaign — by a factor of nearly 5-to-1 between January 2007 and June 2008.”
Talk about a disconnect.
That’s for sure. But then, when you have a Village punditocrisy led by people like Chris Matthews, who believes we should just give the treasury secretary monarchical powers, there’s really no reason to report on all that boring “financial skigamadoo.” let Daddy take care of it and we’ll all go back to talking about just how much Michelle Obama hates America.
Some senior Democrats on Capitol Hill have voiced concern that McCain will continue to oppose the Bush administration’s plan as a way to position himself as a critic of Wall Street and the Bush Administration.
If McCain doesn’t vote for the legislation, other Republicans might follow suit, leaving the Democratic-led majority to fight in Congress to pass the risky bailout plan.
However a Democratic congressional leadership source tells ABC News’ Jake Tapper that Paulson went so far as to assure Democratic leaders that McCain “won’t be a problem” — in other words that McCain will vote for the proposal.
Trust ’em?
Look, McCain has a long history of playing both sides. The most egregious example was when Harry Reid allowed him to carry the ball on torture (surely this honorable man wouldn’t go back on his word on something so important!) and he ended up enabling it. More recently he backed the legislation that exempted the CIA from following the Army Field manual which prohibits torture. Earlier this year he ranted like Huge Chavez on crack against the Boumadiene decision. And yet, he still claims publicly that he is against torture. If the most famously tortured ex-prisoner in the world can play both sides on that issue, then is there any doubt that he is a bad faith actor on the economy when his political future is at stake? Please.
If McCain feels the political need to vote against this measure, he’ll have no compunction about stringing along the Democrats until he gets them so far out on a limb that they can’t backtrack before he decides that he just can’t betray the hard working people of America by voting for it. He sold his soul long ago. He’s not going to rediscover it a month before the presidential election.
Update: Via Kos, I see that Newtie is already laying the groundwork for McCain on this.
You’ll notice he says that he expects Obama to back the plan…