http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

I have written on this blog and others that Hillary Clinton was the candidate that could beat John McCain. She as much as said, "I am the candidate that knows how to do it." The Clinton's are the only democrats in 28 years to have beat the GOP machine.

The GOP in my view worked hard during the Democrat primaries to take out the strongest contender in this race - Hillary Clinton. It was successful, the press, Fox news, the Repubs gave Obama kid gloves, let him be a rock star. He is great and all that, but more conservative than Hillary and does not know the GOP slime machine.

It was a set up, and a successful one at that. This is playing out so exactly like I thought it would. Obama had one big opportunity to name Hillary as his VP and for whatever reason he did not, now the GOP gets the white womans vote. It is unbelievable that this could not be seen.

Hillary got 50% of the democrat primary vote and Joe Biden got less than 1%, and yet he names a stodgy unexciting VP, safe. Now McCain has the female on his ticket, the exciting new one, the change agent. Think how excited the female base would be if it were an Obama-Clinton ticket.

It would have forced McCain to pick Romney and stay with the experience meme. It would have been experience vs. change. Not change vs. change.

It's sad, but entirely predictable.

McCain Grilled On "The View": Sarah Palin, His Abortion Stance, His Obama Attack Ads, And More

Huffington Post | September 12, 2008 12:30 PM

The ladies of "The View" confronted John McCain today for lying in recent attack ads. In arguably his toughest interview yet, View co-host Joy Behar asked McCain:

"There are ads running from your campaign... Now we know that those two ads are untrue, they are lies. And yet, you at the end of it say you approve these messages. Do you really approve these? Barbara then threw in her condemnation, by telling McCain: "You, yourself said the same thing about putting lipstick on a pig..."

Watch McCain try and explain the lies:

full article and video

full article and video

Blizzard of Lies By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times-September 12, 2008

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

[snip]

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

full article

Analysis: McCain's claims skirt facts, test voters

By CHARLES BABINGTON – 18 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Analysis: McCain's claims skirt facts, test voters

By CHARLES BABINGTON – 18 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

[snip]

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. "But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."

article

"Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."

The Big Lie

President of the United States is not chosen on facts or issues. The choice is emotional, irrational. Simplistic. 10% of the voting public still believes Obama is a Muslim.

COMMENTARY / ON THE MEDIA
New election low: distorting the fact-checking
News outlets and independent truth squads seem to agree that the McCain camp's distortions on Barack Obama have gone too far.
By James Rainey, ON THE MEDIA
LA Times-September 12, 2008

... It got so bad the day before the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that FactCheck.org -- one of the nonpartisan journalism websites heroically trying to strain truth amid all the sound and fury -- had to put out an extraordinary news release.

It chastised John McCain's campaign for -- now get this -- distorting FactCheck’s debunking of distortions.

News organizations and these admirable truth-squadding outfits, including PolitiFact.com, do not collaborate. But in independent news reports and commentaries this week, they seemed to reach a consensus to say "enough" to the McCain camp's efforts to demonize Barack Obama.

[snip]

McCain operatives puffed themselves up with outrage about Obama's "sexism." Then they released a Web advertisement, disingenuously flashing text on the screen -- "Barack Obama on: Sarah Palin" -- while cutting to Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark.

As noted on PolitiFact, the ad gives no context for Obama's remark -- context that made it clear the Democrat was belittling McCain's claim that he is an agent of change.

PolitiFact rated the McCain ad “Pants on Fire” (as in "liar, liar") on its Truth-O-Meter. "If anyone's doing any smearing," the site concluded, "it's the McCain campaign and its outrageous attempt to distort the facts."

[snip]

It was the McCain team, however, that plumbed new depths this week by distorting a fact-checking outfit that had come to its aid.

It happened when FactCheck (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center) shot down rumors flying around the Internet about Alaska Gov. Palin.

FactCheck rejected claims that Palin cut special education in Alaska, endorsed Pat Buchanan for president and joined the secessionist-leaning Alaskan Independence Party. (Her husband, Todd, was an AIP member.)

The McCainites tried to attribute anonymous Internet falsehoods to one individual: Surprise! Barack Obama.

Superimposing FactCheck's "completely false, or misleading" finding over a photo of Obama, the Republicans suggested the Democrat had trumped up the charges.

FactCheck, however, found "no evidence" tying Obama to the anonymous Internet attacks. The muckrakers announced Wednesday that McCain & Co. had been "less than honest."

article

[Significantly, the "L" word is now not only surfaced but is flying around, putting McCain's honor on the line.]

He is such a maverick that he stands up to the truth.

Palin 'governed from the center,' went after big oil

write your own rejoinder.....

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

Fauvrick!

He should go on Faux News and talk about it.

on the economy here in three parts

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}