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Posts Tagged ‘John McCain’

The Reverend Wright Issue

by Phantom Ace Comments Off on The Reverend Wright Issue
Filed under Barack Obama, Election 2008 at September 20th, 2008 - 3:26 pm

At the Wall Street Journal, Laura Meckler writes that the McCain campaign is getting ready to open a can of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: ‘Attack by Association’ Viewed as Fair Game by McCain Camp.

Don’t be shocked if you see the McCain campaign pull the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of mothballs in new attacks against one-time parishioner, Barack Obama.

McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)

“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.”

If you’re not a fan of Obama, you’re probably thinking, “It’s about time.” It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that Obama’s fans will shriek, “Guilt by association!” and claim that Obama’s relationship with Wright was nothing special.

But they’re going to have to explain this speech by Obama from June 5, 2007 at Hampton University, lavishing praise on Rev. Wright in a way that makes it very clear that Obama was a close personal friend.

This close friend of Barack Obama also joined Louis Farrakhan on a trip to Libya and met with Muammar Gaddafi in 1984, right around the time Obama would have first met Rev. Wright. Has anyone ever asked Obama for his opinion about that trip?

(Hat tip:Charles the Obama supporter@LGF)

Cohen: The Ugly New McCain

by Phantom Ace Comments Off on Cohen: The Ugly New McCain
Filed under Election 2008 at September 16th, 2008 - 10:16 am

By picking Sarah Palin, it looks like John McCain has lost the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen: The Ugly New McCain.

What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

(Our #1 contributor:Charles)

The Atlantic’s McCain Cover

by Phantom Ace Comments Off on The Atlantic’s McCain Cover
Filed under Election 2008 at September 14th, 2008 - 11:45 am

Gerard Vanderleun posts about some quite amazing perfidy from The Atlantic and photographer Jill Greenberg, whose photo shoot with John McCain was deliberately set up to produce ominous, threatening pictures—by using outright trickery: Out-Takes: Behind The Atlantic’s McCain Cover.

At Photo District News, there’s an article with more details, and Greenberg’s own words about this disgraceful episode: PDNPulse: How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain.

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

(Hat tip:Charlie Manson the LGF Cult leader)

McCain Sets ‘Em Up, Knocks ‘Em Down

by Phantom Ace ( 1 Comment › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Election 2008 at September 13th, 2008 - 3:50 pm

Maybe I’m cynical, but I can’t help suspecting that the Obama campaign was set up by John McCain’s self-deprecating statements about not “getting” the Internet. Here’s a Forbes article from 2000, and it’s clear that McCain is nowhere near as clueless as Obama would like to portray him: Forbes.com – Net Vs. Norm.

In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.

If it was a setup, Obama fell right into the trap.

(Hat tip: Jim Geraghty and Chas@LGF)