Walnuts to college kid: "Your girlfriend wan' ride with me..."

So that's why McCain has to keep firing his campaign staff! He needs them back in the industry drumming up funds!

Regional campaign manager Doug Davenport and Republican convention chief Doug Goodyear departed after acknowledging having represented Burma. Eric Burgeson, who lobbies the federal government on energy issues, left Thursday. GOP consultant Craig Shirley parted ways with the campaign because of his ties to http://www.stophernow.com[...]

Yeah, don't believe the hype about Walnuts' boys working for Idi Amin and Than Shwe; this is strictly business. Doug Goodyear can now go back to directing contributions from Verizon to shadow 527s...ditto Tom Loeffler and EADS.

Loeffler lobbies for the European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., which, with Northrop Grumman Corp., won a lucrative contract to provide air refueling tankers for the Air Force. McCain helped scuttle an earlier contract that would have gone to a competitor, Boeing Co.

Clearly, this is McCain's version of the Gore-China story. Watch for the Pernicious Influence of France stories coming this fall!***UPDATE***The first Pernicious France story of the season! Frogs, Hamas Talk Shop! An admission more pernicious for undercutting Sarko...stay tuned!

So which is more crooked, rigging defense contracts for your buddy, or rigging telecom regulations for your girlfriend? And what's up with all the Verizon people on Walnuts' payroll? Is he on an industry oversight committee or something? Oh yeah...

Now, step two is, if McCain's financing is going to come from unregulated contributions, does that mean Friends of Johm McCain was a clever ruse? My contributions to John McCain for President might be limited; nobody's looking for my contributions to Jon, Jonn, John McCaim, Fats Walnuts, etc...

I'd like to make clear that I don't exactly have enmity for John McCain. He's got a hard row to hoe, having to run against his own party, against his own history, with the dead albatross of the last presidency, with, in all likelihood, some tight-comber born-again from a right-to-work state as his VP. If it were Dark Steer running, Dark Steer would be crankier! With this in mind, I watched, "McCain to student:'Thanks, Jerk!'" and thought, "Damn right, Walnuts! Tell these whippersnappers to get the earbuds out and listen up!" I mean, you can tell how taken aback he is by the sheer assholedom of the question.
Next time, John -- if that is your real name -- use one of our Unsolicited Rejoinders, such as:

"I'll admit, during the primaries I did have to change diapers a couple times. But those were Huckabee's."

"You forget about the privileges we accord the demented. I mean, I could kill your smartass right now and just make up a reason!"

"Well, Beavis, your mom doesn't think I'm too old."

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Take er easy, dude

McCain's anger: a strategy! -- Kaus. Clearly, we Americans are reaping the whirlwind. Back in your youtube clip, when McCain was a reasonable man, willing to acknowledge facts on the ground, he also had no shot at landing the nomination. We like him more the crazier he gets! His Obama=Hamas slur got him an invite to speak to the NRA, which hates him, so...
***
McCain forgetting how the hostage release went is conventional wisdom. It's a little bit crazy to talk about it so fast, though! Old Man McCain seems to be taking shit for shinola here, suggesting that the 1979 hostages were released for weapons, then backtracking to explain that Carter and Christopher (not Carter and Brzeszinski?) got them released. The hostages relased for arms came later and were captured by Hezbollah or affiliated groups in Lebanon. Phew! Isn't the conventional wisdom so much easier! Also, dude, I edited that Iran-Contra wiki page a little bit. It's not a good resource. It goes like this: "These guys did bad things. Then they lied about it. Fawn Hall. Imperialism. Oliver North is a fag." for like 7 meg of text...no timeline, no clear causation.

Bringing me to a point of departure for a future screed: can we at this late date foreswear Wikipedia?
***
McCain at the NRA:

This is a unique style to say the least. JB starts with a patronly/patronizing soft-pedal voice, like the old folks in the Medicare part D ads, mentions Israel, and suddenly hits the chorus, like in "Say a Little Prayer for You!", screams, stumbles, blood-pressure recedes, and he's back in premature catatonia. Clearly, the strain of being an enlightened elder and a cranky elder at once is exhausting. We here at Dark Steer wish the Senator the best of health for the coming election. Which is six months away.
***
Two things this week give us hope here at Dark Steer: one is the third Democrat victory in a special election to the House this year. Two is the passage of a passel of war bills. The former augurs ill for the opposition party this November; the MS-1 district was like a R+10 PVI. There are 25 seats up in November with a R+10 PVI or lower; those are landslide numbers. The war bills' passing, however, is mindbending. Republicans in Congress have finally grown weary of stonewalling every single Congressional attempt to attach some reins to the president's wehrmacht; the plan now is clearly of the "give 'em enough rope" variety. And if a case could be made for indefinitely-funded, indefinitely-long war in Iraq, well, maybe then the Democrats' "abort the troops" policy would become an issue in November. Except one: the GOP can't even get all its members in line for something as simple as abstention; two: solid majorities have wanted the war over within a year since summer 2005.
***
Recent visits to Israel by Rice and Bush bode well for my Peace-By-June prediction, right? Even the President's bizarre ranting about "appeasers" backs me up! How, you ask? The only reason to say something that far off the irrelevance chart, something that the speaker has no intention of backing up, is to flak for the opposite position ! Short: Bush's tough talk is cover for the back-channel negotiations with Syria. Paradoxathon! The harder he talks, the closer the negotiations are to peace! It's like Kissinger-Nixon's mad-bomber strategy: in theory, when a nuclear power bout to act the fool, everyone else calms down.

One more time: by the end of the first week of June, Israel will return large portions of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a non-aggression pact. Only the President can screw this up now, by you know, asking for some extra goodies, like disarming Hezbollah, or paving the Anbar desert...

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If I had some nuts on a wall, would those be...

Agreed. The prospect of this John McCain winning the presidency is laughable. The one who tours a Baghdad market, proclaims it safe, whereupon it is swiftly carbombed; the McCain who can't tell the difference between the Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and the Shiite Mehdi Army; the McCain whose strictly pro-business position on immigration will doom his party, this McCain will lose.

But I can't help but think that only people who pay too much attention to the game see this kind of thing happening. I find it far more likely that most voters -- call them what you will, the people who purportedly cling to Guns and Religion: "downscale whites," the Axl Roses -- haven't tuned in yet. They woke up when the nightly news claimed they were being dissed by some Ivy-league half-foreigner candidate at a gay-folks kaffeeklatsch. But they've been asleep since.

(I'd like to think that's why HRC has a double-digit lead in West Virginia: folks paid attention to the Ohio primary and haven't had a reason to follow anything since. Are the stories of Hillary's imminent demise actually not on the air in the Wild, Wonderful? Why was Monday the second total time BHO has visited the state? This makes me crazy. West Virginia is Indiana on stilts. Use the template of small-format speeches and massive student turnout at the state universities. If Barry contested even Morgantown, he'd pull within six, right?)

So McCain's chances depend on which McCain shows up in the media at the last possible instant. Joe Lieberman's 1988 Senate run offers some relevant instruction. Joe ran as a Reagan Democrat against the liberal Republican Lowell P. Weicker; he wasted Weicker for not supporting Reagan's invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya; he picked up support from William F. Buckley; he dissed LPW for missing votes, ran goofy cartoon attack ads of Lowell as a sleeping bear. A screwy confusing campaign. But the fundamental point was this: Lieberman said Weicker was not a maverick, but a misfit. In effect, the Democrat did ideological housecleaning for his opponents. No Republican in 1988 wanted to seat on their side of the aisle the only GOP Senator to call for a boycott of the South African Apartheid regime. The net effect was that the Connecticut GOP (like everywhere else) swung to the right, and the Democrats only gained seats by seating conservatives.

Which McCain shows up in the media? Maverick or Misfit? More importantly for our futures bidness, which would be the preferred outcome for Obama Democrats? (Let's ignore the fact that no one knows what an Obama Democrat is. I think we ODs are post-grad educated Northeasterners-Rustbelters who are willing to "diss partisan politics to get a gig," thanks Martin Sheen. But discuss amongst yourselves.) After McGovern purged the party (part by accident; he sure didn't intend to lose urban whites in the Northeast), McGovernism became the default Democratic position for a generation: mercy for the underclass, negotiate for peace. McCain's ability to draw support from the moderates of 2006 is a boon to the ODs.

Check it: the Democrats elected to the House in 2006 got in because two camps of opinion about the Iraq War shook hands: "I don't think we should be there," and "I think we should win." As an OD, I want the "I think we should win," camp to bolt, because their ideology is transparently bogus. They do not belong in my tent. Frank Rizzo and Dick Daley can come back into my tent, so long as they denounce the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, "coercive interrogation" and warrantless eavesdropping. Five points of light. My tent might be 20 percent of the electorate, but at least I know who's in it. The numbers come later. The whole point is to align party and ideology in your own camp, and disorient party and ideology in the opposition.

And Walnuts makes that real easy: right now he's got free-traders and protectionists, comprehenisvists and Minutemen, dudes hung out to dry on the end of the "surge" and dudes who want war with Iran yesterday, fiscal conservatives who hate giving atropine to the economy over and over again and reps whose constituents are losing their homes. It's not a Big Tent. It's a total clusterfuck.

That is the outcome of "McCain is a Maverick." But his biggest problem this week is convincing people that Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman heard him wrong, he definitely voted for the guy who gave him le shaft royale in SC. Problems occur for McCain when "McCain is a Misfit." On the reel f'reel. If McCain doesn't belong in his own party, how can he be trusted? If the Misfit is the standard-bearer, well, what does the party believe? If it's just an aggregate of fractious interests, what did the McCain Democrats sign up for?
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Seal the deal, BHO

K:

You should read Ross Douthat's review of Nixonland at the Atlantic.

Also, we should email Christopher Beam at Slate some scenarios for their "Obamapocalypse" contest. Sounds like Politico has their entry in already:

Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it.

It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race.

What's interesting here is that today an Obama campaign meltdown is fantasy, whereas yesterday the meltdown was fact. Or at least news...Whither Bittergate? Why was it significant that Barry called Matt Lauer "Tim"? (NBC thought it was about the incipient meltdown, but clearly Barry just lost his Kenneth: "If you leave the entourage, who's gonna help me tell white people apart?") Also, wasn't I just reading an appeal to BHO to quit? Yes, I was! Who's writing that type shit today?

Me, evidently. Nightmare scenarios for Obama? We're living through them: Barack spends a month dealing with bogus guilt-by-association smears. He fails to seal the deal in either Indiana or Pennsylvania (or Ohio or New Hampshire) despite having a 3-to-1 TV presence and a 4-to-1 bank account advantage. Clinton is allowed to hang on and bleed him to death all spring. Barry doesn't see it, is focused on the math, doubts that Clinton would suicide-bomb the party, realizes too late that he's running against Clinton and McCain. Spends May and June in regal seclusion, sits on his war chest. Both Barry's opponents lambaste him on all manner of strange bullshit; watch for the return of the turban-and-polo-shirt photo. Clinton shows up at the convention the underdog champion of the working-class, trying to do right by the great people of Michigan and Florida, blocks Obama's nomination, waits for fatigue to set in. Obama gets tired of fighting, accepts Clinton's promise of the VP. Obama's delegates from states Clinton won are released. Clinton gets the nomination and picks Evan Bayh for VP. Obama retires to the Senate in shame and disbelief. Clinton loses to McCain by 5%, her hate-factor killing off any hope of Democratic gains in the midwest and rust belt...

Barry needs to start a scorched-earth counterinsurgency now, or yesterday. Al Sayyid Hillary al-Amriki has already riled up the dispossessed majority, staked her claim to the heartland, and issued fatwas against the occupier. The Jaish-el-Clinton cannot be allowed to have safe harbor in Kentucky. Nor can it be permitted to import weapons from the McCainians...

Offense outruns defense

I love this shit:
On Tuesday, Media Matters ran this history of the Lieberman Hack , essentially asking ABC, CBS and CNN to apologize for uncritically passing on false allegations. Betty Nguyen of CNN is the worst offender, first reading verbatim two paragraphs of campaign text:

"[...]Let me just read you a statement from the Lieberman campaign, this from the campaign manager, saying, 'For the past 24 hours, the Friends of Joe Lieberman's website and email have been totally disrupted and disabled. We believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the U.S. attorney and will be filing formal complaints reflecting our concerns.'

Also goes on to say, 'This type of dirty politics has been the staple of the Lamont campaign,' referring to Ned Lamont, the challenger, 'from the beginning, from the nonstop personal attacks to the intimidation tactics'

Now, was Sean Smith chanelling Abe Ribicoff there? That started life as "gestapo tactics," right?

'and offensive displays to these coordinated efforts to disable our website.'

...then Nguyen gives it the full Hindenburg:

"Basically, the situation is: Joseph Lieberman is saying that his website was hacked and that there are major problems with it. People can't even access it, especially on voting day. Today is the primary.[...]"

and delivering the coup-de-grace, emphasis mine:

"And Ned Lamont, as you well would assume, says he has nothing to do with it. There's no tampering of the website. So, we'll see."

CNN clearly did Lieberman a solid by passing along the attack, but what I love is the "all thieves also lie" tone of Nguyen's last comments.

As you well would assume, CNN has nothing to say about throwing the race to Lieberman. Here's CTBob's archive of Liebermania.

Attacks run faster than our ability to verify them. This brings us back to the present and to Barry. The killer in the debate -- man, nearly two weeks ago now -- was his excessively delicate, elevate-the-discourse jive on Wright. This emboldened HRC and Wright to, ironically, go on the road saying the same thing: "This is who I am; I dunno about Barry, but this is me." Barry's pimpslap to Wright should have been much harder, and should have come sooner. He knows he has to be twice as good in order to get half as far.

Willie Horton forever! I mean, if only Dukakis in 1988 had said something like, "If George Herbert Walker Bush is so scared of Massachusetts he can windsurf somewhere else," or, "Willie Horton never made it onto any country club, so I don't know what George Bush is worried about," idunno, something. Nip these things in the bud, people! The time to kill the attack, like a newborn wildebeest, is before it gets its legs under it...

I fear, K, we've drunk the kool-aid on the Wright issue. I don't understand why the Rev is a problem for Obama when dudes like Rev. Hagee and Chuck Keating aren't a problem for McCain. Obviously, we're just missing what Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana are getting. And seriously, I have no idea what that is. How the Ivy-educated scioness of Scranton gentry managed to be the candidate of blue-collar whites is beyond me. Do they vote for the boss? In making this election about identity -- rather than, idunno, war, recession, water, food, shelter -- we've handed it to McCain.

McCain by 5 over Clinton.

Bush league

K:

Barry may indeed weather whatever storms emerge. It seems clear that Gibson and Stephanopoulos are getting the worst of the debate coverage, for instance. John Dickerson says Obama was doomed to look petulant; and I think the stick-to-your-guns strategy is what doomed him. Because we've seen it before.

It's Bush 101 : Double Down. It may or may not enable the campaign freedom of maneuver. I tend to think not, based on Barry's flaccid attempts to thread the needle on Rev. Wright in the debate, but prove me wrong. (He was pushy and above-the-fray while delivering byzantine rationalizations of his relationship with Wright. It was cringe-inducing. There are so many ways to deal with the Rev., and he has to pick the morally upstanding one? Barry can't say, "Look, I was living in Chicago's South Side. I need this man and every other vintage militant every day of the week, because I'm from Kansas."? He can't plead expediency? Ahh, because that would be the old politics rearing its ugly head...)

There is maneuverability on the Bitter score, so fine, maybe the tactic works. Elevate. Got it. But it's a shit way to make policy. Elevation is fine for discourse; but in policy, it's called escalation. It's a perpetual raising of the stakes.

To take your abortion prediction, what does an elevation speech sound like?

***
Leebs will speak at convention if McCain can't find his keys.
Related! McCain anger okay! Not pissed enough to "blur his judgment," says Leebs!

Also, not senile enough to fumble the nuclear football! Not drunk enough to confuse Sunnis with Shiites! Still funny! Don't you quit on me...

Also related! One-third of Iraq veterans have post-traumatic stress disorder or a major brain injury. That's 19 percent with depression, 19 percent with probable brain damage, minus 7 percent with both. What's the record for Vietnam POWs?

And, forty years after: the sacrifice-shall-not-be-in-vain meme is back to shame us all...Will President McCain blockade Vietnam until the return of all captive US servicemen is accomplished? I'm for it! US out of Vietnam!

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Be Ready to Sacrifice...

Quickpost. Since we're gonna occasionally pull out snippets from old emails and hope our reader(s) trust us enough to believe we're not making shit up, seems only right to bring up this li'l vulgar snippet...

...biggest concern, of course, is national security credibility. barryhussein's got no service experience. shouldn't be huge, but it is. sucks, but, what can you do?

...other concern is the clintons. yeah, they say they'll fall in line. and they likely will. but i wanna placate those scheming fucks. i want them totally on board with as little bitterness as possible.

...so who's that give us? well, i'm thinking clark. national security cred in the bag. more importantly, he's a clinton man. endorsed hillyclint. was rumored to be the clinton stalking horse in the 04 contests. mentioned time and again as a veep for hillyclint. you tell the hick and hte [sic] harridan we'll give them a gracious concession for the good of the party and they'd better fucking fall in line with full out support. no sour grapes. full on support and doing their best lying to excuse the attacks they made on barryhussein in the primaries. i want billyclint and barryhussein with joined, raised hands in front of a crowd of 30 thousand in arkansas. i want hillyclint and wes and barryhussein arm in arm in madison square garden with twenty thousand alternating chants of yes we can and u.s.a...

And then we've got Lawrence O'Donnell, writer for The West Wing, dropping this gem:

Barack: When you walk out of here I’m going straight to a press conference and announce that when I get the nomination, my choice for VP will be Wesley Clark, and—
Hillary (laughs): Not gonna happen. Wes has been with my campaign from the start.
Barack (continuing): —and on the next ballot, the possible Obama-Clark ticket’s gonna get me the Arkansas delegation and another—what do you think—200 superdelegates at least?
Hillary: I’m not gonna let you have Wes for a phony unity ticket.
Barack: Too late. Michelle is meeting with him right now.
Barack’s iPhone buzzes. He checks it.
Hillary: He won’t accept anything without my—
Barack holds up the iPhone. close on text message: CLARK DEAL DONE. LUV U, M. Hillary looks pained—as much by the Clark deal as by the love in the Obama marriage. Barack gives her a moment to process the shock, then …
Barack (softly): I want you to come with me to the press conference.
Hillary: No way.
Barack: I need—
Hillary (bitterly): You don’t need me. You’ve got my biggest supporter as your VP. He’s got you covered now on foreign-policy credentials, military experience.
Barack: It’s not a unity ticket unless you say it’s a unity ticket. I want to tell the press that I asked you to be VP, you turned it down and suggested General Clark. I want to give you credit for saving the day, saving the party. I want you leaving Denver with your head held high.

Now, imaginary scripts for future scenarios ain't exactly sound political analysis, but I've got the general view that there's been little "sound political analysis" this election season. Maybe the American public can't take it. Maybe the American public ain't smart enough to take it. Maybe the American public thinks it's getting sound political analysis but is really deceiving itself about the pertinence of what really amounts to little more than "oooooooh! he say whaaaaa? oh no he didnnnnnnnn'". Don' matter to Jesus. What do matter to Jesus is making sure this ticket is solid. So Clark gets the Clintons a surrogate in the Oval Office. And he works best. HillyClint as veep doesn't bring much to the ticket IM(ns)HO. Most of the Dem partisans, no matter what they say right now, will fall back in line once the nominee is chosen. The rest will trickle back as it becomes apparent to the nation what a McCain administration will look like. Party unity ain't a question. We want white males, though, don't we? We want to try to pull the South, now, don't we? Clark's the way to go.

Now what to do about HillyClint? She ain't gonna totally be happy with ClarkVeep. No, no, no. She's sacrificed too much, endured too much. And she deserves a reward. She put up with Bill and Chris Matthews and whoever the hell else. So I've been saying for a while now: Senate Majority Leader. [No email to cite here, gotta trust me.] We knock the eunuch Reid out of the spot, dust it off nice, and give it to her. She gets a nice, visible perch from which to watch BarryHussein like a hawk. And rightly so. His ass better not mess up. But, if he does, Hillary is...
Untarnished. Gets to be a walking "I Told You So" in 2012. Still runs on the competence issue. Gets some notches on her belt for accomplishing things. Perfect positioning to beat Mitt in '12.

And now, I must needs find some way to get access to the NBAs live streaming of the Laker game. Lakers-Celtics final. This will be beautiful. You should watch the playoffs this year.

-k

"Oh, but be ready to sacrifice.
If you love 'em you should tell 'em twice..."
-Gnarles Barkley, "Surprise"