Missoula Notebook
Did You Know John McCain… is a Liar?
By Sutton Stokes, 8-27-08
First in an occasional series of "fun facts" about the Senator from Arizona.
John McCain's latest ad (linked below) claims that Barack Obama says "Iran is a tiny country and doesn't pose a serious threat."
Here's what Obama actually said:
“Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.”
Now, watch John McCain's deliberate distortion of these remarks, and consider whether you really want a president who is willing to lie his way into office.
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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Comments
I hate the bashing that political campaigns bring about.
Good series, I look forward to more.
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Obama's campaign is running a TV ad in Indiana that asks the question: "How can John McCain fix the economy, when he doesn't think it's broken?" But the ad uses quotes from McCain that are old and taken out of context...The economy has worsened since McCain's debate comments back in January, and so has his public assessment. This month McCain's campaign released an ad that begins with these words from an announcer: "Washington's broken. John McCain knows it. We're worse off than we were four years ago."
Nevertheless, Obama's ad ends by asking: "How can John McCain fix the economy, when he doesn't think it's broken?"
By using months-old quotes and selective editing, the Obama ad distorts McCain's assessment of the economy.
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Rocks from glass houses lead to a shattered reality.
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Character? Look, people. Obama is a politician. So we already know he’s a cheat and a liar and a back-stabber. Grow up.
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By your standard ("consider whether you really want a president who is willing to lie his way into office") every candidate would be disqualified.
Have you noticed the ponderous chain Biden has forged: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/26/field
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By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics — students and teachers alike — a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it’s surprising that Biden’s record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama’s consideration.
Joe Biden, you will remember, ran for president in 1988. He delivered a speech that presented the thoughts of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock is if they were his own, and was slow to explain or apologize for this transgression. The ensuing scrutiny of Biden’s record revealed that he had also plagiarized in law school, failing a course for doing so. Shortly after these revelations, he dropped out of the race.
The entire affair was a shabby and unfortunate business. Operatives from the competing Dukakis campaign secretly videotaped the offending speech, then leaked it to the press. When Dukakis found out, he fired his campaign manager, John Sasso, and replaced him with Susan Estrich, who turned out to be a much better legal scholar than campaign manager.
To a degree, appropriating Kinnock for a stump speech is an understandable offense. There is not the presumption of original and unique authorship in the words that come out of a politician’s mouth. Just ask Peggy Noonan. However, the phrasing of Biden’s speech, prefaced Kinnock’s sentiments with language that indicated that these were his thoughts. This incident suggests the same kind of troubling indifference to the truth that has been a hallmark of the current administration, but on its own, perhaps not worthy of ending a political career.
The incident in law school is more concerning, at least from the perspective of any educator. The kind of wholesale plagiarism Biden evidently committed, copying chunks of a law review article into a paper with his name on it, suggests an inclination toward the kind of malfeasance present in the Kinnock incident.
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Sutton, Jonathan Beecher Field is not going to let Biden get in his way of holding his nose.
Oh, and Craig, Bob has convinced me: not only am I not voting for Michelle Obama, I've decided not to vote for Reverend Wright either.
A big hand for Craig, folks! He's here all week!
May our nation continue to survive the kerfuffle with an election every 4 years.
Also sounds like what some Greens were saying in 2000, against the claim that Nader might end up throwing the election to Bush. But I would have to disagree with you, Craig (about how the other guy is never as bad as you think) and point out that Bush turned out to be almost unimaginably worse than most people had, well, imagined.
As for McCain, this is also just simply not a "six vs. half dozen" election: I agree with Andrew Sullivan, who warns of the dangers of "a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years." http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/america-against.html
Here is a man (McCain) who clearly loves power more than he loves honor or truth (is there any position he espoused in 2000 that he has not now reversed?), who once claimed to despise Rovian tactics but who has now embraced them, who swore there would be no Swift boating but now won't denounce Corsi's hit job of a book, filled with patent falsehoods though it is. McCain once stood on principle, until the focus groups showed him he couldn't win that way.
Given these character flaws, and given as well our consistently weak Congress and the precedent of the current administration's hatred of both democracy and the Constitution they perjured themselves by swearing to defend, I really believe that a McCain presidency poses a grave peril to the nation we love.
Oh, and thanks for letting the sarcasm slide. Having seen your rifle, I wouldn't want to get on your bad side. :)
Take care.
Obama is smart, academically, and has shown initiative and a disciplined search for his goal. I read in the Economist that he was for 12 years a part of the faculty at the U of Chicago law school, if not a full time member. I don't know how he scraped together the money to live, with all his political work for free, and social work, but I suspect the white maternal grandparents might have had a much softer spot in their hearts for him and his sister than they did his mother, and he just possibly could have inherited some dough. That his wife Michelle was a hot rod corporate lawyer is a way to pay some bills. Her brother, the new basketball coach at Oregon State, was a successful broker turned basketball coach at great financial loss. I have to respect his moral compass and desire to follow his heart. If his sister shares some of those values, and is with Obama because he, too, is a like thinker, then all might not be lost to a very green rookie in the big leagues from single A ball in one season. It is the sophomore year slump that has me worried. I will probably vote, holding my nose, for McCain. The Oligarchs of the Environment have too much money invested in Democrats and none in Republicans, so the least I can do is to try to level that field just a teensy, weensy little tiny bit.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. You've clearly considered the situation carefully. Can you direct me to a quote in which Obama claims literally to have an "impoverished" upbringing?
As for the financial struggles he described his grandmother having in his speech last night, this sounds realistic to me, whether he attended a good private school or not. I know because I went to one myself, one of the best in D.C., at a time when my family essentially had one income, and not a large one at that. As you say, there is scholarship help, and often schools like these want to have a wide range of diversity, including economic, so they'll take a hit on tuition. (Very few students pay full tuition at a lot of private high schools and universities; basically the few truly rich students subsidize the school's ability to have a wide-randing student body.)