He's such a bitter old man

It's almost sad. In the last few days, John McCain has destroyed what small credibility he had left with his demented ranting and proved himself to be little more than an aging, hapless sad sack. Of course our sadistic media invited him to the Sunday bobblehead gossipfest. (Exclusive! Must credit Meet the Press!) Wherein, McCain spit out this bitter nonsense:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested on Sunday that President Obama should send former President Bill Clinton to lead cease fire talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

"We need a person of enormous prestige and influence to have these parties sit down together as an honest broker," McCain said on CBS's “Face the Nation”.

Because the sitting President of the United States has no prestige. Which is why that sour old Senator sold his soul to try to attain the office.

No surprise McCain is trying to latch on to the Gaza crisis though. The now fallen Saint Petraeus betrayed him the hearings, testifying to the glaring lack of "there" in Benghazi. This left Mr. "WannaBePresident" McCain with nothing much to say immediately afterward.



He had to wait until his keepers told him how to react. The next day, McCain confirmed he would continue his inane vendetta against Susan Rice:

Asked Saturday at a press conference at the Halifax International Security Forum if anything he was told by Petraeus would change his assessment of what Rice knew and the statements she made, McCain said, "No, because I knew it was a terrorist attack from the beginning. People don't go to spontaneous demonstrations with mortars and RPGs."

Yep. Mr. "shoulda been president dammit" McCain knows all the things. Who could forget this priceless moment in October of 2008 at the presidential debates.



Astounding that even Republicans didn't want to elect this guy.

Grumpy Gramps McCain still a sore loser

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man. ~John McCain, August 15, 2009

Once he was a hero, revered by many for his Maverick ways. Now he's just a small and bitter old man impotently flailing in failed attempts to land a meaningful blow against his political betters. His stature diminishes before our eyes, as he struggles to regain some relevance, succeeding only in looking more the doddering fool by the minute.

But although McCain had time to speak on the Senate floor and on television about the lack of information provided to Congress about the attack, he didn't attend the classified briefing for senators Wednesday given to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which he is a member.

He's not the only Republican grandstanding for the cameras while failing to do their job.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), another Homeland Security committee member who was on television complaining about the lack of Benghazi information, also did not show up for the Wednesday hearing. Paul did a CNN interview from the Capitol building Wednesday in which said he had questions about the anti-Islam video, the lack of Marines in Libya, and diplomatic security. At one point he says, "I don't know enough of the details." [...]

"If you want answers, a good first step is to show up and ask a question," an administration official told The Cable. "That's what a senator does."

McCain's spokesperson said it was a "scheduling error." Took them a while to come up with that excuse. McCain didn't handle speaking for himself well at all.

I have to tell you something that just happened on Capitol Hill, and that is our senate producer Ted Barrett just ran into John McCain and asked about something that we’re hearing from Democrats, which is John McCain is calling for more information to Congress, but he had a press conference yesterday instead of going to a closed briefing where administration officials were giving more information. Well, Ted Barrett asked John McCain about that, and it was apparently an intense very angry exchange and McCain simply would not comment on it at all.

It's unclear to me why Republicans think it's good politics to make Susan Rice the villian of their imaginary scandal. When McCain takes cheap shots against her intellect, the obvious comparisons are inevitable.

Also, one of the most irritating, and little noticed comments Grumpy Gramps made about this whole ludicrous fauxrage, was that nobody died in Iran-Contra. Dennis G. makes short work of that fallacy. In fact, hundreds of thousands ultimately died because of horrendously bad, real life choices made in that era of Republican foreign policy. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you, McCain defended Condi Rice for her "misstatements" about Iraq and hundreds of thousands died because of that ill begotten invasion.

Bi-partisan support for Obama

Under the Willard Romney rules for using out of context quotes in campaign ads, by rights, Team Obama should air this on a continuous loop. They won't, and it's clearly marked as a fake ad, but nonetheless it deserves to be widely disseminated if only for the great production values.



You'll recall this a play off McCain's Freudian slip the other night. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long to be produced. Internets are usually quicker on the draw. [Via Anne Laurie]

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McCain's Freudian slip

I usually ignore these momentary mental lapses because hell, they can happen to anybody. I might confess to having a few myself. But this one is very funny. McCain, on the stump for Romney this week, forgets which candidate he's supporting.



Admit, it crossed my mind that McCain may secretly be hoping Romney tanks. In fact, I've been wondering why McCain is on the stump for Willard at all. Quite a bit of bad blood between them from the last time around. Figure he must be hoping for a Cabinet appointment. Maybe Secretary of Defense? [Via TPM]

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Father's Day

By Capt. Fogg

Things change, everyone gets older. You start to wonder how many more father's days will pass while you still have a father to spend it with. It's good then, to see how some things never change; things like the bitter, miserable, vicious lies that spew from the GOP. Take the current Elmer Fudd of the Party, John McCain, the tortured war hero who didn't have the courage to stand up to the party's support of torture. Take John, who is making this Father's Day so much happier by blaming the Arizona wildfires on illegal immigrants rather than on the drought.

But he has substantial evidence, which he will, no doubt, reveal eventually, or not reveal or simply forget about after the wildfire of hate has got beyond control. Remember when Mexicans were bringing leprosy across the border? Many will long remember Lou Dobbs' accusations but not the lack of evidence and perhaps the wildfire libel will stick long after McCain's slide into dementia becomes all too obvious.

Well thanks John, for all you do and for reminding us of Republican fathers long gone like Joe McCarthy with their vaporous claims of "evidence" and I'm sure your legacy will stink long after you're gone.

McCain's Lament

To be fair this is probably the most gracious op-ed McCain has ever written. Most people are quoting the positive remarks he made about President Obama being a real American with the best interests of the country at heart. But much of it still falls into whiny old codger territory. Like this bit:

Political leaders are not and cannot reasonably be expected to be indifferent to the cruelest calumnies aimed at their character. Imagine how it must feel to have watched one week ago the incomprehensible massacre of innocents committed by someone who had lost some essential part of his humanity, to have shared in the heartache for its victims and in the admiration for those who acted heroically to save the lives of others - and to have heard in the coverage of that tragedy voices accusing you of complicity in it.

Yes John, let's just imagine. I'm sure the poverty stricken people whose safety net your party relentlessly attempts to shred will be able to relate to being falsely accused of being too coddled. All those unemployed Americans who listen to Republicans refuse to extend benefits to them on the grounds they're too lazy to look for work, or too proud to take menial minimum wage jobs, can surely empathize with unfair accusations. And the millions more who won't be able to afford health insurance once your party passes the repeal of "job killing" health care reform are just waiting in line to soothe your hurt feelings over the grossly insulting suggestion that perhaps false rhetoric which demonizes political opponents contributes to a toxic social environment.

On a vaguely related and lighter note, the Republican National Committee chose Reince Priebus as their new leader. I have a feeling he won't be nearly as entertaining as Steele was but the funny name lends itself to some dry humor. As pointed out to me by my friend Jeffram, who didn't originate it but passed it on; if you take the vowels out of his name, it spells RNC PR BS. Yeah it's a cheap shot, but it is kind of funny in a painfully apt sort of way.

Angry, bitter, old McCain

I'm so old I remember a time when I rather respected John McCain. It was many years ago when he seemed to act on principle and deserved his "maverick" status. All that's gone now. Losing the presidential race changed him and it's beyond mere partisan hackery now. His obvious bitterness at being denied the Oval Office and his sneering disdain for the man who won the contest has morphed into an evil thing. He's become a filthy cockroach skittering far from the fringe edge of civil society and feasting on the offal tossed in the gutters by tea party "patriots."

I didn't see his temper tantrum yesterday, but I have no doubt Steve Benen describes his metamorphosis well:

This isn't another "Whatever happened to the old McCain?" piece, which we've all seen too many times in recent years. Rather, this is to suggest McCain has done more than make the transition from "maverick" to petulant right-winger. Yesterday, the man waving his arms on the Senate floor was a misanthropic hack who's abandoned basic decency, and trashed any hopes he might have had about a respectable legacy.

Sad really that he embraced this dung strewn path. He could have been gracious in defeat and done much good in his waning years not just for his own legacy, but for our country. Instead he's become the kind of monstrously deformed creature that is so painful to view, we prefer to avert our eyes rather than be forced to acknowledge his presence among us.

Tire Swing Down - Updated

Years from now we'll be asking, "Where were you the day McCain totalled the Straight Talk Express?"

"I never considered myself a maverick." ~John McCain

The empath in me finds this so horribly sad, I can't even snark about it.

Update: Is it dementia or just dissembling?



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Please Make McCain Go Away

Will somebody please tell the media that McCain lost the election and has absolutely nothing of consequence to add to any discussion. Bad enough he's going to be on Meet the Press again this Sunday, for the 20th effin' time, but ABC gives him a big piece on their website today after he made an idiot of himself at yesterday's summit. The old geezer warns that "passing a Senate bill with 51 votes in what's called budget reconciliation would have 'cataclysmic effects.'" What's he going to do? Start farting loudly on the Senate floor?

McCain has no particular power or importance in the Senate since he lost the election in a landslide over a year ago. He's a sad and bitter loser. I know the media love that tire swing at his ranch but the rest of America is sick and tired of hearing his lastest paraphrase of "get off my lawn." Enough already.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

John McCain Puts Afghanis First

This slipped under the radar during the holidays, and it's still worth archiving. McCain and his sidekick Lieberman were on the road last month, praising the US military unmanned drone attacks. But it was this quote from McCain that caught my eye:

"So we will be seeking both the funding and the policy that would mean that the Afghan military can be built up to a total of 400,000 troops in order to fulfill the responsibilities and meet the challenges that they face," he said.

This was around the same time of the release of this McCain campaign ad.

A narrator calls McCain “Arizona’s last line of defense” against Obama’s agenda and says McCain leads the charge against “ridiculously unaffordable ideas like government-run health care.”

So GOP Johnny wants full funding for the Iraqi Afghani army, but doesn't want the US government to spend any money on Americans' health care. Except, one assumes, his own that has been pretty much provided by the government from birth.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Blaming John McCain

Sully posts on something I was thinking last night as well. While I'm continuing my embargo on reading about Sarah Palin, I do of course read the headlines and I see the McCain camp denying the allegations she makes in her book about the campaign. I tend to believe them. She started her stint in the national spotlight with lies and hatemongering and stuck to that deceitful script for the duration. The truth and facts don't serve her purposes.

The point Sully makes is that John McCain is responsible for this, or more accurately it's his irresponsible choice that unleashed this horror on us and no one holds him accountable for it. Thinking back, it was clear to me within 8 hours of googling that Sarah's ladder to success was built of the bloody bodies of the allies she backstabbed for her personal gain. Hard to believe McCain and his team could have been so incompetent as to miss such obvious clues. So why does the media still treat McCain, or anyone involved in that epic show of impossibly bad judgement, as credible commentators -- about anything?

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Wrong-Way McCain

Frank Rich's column in NYT worth a read in full this morning. Shorter version: All the people who were declaring Afghanistan a great success story three years ago, now claim it's a failure and that Obama must escalate.

And yes, he's looking at you John McCain.

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to assert that "we have no choice" but to go all-in on Afghanistan -- rightly or wrongly, presumably -- just as we had in Iraq. Why? "The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse," they wrote. "The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again."

This shameless argument assumes -- perhaps correctly -- that no one in this country remembers anything.

Which I suppose explains why McCain is on my teevee seemingly every single day.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

President McCain

I continue to believe it's because of the barbecues.

Since the president took office, McCain has been on "Meet the Press" twice (July 12 and March 29), "Face the Nation" three times (August 30, April 26, and February 8), CNN's "State of the Union" twice (August 2 and February 15), "Fox News Sunday" three times (July 2, March 8, and January 25), and "This Week" twice (August 23 and May 10).

Eric Boehlert recently checked and found that John Kerry, in the eight months after Bush's second inaugural, made three appearances on the Sunday morning shows. As Boehlert concluded, "[A]fter Kerry lost in November, the press walked away from him. After McCain lost in November, the press still crowds around him."

McCain has no particular relevance in the Congress right now, nor to the national party other than he lost the election by an impressive margin. The key word in the last sentence being "lost" which appears to have escaped the media's notice. When Bush was in office they told us they didn't have Democrats on the bobblehead shows because the GOP was in power. What's their excuse now?

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Throw a great barbecue...

And apparently the major media will eat out of your hand forever.


Just in case you've been missing President McCain in the last 3 hours that he has been missing from your TV, he will once again be on the Sunday morning bobbleheads. You have to wonder why he's become a permanent fixture. As Steven Benen points out, McCain is of no particular consequence on The Hill these days. He doesn't chair any important committees. He hasn't introduced any major legislation. He's not a pivotal vote on the floor. He's not even a Maverick anymore. His recent voting record is one of the best GOP rubberstamps inside the Beltway.

The only possible interesting thing George Stephanopoulos could ask McCain about is this tweet from five days before Libya welcomed the Lockerbie bomber home with a hero's welcome.

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.

Maybe George could ask him what interesting things they talked about while McCain was off conducting a foreign policy tour instead of staying here and dealing with our domestic issues. Sometimes I wonder if McCain remembers he lost the election, but I suppose you can't criticize him too much. The media still treats him like a winner. Maybe he didn't notice the election is over.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

The Three Stooges of Ahmadinejad

What a bunch of maroons. McSame as it ever was.

Three U.S. senators said Thursday they will introduce legislation funding a package of assistance to help get around the Tehran regime's information block.

"The Iranian government recognizes that Internet is a threat to its stranglehold over society and is trying to impose its repressive controls over it," Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said. "The legislation would authorize funds to ensure that Iranians have the hardware, software and other tools to evade the censorship and surveillance of the regime online."

McCain joined fellow Sens. Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, at a news conference to announce the legislation, which they said is an effort to support the Iranian people.

Not helping... The question isn't why are the three amigos so stupid. It's why is the media giving them a microphone? Did they all miss the memo? McCain lost the election precisely because of idiot grandstanding like this.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

McCain enraged over Reagan remarks

Okay, this is just deranged. McCain threatened to block a key Cabinet appointment to Interior because the nominee, David Hayes, said something in 2006 about Ronnie Reagan that Johnny-boy found offensive. And what was this horrible statement, you ask?

In the article, Hayes wrote that “the conservative political agenda in the West is grounded in hoary stereotypes about the region and its people” and that “out of this conservative world view emerges the stereotypical Western man (and it is unquestionably a ‘he’)—a rugged, gun-toting individualist who fiercely guards every man’s right to drill, mine, log, or do whatever he damn well pleases on the land” and that “Like Ronald Reagan before him, President Bush has embraced the Western stereotype to the point of adopting some of its affectations—the boots, brush-clearing, and get-the-government-off-our-backs bravado.”

Yes, you read that correctly. McCain wants to obstruct the appointment because Hayes called St. Ronnie a fake cowboy -- just like Bush. One has to wonder whether McCain became so addicted to the spotlight that he'll say any crazy thing to "win" the news cycle, or whether dementia really is setting in and he's forgotten that in this country, we're allowed to criticize our presidents. Even the dead ones.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

McCain sounds sour note at Obama's summit

I wonder if McCain realizes how silly and petulant he looked at President Obama's fiscal responsibility summit on Monday? Sam has a partial transcript but you really have to watch the full video here to get the full flavor of the sour grapes McCain is choking down with this little quip. It's so obvious he thinks he scored a real zinger in bringing up the presidential helicopter. He gets all puffed up with his own cleverness and then pathetically deflates when Obama righteously outclasses him with his response to the dig.

Why McCain thought it was a good idea to bring up a procurement that Obama had nothing to do with, remains a mystery. It was Bush who ordered the new fleet of 28 planes, including the new helicopter, at a cost of $11 billion dollars. McCain ends up looking not only petty, but like an idiot.

More must reads on this story. The Caucus has the ultimate photo of the event and captures the essence of McCain's bitterness, while watertiger skewers the desiccated old goat along with a bonus jibe at McCain's former running mate, who shared her paranoid fantasies about how the media is "out to get her" yesterday.

It chills the blood to think what disasters that dubious duo would have caused by now had they somehow managed to win the election.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

No room at the table for Palin

President Obama is holding a series of dinners to honor bipartisan champions as part of the festivities for inaugural week. Honorees include Joe Biden, Colin Powell, and John McCain. Notably missing from the McCain guest list is Sarah Palin. John will be introduced by his BFF Linsday Graham.

It's not clear whether she was even invited. I'm guessing if she wasn't, it was by McCain's request. After that last interview I saw, I can't imagine their chilly post-election relations have warmed up very much. I also can't fail to notice that the third Musketeer, Joe Lieberman hasn't been mentioned either. I wonder if he's on the guest list?

The local perspective is at Progressive Alaska and be sure to follow the link to Celtic Diva at that post. It seems our Sarah is playing politics with the stimulus funding and couching her rhetoric with an eye towards the lower 48 at the expense of her own constiutents. They're not happy about it.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News.]

Mac attack - the last gaffes

Everybody is doing retrospectives but I think some of the finer missteps of Campaign 08 have been missed so let me fill in the blanks on McCain who offered some of the most amusing gaffes outside of Bushworld. He started out with so much promise. He was the toast of the media gaggle.


So what went wrong? Well, there was the infamous green screen.


His remark about the economy being sound was definitely a lowlight but this one is often missed.


And of course, there was his unfortunate choice of a running mate. A source of endless amusement that started at the convention.



But my personal all time favorite seems to have been overlooked entirely.


And of course, he invented the Blackberry too. It's unclear whether he ever learned to use it.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News.]

Shunned

I'm predicting this will be the most linked to video of the day.



You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief that they don't have to be polite to him anymore.

On a related note, this is almost as sad. What if John McCain came back to work and no one noticed? That's pretty much what happened. He's lucky that it looks like Gov. Janet Napolitano will be tapped to head DHS. If she had mounted a 2010 challenge for his Senate seat, the numbers didn't look very promising.