Posts Tagged ‘Palin’

John McCain: Liar, liar, pants on fire

April 13, 2010

John McCain is a big fat liar. It’s sad how someone who has been so widely admired can tell such a whopper. McCain told Newsweek, “I never considered myself a maverick.”

No, except for his autobiographical Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him. And except for all his campaign ads calling himself and Sarah Palin mavericks. And thousands of times during the 2008 campaign.

McCain is in  the fight of his Senate career: J. D. Hayworth is mounting a serious challenge for the Republican nomination, and the outcome is in doubt. To increase his chances against a challenge from the right McCain seems to have decided he needed to run away from his past and from his self-identification as a maverick.

Sad. And revolting.

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Posted in Ethics-general, Politics | 3 Comments »

Palin was the best part of the Tea Party convention, the audience the worst

February 14, 2010

Sarah Palin gave a rousing speech at the Tea Party convention, raking and mocking President Obama with zingers like “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for ya?” The crowd enthused, having paid $350 to hear the speech live, and the left’s commentators tut-tutted over Palin’s writing notes on her hand to help her remember her key points. All in good fun.

But there was a truly ugly side of the convention. Tea Partiers can no longer pass off the birthers as a tiny group of nuts that aren’t representative of true Tea Partiers. Not after the crowd’s wild enthusiasm for Tom Tancredo’s keynote speech. Ex-congressman Tancredo (R-CO) explained that “Barack Hussein Obama” was only elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote.” [Wild cheers]

“People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.” [More wild cheers]

I’m not sure who he was referring to. Perhaps it was Latinos and African-Americans who couldn’t have voted had there been a literacy test—like in the good old days when blacks were turned away from polls all over the South, no matter how literate they were, because the point of the tests was to turn them away.

I’m pretty sure, however, what the crowd was cheering. It was that Obama voters were others, a different species, not even entitled to be part of the American system. The crowd responded to hate speech with cheers.

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Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »