Welcome To The Hippie Dome

Jack Cafferty:

The Bush presidency is thankfully over...but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won't go away.

From Nancy ("Impeachment is off the table") Pelosi to President Barack ("I want to look forward, not backward") Obama, the country is being poorly served by their Democratic government. And on this subject President Obama is dead wrong [...]

If the Republicans were serious about restoring their reputation, they would join the call for a special prosecutor to be appointed so that at long last justice can be done.

It's too late for George W. Bush to resign the presidency. But it's not too late to put the people responsible for this national disgrace in prison.

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board, the same one that just hired John Yoo:

There is much more to learn about mistreatment of detainees, so it's unfortunate that the president on Wednesday reversed his promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas. For example, a full accounting is still needed on the detainees like Libi who vanished into secret prisons under rendition policies.

More sunlight on this dark chapter in the nation's history is the best way to understand what happened and not repeat its mistakes.

Lanny frickin' Davis:

I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.

But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.

His insistence on putting himself on multiple TV programs and conservative radio talk shows, not only defending torture but offering the defense that it worked, has changed my mind. Not only that — he went on to attack Mr. Obama as weakening the United States in the war on terrorism because Mr. Obama immediately announced that torture would no longer be allowed [...]

It reminds me of Gary Hart's reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. Mr. Hart denied the charge — and then dared the media to catch him. Well, they took him up on his dare (specifically, the Miami Herald did). And they caught him — at least in a compromising situation that led to his withdrawal from the campaign.

So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.

Welcome to the hippie dome, guys. Don't bogart the joints.

Update on McCain Cross Story and his Pinocchio Problem - Cafferty mentions it on CNN

Time for an update on McCain's growing problem as a serial exaggerator and liar, a facet of this campaign that has gone almost uncovered by the traditional media. Today, just a half-hour ago, we had the very first major media mention of his
"cross in the sand" story being potentially copied from a story attributed to Alexander Solzhenitstyn. Jack Cafferty read a letter on the air mentioning this (transcript and/or YouTube). Cafferty didn't editorialize about it but just read the allegation from one of his emailers. The rest of the program continued as if this wasn't uttered by anyone, but it's starting to get out there. A religion blogger for the Dallas Morning News brought it up but tried to dismiss it:

Bottom line for me: It's not like he came up with the story for Warren's forum. He's told it for many years, even used it in his political ads. Seems a bit off-flavor to accuse him now of making it up, absent some compelling evidence.

It's true if he's lied about it for a while? You're only allowed to challenge a comment if you discover refuting information closer to when the statement was made? Odd.

In addition, this came up in a Washington Post online chat with Jonathan Weisman:

...And then saying that all the moderate/liberal justices on the Supreme Court have got to go was unhelpful. And while I thought that McCains's "cross in the sand" story sounded odd, it now turns out that McCain stole that story from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archepelago." Will anyone at The Post be investigating this fairy tale, since it appears that McCain first told it Saturday night?

washingtonpost.com: Is McCain Now Copying Solzhenitsyn? (CQ Politics, Aug. 17)

Jonathan Weisman: Well, now that you mention it, sure. Let's go for it.

Stay tuned.

There's also some new information, unearthed by No More Mr. Nice Blog:

The Nightingale's Song, a 1995 book about five graduates of the Naval Academy, one of whom is McCain -- contains a chapter on, of all things, three Christmases McCain spent in captivity. (Thanks to Amazon's 'Search This Book' feature, and the fact that the chapter in question is only four pages long, I've read it, and you can too.) It contains no mention of this incident at all.

On the first Christmas (1968), the North Vietnamese stages a church service with photographers documenting it, apparently for public consumption. McCain decided to ruin the picture by swearing, talking about torture, etc. On the last (1970), the big news was that he was given a cellmate: "the perfect Christmas present." Christmas of 1969 is more interesting. "The Cat", who was, according to McCain's 1973 piece, "the man who up until late 1969 was in charge of all the POW camps in Hanoi", comes to see McCain in his cell. They talk; he says that McCain must miss his family; McCain concludes that he "had no hidden agenda", and just wanted to talk. The Cat asks about Christmas; he explains about Tet. At the end:

"The Cat got up to go.

"Merry Christmas", he said.

"Thank you", said McCain."

To my mind, it's a lot harder to believe that McCain never mentioned the story about the cross to Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale's Song, than to believe he didn't mention it in his 1973 piece. Timberg interviewed McCain, and says that McCain spent "a lot of time" with him. He was, moreover, writing about Christmases in captivity. If mcCain didn't mention it at the time, that would be very odd.

To be clear, I don't completely care about this. But this is catnip to the media, yet the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is actually pronounced in the case of McCain, while thin and circumstantial in the case of Gore. I've been chronicling McCain's Pinocchio problem for a little while now. He claims he created the Do Not Call list. He asserts to a Pittsburgh radio station that he recited the lineup of the Pittsburgh Steelers to his captors when he has for years used the Green Bay Packers in the same anecdote. Just in the last few days, he said at Rick Warren's forum that he would never have nominated Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter when he voted for all three of them, and he today took credit for Jim Webb's GI Bill when he actively opposed it. He has lied outright to the entire nation throughout this campaign, and the media has no interest in building this narrative despite the wealth of evidence.

The cross in the sand story is only a symptom. It's a test for whether the media has the ability to cover Democrats and Republicans on a level playing field. If this is confined to Cafferty and Olbermann, they have failed.

UPDATE: First of all, the McCain campaign has had to deny the cross story, which is a victory in and of itself. Second, the denial, that a fellow POW somehow remembers McCain saying this, is kind of hilarious for one sentence:

(Orson) Swindle, who was held as a prisoner of war along with McCain, tells the McCain Report that he heard this particular story from McCain "when we first moved in together." That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though "time blurred" and he couldn't be sure.

"My friend Mr. Swindle, would you be willing to say with plausible deniability that you think you remember me saying this at some time in the past?"

"If it means an ambassadorship, sure!"

Second of all, Sen. McCain's pants appear to be on fire. Again.

During Saturday's presidential forum at Rick Warren's California megachurch, John McCain was asked to name the "three wisest people" he would "rely heavily on" if elected president. He didn't cite close confidantes Phil Gramm and Randy Scheunemann, possibly because they have gotten McCain into trouble politically. Instead McCain chose Gen. David Petraeus; former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, one of his economic advisers; and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a leading figure in the civil rights movement [...]

But even though McCain has now repeatedly cited Lewis as a role model and potential adviser, McCain has not established a relationship with the Georgia Democrat in the 22 years they have served in Congress together. At the time of McCain's Selma speech, a Lewis associate told my colleague David Corn that McCain has never been close to Lewis. Lewis was not told about McCain's speech in Selma in advance, nor was he invited to attend.

In response to McCain's latest invocation of his name, Rep. Lewis said in a statement requested by Mother Jones, "I cannot stop one human being, even a presidential candidate, from admiring the courage and sacrifice of peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or making comments about it." But, he added, "Sen. McCain and I are colleagues in the US Congress, not confidantes. He does not consult me. And I do not consult him."

The Power of Headlines

I just heard Jack Cafferty discussing a new LA Times poll about immigration, highlighting the headline of the story, that 1 in 3 Americans would deny social services to illegal immigrants. I wonder if anyone will tell him that 33% is a pretty low number, from a political standpoint. The headline of the Times story belies the result of the poll, which is that the majority of Americans favor comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship for those working in this country already. And what Cafferty also doesn't realize is that 60% is a bigger number than 33%.

For all the demagoguery and recent panic in Democratic circles, it turns out according to a new LAT/Bloomberg poll that the basic principles of comprehensive reform are still popular: "About 60% of Democrats, Republicans and independents support 'a path to citizenship by registering, paying a fine, getting fingerprinted, and learning English, among other requirements.'" As Marc Ambinder points out this is the thing that opponents call "amnesty" so even if "amnesty" is unpopular, the thing that "amnesty" denotes is popular.

The fact that only a small fringe of Americans would deny social services to immigrants, after years of demagoguery, is remarkable. The Lou Dobbs fringe of this country is loud, but not a majority. This poll proves it. But because the headline was written in such a way to obscure this fact, lazy broadcast media figures characterized the poll in the opposite way. This is the result of a media that takes its cues so much from the first five words of a print story instead of the whole story.