Credit to Blue Man in Red District for discovering the background item. Think Progress published it Sept. 29. Read it, here.
Read the Think Progress original, links and all, comments and all.
The big McCain thing was to ride the white horse into Washington, and claim credit for brokering a deal on the bailout package.
Well, the Senate might pass something that the House passes, etc.
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
But the old soldier made a desperate play for credibility. It was a ploy hatched among cynical GOP handlers, amid sinking poll numbers, and with the realities of the stupidity of the prior cynical ploy, the Palin choice, finally sinking in with America.
So, is the McCain candidacy more or less credible now, Palin and all, statesmanlike deal broker posturing and all? You decide that. I cannot see any way to read the truth in the story, other than that the man was entirely disingenuous and scheming to use a serious financial situation to try to get his sorry self elected.
It is dishonesty. It is the moral equivalent of willingly doing propaganda broadcasting for the Viet Cong while held in Hanoi captivity. It is deliberately and counterproductively getting in the way of a congress trying to wrap up business and get to campaigning, but considering a financial fall-out problem in ways where the last thing needed was a sorry old man interfering in order to try to dishonestly energize a sorry old campaign.
The Keating man rides again, ...
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The one unfortunate thing, Obama will be stuck with the mop-up after Bush-Cheney, and the GOP in Congress will be just as obstructionist as ever. It will be a GOP mess, with the GOP in the way of fixing it. Same old, same old.
The related earlier shifty weasel posting is here. More of Honest John, here.
And if you are at all inclined to believe there is any real honesty in that McCain advertising hooey about, "He took on Big Oil. She fought the Bridge to Nowhere," then read more of the truth -- Politico reports it, here:
Sarah Palin supported the “bridge to nowhere” long after it had become an icon of wasteful federal spending.
By the time she held up a T-shirt proclaiming her support for the bridge during her 2006 campaign for governor, it already had been derided across the Lower 48 as a monument to waste — including by Palin’s current running mate, Arizona Sen. John McCain.
Palin was campaigning for the votes of Alaskans who wanted the bridge and who felt aggrieved by all the criticism it had attracted. The shirt’s message said she was one of them, not one of those critics who didn’t even know the local ZIP code. [...]In fact, Palin supported two Alaska bridges: the planned Gravina Island Bridge and its even costlier sister, the Knik Arm Bridge. The congressional fight over them had come during a time of indictments and guilty pleas for lobbyists and lawmakers. The parade of convictions left the clear impression that corruption in Washington was spiraling out of control and that pork barrel spending was at the heart of it. [...]
McCain Picture from the Think Progress posting. Bridge routing + Ketchikan, AK photo, from Politico posting.
____________UPDATE_____________
Here is why thinking people should believe John McCain is either defectively wired, or is disdainful toward thinking people. A McCain apologist (Lindsey Graham who independent of McCain is fully able to pin the needle on a bozo meter) is quoted:
“But here are the facts, and I’m not overselling anything. The fact is that the House Republicans were not in the mix at all. John didn’t phone this one in. He came and actually did something. … You can’t phone something like this in. Thank God John came back.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 9/28/08
Then, we see this:
Of course, though McCain made much of his rushing back to Washington after Friday’s debate, it turns out that he never went to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers stayed late working on the bailout. The New York Times reports that McCain was at his apartment “until 12:30 p.m. Saturday, when he emerged and made a one-minute trip in his motorcade to his campaign headquarters around the corner.” A McCain aide explained that “he can effectively do what he needs to do by phone.”
Better yet, a reported simple sequence, two sentences in order, McCain himself speaking:
Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame, it's time to fix the problem.
Saying, in effect, Obama's partisanship is to blame, but we should not cast blame. Then, to assure fixing blame against Obama the McCain campaign is reported to have released a statement, which, two hours later, McCain himself reportedly repudiated:
September 29, 2008, 5:19PM
John McCain just now delivered a statement to the press about the bailout collapse, and called for the finger-pointing to stop -- barely two hours after his campaign directly blamed Obama in unequivocal terms.
"Now is not the time to fix the blame." McCain said. "It's time to fix the problem."
But at around 3:30 P.M., the McCain campaign blasted out a statement that fixed the blame directly on Obama.
"Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill," the statement said. "This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country."
Of course, it's already been established repeatedly that McCain isn't responsible for what his own campaign does, so nothing to see here.
In all seriousness, this seems to show either that the McCain campaign realizes how badly it erred in launching such an attack on Obama in the midst of today's crisis news, or that the meltdown's political strains have knocked the McCain team so badly off its game that we're way beyond erratic now and are rushing headlong into unhinged.
See also, here. Obama is reported as conciliatory, working for consensus. McCain's people reportedly are in partisan attack mode.
McCain, the next day put the blame-game burden on history, "History will judge who was to blame, and who wasn't ..." so it was not his staff poisoning the well the day before, it was "history"? History is in the facts, and they can be judged now.
"From the minute John McCain suspended his campaign and arrived in Washington to address this crisis, he was attacked by the Democratic leadership: Senators Obama and Reid, Speaker Pelosi and others. Their partisan attacks were an effort to gain political advantage during a national economic crisis. By doing so, they put at risk the homes, livelihoods and savings of millions of American families.
"Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill.
"Just before the vote, when the outcome was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded partisan speech and poisoned the outcome.
"This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country."
In effect, the GOP presidential campaign wants people to believe that Sen. Obama, and Democrats are responsibie for a failure of the House to pass the Bush-Paulson bailout proposal, in light of this:
It is a shame, Obama and that Democratic majority did not energize the majority of those GOP House members to rise above partisanship, isn't it? No wonder they are to blame, when McCain "suspended" his political activity to go to Washington to make things happen -- and then Obama undercut that by not energizing enough of Sen. McCain's and President Bush's people to deliver on the McCain promise.
And pigs fly, while voting in a negative GOP majority for which Sen. Obama is responsibie. Sure. John, tell me another good lie, please.
Either McCain has been for twenty years in the Senate and somewhere along the way staff's preempted the power to speak for him without prior approval and has been covering for him as with Strom Thurmond in his declining years, or McCain's disrespect for consistency, never mind for truth, is limitless.
First he blames Obama, then says don't cast blame? Nevermind, looking ever at the man in the mirror when shaving in the morning, and saying, "Were you ever inconsistent or at fault?" Not only silent that way, in facing the man in the mirror, McCain's silent "leadership" interestingly was reported at the White House, when he, Obama, and congressional leadership were summoned to meet with Bush for a bipartisan caucus in hope of securing House bailout approval.
Bush turned to McCain, who joked, “The longer I am around here, the more I respect seniority.” McCain then turned to Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to speak first.
Boehner was blunt. The plan Paulson laid out would not win the support of the vast majority of House Republicans. It had been improved on the edges, with an oversight board and caps on the compensation of participating executives. But it had to be changed at the core. He did not mention the insurance alternative, but Democrats did. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, pressed Boehner hard, asking him if he really intended to scrap the deal and start again.
No, Boehner replied, he just wanted his members to have a voice. Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.
McCain is standing in quicksand saying "Follow me" and then silent before his party's president, not saying "Follow me" and in fact not saying a thing either way.
Not surprisingly, recent polls now reflect the Obama lead in key states increasing, with an 11% gap between the two, in Minnesota.
How will John explain that? How will History judge it? Early November cannot arrive soon enough, can it?