Right, so I’ve been increasingly agitated at how the election coverage so far seems to not only be tipped toward covering Obama’s every word and jumping on any perceived inaccuracies whereas McCain has remained relatively unscathed.
One of my friends started a document entitled “Aspects of John McCain And His Campaign That Would Derail Obama If They Were True About Him” and lists the following:
His Involvement In The S&L Scandal/Bailout of the Late 1980s
Phil Gramm
link
The former senator’s suggestion that much of Americans’ economic pain and uncertainty is psychosomatic came in an interview with the conservative Washington Times. “You’ve heard of mental depression. This is a mental recession,” he told the paper. “We have sort of become a nation of whiners. … You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.”
link
Now, however, Gramm’s work for the Swiss-based investment bank UBS is coming under scrutiny as contradicting McCain’s policy that bars lobbyists from his campaign.
Gramm started work at UBS as a vice chairman in January 2003, immediately after leaving Congress. A month earlier, he had shifted $2 million in campaign contributions from the Friends of Phil Gramm Political Action Committee to a UBS PAC, a move that let the bank increase its visibility with lawmakers.
….
As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in 1999, Gramm pushed through legislation undoing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act by eliminating the wall between heavily regulated commercial banks and lightly regulated investment banks.
Some economists blame this deregulation for contributing to the rapid growth in sub-prime mortgage lending, its securitization into investment bundles and thus the recent crisis in the mortgage markets that has pushed the U.S. economy to the brink of a major recession.
In 2000, Gramm shepherded through another anti-regulatory law that lightened up government oversight of energy-commodity trading. Houston-based Enron and other energy traders exploited the changes in a scheme to drive up California energy prices and gouge consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.
His Marriage:
Divorced his first wife, but started schtupping someone else first.
link
“After a whirlwind courtship, John asked Cindy to marry him. But there were some details to clear out of the way. McCain needed a divorce from his wife of 14 years, Carol, who had been badly injured in a car accident while McCain languished in Hanoi.”
Seems like maybe he was having an affair with a lobbyist.
Cindy is rich, and he uses her money for his campaign, but she won’t release her tax returns.
Cindy is out of touch with Middle America.
link
Cindy profits from the dismantling of America’s heritage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/mccains-to-profit-from-an_n_112645.html
Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, is set to get a huge payout from the sale of Anheuser-Busch Cos., brewer of Budweiser and hundreds of other brands, to Belgian beverage giant InBev NV.
McCain, the heiress to the third-largest Anheuser distributor, owns at a minimum $1 million in the American company, according to John McCain’s Senate financial disclosure forms, which don’t offer any more information for large assets held by his spouse.
His Warmongering
He makes tasteless jokes that disregard people of other countries.
link
Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
He quickly caught himself, saying “I meant that as a joke” as his wife, Cindy, poked him in the back.
His Flipfloppery
* He was against torture before he was for it.
* He was for the 4th amendment before he was against it.
* He was against the confederate flag in SC before he was OK with it.
* Opposing MLK day as an official state holiday.
* Stating that he would not have voted for the very immigration bill that he co-sponsored.
* Voting for the privatization of Social Security. And subsequently claiming that you never supported privatization.
* Opposing making the bush tax cuts permanent. And then, in order to court your base, insisting that the tax cuts be made permanent.
His verbal gaffes
* Mistaking Sunnis with Shiites – three times within a 24 hour period.
* Referring to the Czech Republic as “Czechoslovakia” – three times since October of last year.
His Ties With Religious Radicals
All The Lobbyists His Campaign Has Had To Let Go
Remember, the above is a list of things that would derail Obama’s campaign but have not even been major talking points about McCain.
But let me be clear: I think that all candidates should be allowed the occasional mistake, and I don’t believe that it’s fair to criticize a politician for every last thing they have ever said or did, however it is grossly unfair to have excoriated one presidential candidate for, say, admitting to have once smoked marijuana, while giving another presidential candidate a pass for having been busted drunk driving (and strong evidence that he used cocaine) writing it off as “youthful indiscretions.” Either you pass them both off as youthful indiscretions, or you flog the hell out of both of them.
The media also did a hatchet-job on John Kerry for being flip-flopper, yet McCain has switched his position on a number of issues to make him more attractive to mainstream Republican voters. So one is negatively labeled for changing positions, whereas the other is using it as a political tactic?
Again, I’m not even talking about policy here, I’m talking about the media’s treatment of the candidates, and it ain’t a case of the “liberal media” making things cozy for the Democrats either.
Current Mood: Frustrated | 
2 Comments
Agree whole-heartedly. A guy whose spent years in politics, with votes for and against the same issues. A guy whose political past is shorter, has been involved in setting very little policy, yet is being hammered. I have two theories, and both may be true. One…McCain is boring. If you were a journalist, who would you follow? Two…while McCain is busy spending his money on focus groups finding which of the negative terms and stories stick the best, Obama is fine-tuning a few speeches that we’ll tell our grandkids about, rising above the minutia.
I am all about “the McCain is boring” theory. He’s just not interesting whereas Obama, regardless of whether you like him or not, is just naturally more interesting. I think Al Gore suffered from being a pretty boring candidate, too, and we all know how that worked out.
I mentioned awhile back that not all rhetoric is empty. Because Obama is a natural-born orator, I really do think he has the power to open people’s minds to different ways of thinking. It seems to me not only effective way, but perhaps the only way, to reverse the entrenched system of party politics we have going in this country today.