Who Is The Real Joe McCain?

[News item: John McCain's brother Joe, stuck in traffic, calls 911]

911 Dispatcher: 911. State your emergency.

Caller: The wheels are coming off the [expletive] bus!

911 Dispatcher: Has there been an accident?

Caller: No, it's no accident; Mom always liked him best...

911 Dispatcher: Sir, please state the nature of your emergency.

Caller: I'm stuck in traffic! You'd think after buying $150,000 worth of clothes for that trailer-park trollop and arranging for Cindy to get her own cell tower, he could at least helicopter me out of here!

911 Dispatcher: Sir, 911 is for emergencies only.

Caller: It is an emergency! Don't you know what's going to happen to my taxes if That One gets into office?

911 Dispatcher: Sir, as one of the 95%, I hardly think--

Caller: Don't you know who I am? I'm Joe The Plumb--, I mean Joe McCain! Damn!

911 Dispatcher: Sir, are you the Joe McCain who works at Kelly's Roast Beef on Revere Beach and keeps calling 911 about the sea monsters?

Caller: [expletive] you! (hangs up)

911 Dispatcher: 911. State your emergency.

Caller: Hello, I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC, because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon...

[cross-posted at Blue Mass Group]

A Bridge Too Far Towards Nowhere

(CNN) -- Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone "one step too far" in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

"In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove -- the man who held the previous record -- said McCain's ads have gone too far," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, in a statement sent to reporters minutes after Rove's on-air comments.

If there's anything we've learned about conservatives, their eventual downfall is that they never know -- before the fact -- when to draw the line; whether it's if the country has gone far enough to the right, how much less regulation of financial institutions is too little, how many lies to tell about a political opponent, or how unqualified for office a running mate can be, there's not the perspective to know when they are about to overreach, so the good news is that, inevitably, they do.

It's just that waiting for the inevitable can be excruciatingly painful.

Earth To McCain: Get A F#%*g Map Already

While Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama put John McCain -- the presumptive foreign-policy expert of the two -- further back on his heels by essentially reaching an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki on a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (see aimai's post, below), McCain was burnishing his foreign-policy resumé:

Asked on ABC about the uptick in violence by Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, he replied: "We have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border."

Iraq borders several nations, but Pakistan is not among them...

Dead Beat Dad Borrows Kid's College Fund to bet "sure thing" long-shot.

In "Betting the Spread" Mark Schmitt takes a stab at explaining just how deeply McCain has screwed the American Taxpayer and his status as an ethical human being in order to finance his campaign. Essentially, he has bet the use of public monies he has not officially accepted so that he can leverage private loans to run his campaign. If he loses, he promises to stay in the race long enough to take public money to pay off his debt to his private lenders. If he wins he bets that he will receive enough private money to pay off his lenders and, ultimately, refuse the public money so that he can receive more money as a corporate shill. So he's used the public financing system as collateral in a private loan scheme--or, more accurately, he has robbed the pennies of jane and john taxpayer so that if he looks like a good bet the Olins and Pews and Scaife's can pour money into a sure thing.

The problem for people who don't love a "straight shooting" maverick is that the whole thing is just too complicated and runs too far counter the McCain legend to make a dent in the myth, let alone the campaign on the man. This is the place that the long term work of bloggers on coming up with new ways to understand the GOP would come in handy. I'm thinking of all the work done on notions of "credit card conservatives" and "dead beat dads" that populated blog discussions during the last election cycle. Unfortunately for the left there simply is no orchestrated "iron triangle" to put these ideas into play. Even as we see all around us evidence of just how this teetering pile of loans and self dealing ultimately results in economic and moral bankruptcy.

My first pass at a way to use this against McCain is to hammer away at a "Campaign Finance Reformer" whose own campaign finances are so leveraged they are impossible for the average american to understand or would be illegal if the average american tried them. But I don't really think it can be done unless the dems can figure out a short form strategy and blast fax and blast cocktail party circuit the story in such a way that lazy media pundits run with it. There's no sex in the story, and to the extent that it mirrors the grim story of overextension and bankruptcy that is bedevilling the economy as a whole no one wants to hear about it.

aimai