"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Saturday, January 19, 2008

"The Stupid! Make it Stop!!!!"
Posted by jurassicpork | 10:23 PM

The NY Times has just barely caught up to the AP newswire but John McCain has just been declared the winner in the South Carolina primary. Even though The Swamp Has also yet to catch up to the closing SC polls, this is what Lisa Anderson had to say about it a little over an hour ago:
The latest exit polls from the Associated Press showed that among moderates, who represented about a quarter of the vote, McCain was beating Huckabee two-to-one. The majority of the South Carolina electorate was conservative but Huckabee had only a narrow lead over McCain among them.

McCain, 71, led easily among older voters; those 65 years old or older made up about a quarter of the vote in a state heavy with retirees.

Now, it’s been rumored that I’m a liberal with progressive tendencies, so I cannot very well cheer on a Republican running for President, especially since every one of them without exception (except for perhaps Ron Paul) is guilty of saying batshit insane things during this marathon election season.

Still, Republican voters have to vote for someone that comes with an “R” after their names and their choices must be respected.

However, it baffles me how McCain can win any state primary by garnering a third of the vote (Huckabee got 29-30% with over 90% of the precincts reporting in). Anderson’s observation is a good one: McCain is 71 and will be 72 just after the GOP national convention this summer. That means he’ll be a 76 year-old incumbent running for re-election if he somehow wins.

Anyone who’s a critic of the Iraq war cannot in good conscience vote for McCain because McCain wanted an even bigger surge than Bush had initially proposed (although, as we all know, the 20,500 additional troops got bloated to over 30,000 when the administration, in a very belated postscript said, “Oh, didn’t we mention the support personnel we’d also need to send over?” Such bait and switch tactics disguised as oversights is the only way in which oversight actually exists in the massive corporate boardroom into which our legislative and executive branches have been metamorphosed).

McCain is openly advocating and even joking about bombing Iran while completely ignoring the NIE that has expressed grave reservations that they even have had a nuclear weapons R&D program since 2003. Even Bush, as clearly detached and insane as he is, at least has enough respect for a cynical public to pretend that diplomacy and other non-invasive measures are still on the table. McCain obviously won’t even lie to respect your intelligence.

Then last year, on (appropriately, April Fool's Day) he jeopardized his own life and the lives of over 100 US troops just so he could cautiously meander in a Baghdad market that wound up getting bombed, anyway, just he could show us all how safe it really was.

In John McCain, we see a man who should’ve been beaten by Governor George W. Bush fair and square in South Carolina and who later humped his leg in public and began sucking up to Jerry Falwell after calling him “an agent of intolerance” that same year, not a maverick Republican who had bravely persevered and was vindicated by beating not Bush but a motley crew of freshman Republican presidential contenders who (Romney aside) have not won more than one primary or caucus.

So McCain won the Matlock vote. So what?

Let’s take stock, people: The GOP presidential campaign is working out better than we could’ve dreamed. Duncan Hunter dropped out before the SC polls even closed. Giuliani’s an afterthought and is becoming increasingly irrelevant as he tries to hit a home run in Florida. Huckabee won a caucus, Romney’s picked up only Michigan and Nevada (after running as unopposed as Hillary in Michigan, which the late Gov. George Romney posthumously won for his greaseball son.). Fraud Thompson’s been sleepwalking down the campaign trail and his poll numbers reflect that. Ron Paul is too progressive for many stick-in-the-mud Republicans and who is this Alan Keyes of whom you speak, stranger?

As the pundits have been saying since the Iowa caucus and before, there’s no clear front-runner on the Republican side while people on our side are watching Obama and Hillary switch victories as if they’re at a tennis match.

The Republicans are beating the shit out of each other and when their field winnows down to one man at the convention, most of Republican America will be left with a Brooks Brothers-suited zombie whom they never wanted. We could be seeing Republican voters coming out in record low numbers, which will make Democratic pollsters’ and pundits’ fears that Hillary will unify and energize them seem laughable in retrospect.

And if Hillary Clinton, as fairly and unfairly hated across the red states as she is, cannot unify and mobilize the GOP vote, how could the Republican party’s current, pathetic crop of divisive losers do so?
5 comments
Bookmark and Share
5 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I've got to admit that both 2000 and 2004 has made me very cynical with regards to the American electorate. In short, you will not lose money underestimating their collective intelligence.

Of all the candidates in the GOP stable, I'd say McCain has the best chance of winning the Presidency. That is especially so if he ends up running against Hillary.

Everything you say about McCain and the other GOP candidates is true, however that truth is competing against a press narrative that endlessly paints McCain as a "maverick."

I can see a scenario in which the GOP unites behind McCain because he's all they've got. Combine that with McCain's ability to draw in independents who don't bother to judge him by his actions, and then stir a Hillary candidacy into the mix, and you've got a situation where Dems could very well lose this thing.

And boy, do I hope I'm wrong.
1/19/08, 10:55 PM  
Blogger adam k. said...
If it really is Hillary and McCain, this election season will just get unbearably ridiculous and stupid.

The media will continue to paint McCain as a "maverick" no matter how many real-life positions of his bely that. Hillary will keep standing for nothing in particular and will energize no one except perhaps old women who really want a female president, and thus will not provide enough of a contrast with McCain to make this interesting. But still the media will keep trying to spin this as something other than a contest of who can be the biggest tool.

There will be no "change", no "moving forward", no galvanizing the electorate, just a big game of who's the biggest tool, kinda like last time... though I can get mildly excited for Hillary moreso than Kerry cause she at least is a woman and would make history, and has that "zing" factor in how she makes the wingnuts' head explode.

Isn't it funny how her candidacy was declared dead just a couple of weeks ago?

At this point I think she'll win simply because after NH, I'm convinced that the Clinton machine utterly and completely controls all our lives, and cannot be stopped. But the pessimist (and realist) in me think McCain and and may win. How depressing.
1/20/08, 3:04 AM  
Blogger Jill said...
Never, ever, ever underestimate the Republicans, and never underestimate the ability of the media to paint John McCain as some kind of unifying maverick. Hell, they may even take a few years off him in the bargain.

In SC yesterday, every voting machine in one county failed. In Maryland, a Republican hack is in charge of delivering the machines. The voting apparatus is still hopelessly broken.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the one candidate who can beat all of the Republicans (including McCain) is increasingly marginalized by the media, and as a result, by the people in the primary and caucus states, despite a 5-point surge in national popularity in the last week. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are going to beat each other bloody right up to the convention, to the point that any support the nominee gets from the other is going to be suspect.

If you look at the media coverage of everyone but Romney, it's still glowing. Giuliani is well behind Ron Paul, but the media still treat him as credible. They LOVE Huckabee. And McCain is like a demigod.

Don't assume this one's in the bag, because it's far from it.
1/20/08, 9:41 AM  
Blogger adam k. said...
I'm not underestimating the republicans at all. I'm very scared that McCain will end up president. The nominee will most likely be Hillary, and she will not unite the party at all. I think the best way to heal the rifts would be for her to make Barack her running mate, but I don't think she'd do it. I think she SHOULD, cause it'd get her more support from youth and the party's liberal base, but I don't think she will.

Luckily, though, she does best with actual voters when the media picks on her, which they most certainly will, so that might help. A Ron Paul indy run might also help. We'll see.
1/20/08, 2:15 PM  
Anonymous LPO said...
I have seen many sites before most of them do not look good....

Regards,
http://www.saibposervices.com/Outsourcing_for_Legal_Projects.aspx

Legal process outsourcing(LPO)
5/20/09, 5:21 AM  
Post a Comment
<< Home