Today Bush held a White House Summit on International Development, or as he called it, “a summit to herald the outstanding work being done to lift up souls in need.”
WHAT POWER TO SAVE LIVES COMES WITH: “We believe that power to save lives comes with the obligation to use it.”
IT DOES SOUND LIKE KIND OF A CRAP DEVELOPMENT MODEL: “I refuse to accept the development model that says, oh, these people are doomed forever, let’s just throw money at the problem.”
WHAT THERE’S NOTHING MORE BASIC THAN: “In the new era of development, America and our partners are helping to meet basic human needs like food and clean water. There’s nothing more basic than food and clean water.”
OR THEY WOULD, IF THEY COULD HEAR IT OVER THE SOUND OF THE POTATO CHIPS THEY’RE EATING: “The American people care when they hear people are going hungry around the world.”
IN OTHER WORDS: “I believe that as the United States moves forward, we ought to purchase up to a quarter of our food from local farmers. In other words, of all the food aid we get we ought to take a quarter of that, Donald, and purchase the food directly from local farmers.”
WHAT LAURA DIDN’T THINK OF: “I want to share with you an interesting program -- for two reasons, one, it’s interesting, and two, my wife thought of it -- (laughter) -- or has actually been involved with it; she didn’t think of it. But she thought of it for this speech.”
That idea? Something called PlayPumps Alliance, in which children are chained to water pumps which they’re told are really merry-go-rounds and that they’re having fun endlessly turning the contraptions and are certainly not slaving away in Dickensian satanic mills. “And as my good wife says, PlayPumps are fueled by a limitless energy source -- (laughter) -- children at play.” Limitless, he says. Those poor, poor children.
TOO MANY PRESIDENTS: “Yet too many people can’t read.”
AN INTERESTING STATISTIC: “For developing nations, the value of trade is 40 times the value of foreign aid. Isn’t that an interesting statistic? What should that tell you?” Er, that the value of foreign aid is one-fortieth the value of trade?
WE JUST NEVER SEEM TO GO ON VACATIONS AS A NATION ANYMORE: “I’m just so sorry that not every American could have been with Laura and me to see what we saw in our trip to Africa last year.” Next summer, let’s all 300 million of us go to Tahiti. I call dibs on that nice spot on the beach by those rocks.
WHAT WE MISSED BECAUSE WE DIDN’T ALL GO WITH GEORGE AND LAURA TO AFRICA LAST YEAR: “Schoolchildren sang songs about America’s generosity.”
CONTEST: What might the titles of those songs about America’s “generosity” be?
Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was supposed to go to a regional summit in Swaziland for negotiations to save the doomed power-sharing deal that Robert Mugabe signed but never intended to honor, but he has not been issued a passport because... Zimbabwe is running out of paper. That’s what the government said. Because of sanctions, it said (and possibly because these days you now need a dump truck full of Zimbabwean currency to buy one peanut).
Second Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Ted Stevens, testifying at his trial, on why an expensive lounge chair given to him seven years ago should not be considered a (unreported) gift: “We have lots of things in our house that don’t belong to us”. Indeed, “I don’t know how it got in the house.”
Today Bush spoke to the Central Louisiana Chamber of Commerce about the economy.
HE HAS AN MBA, YOU KNOW: “And then the question I’ve asked here is, what are the attitudes like? And I have heard that people’s attitudes are beginning to change, from a period of intense concerns -- and I would call it near panic -- to being more relaxed and beginning to see the effects of changes and the liquidity that is being pumped in the system, that we got a long way to go.” Near panic, more relaxed, liquidity being pumped in the system, long way to go... should you really be making with the dirty talk to the Central Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, George? For shame.
Sarah Palin was interviewed recently by the 700 Club (it airs Tuesday, clips at the links below).
She supports amending the US Constitution to ban gay marriage.
I’m not going to be out there judging individuals, sitting in a seat of judgment telling what they can and can’t do, should and should not do, but I certainly can express my own opinion here and take actions that I believe would be best for traditional marriage and that’s casting my votes and speaking up for traditional marriage that, that instrument that it’s the foundation of our society is that strong family and that’s based on that traditional definition of marriage, so I do support that.
How is banning them from marrying not telling people what they can and can’t do?
She says that she would certainly condemn those people shouting violent sentiments towards Barack Obama at her rallies if she ever heard them, but she’s never heard anyone do that. She has heard Obama tell people to “get in their face, argue with them,” which is “kind of inciting and a bit negative” and presumably is the exact moral equivalent of cries of “terrorist” and “kill him,” just as arguing with someone is exactly the same thing as assassinating them.
What does she pray for? She prays “that my kids will not be adversely affected by some of the political shots of course that, that we’ve been taking the last couple of months.”
Obama, she says, is trying to “pretty up” his extreme views on abortion.
She says she avoids interviews with the mainstream media because “I mean you set yourself up just to continually be mocked” by the “filter.” Sarah, do you mean there are people so low that they would mock you? The effrontery! Names, I want names.
And that, she says, was why she couldn’t respond to Katie Couric’s question about what newspapers she reads: “it was, I guess my being such an outsider from the Washington elite and the media elite is the questions she kept asking me were, I kept thinking why aren’t you asking me things that really, really matter right now”.
So the 700 Club guy asked about something that really, really matters right now, her baptism in middle school in... wait for it... Little Beaver Lake. “Well, it was a neat thing to be able to do.”
Juan Cole (and others) have dubbed Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama Powell’s “finest moment.” Er, doesn’t that imply that he has had other fine moments?
McCain at a campaign rally today: “Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is growing the pie.” Mmm, pie.
At another rally he said he was campaigning “on behalf of Joe the Plumber and Rose the Teacher and Phil the Bricklayer and Wendy the Waitress” and other gender-based occupational stereotypes.
This morning John McCain was interviewed on Fox by Chris Wallace.
WHAT JOHN SENSES: “I’ve been in too many campaigns, my friend, not to — not to sense that things are headed our way.”
Much of the interview seemed to be a preview of his excuses for losing the election, with many dark insinuations about scandalous money-raising practices by Obama. “$200 million that — that we don’t know where the money came from — a lot of strange things going on in this campaign.” Let me help: it comes from contributions under $200, too small to trigger the legal requirement for reporting. Perhaps if you’re a Republican, following campaign laws seems like a “strange thing.” He brought up Watergate a lot: the flood of contributions to Obama are, he said, “completely breaking whatever idea we had after Watergate to keep the costs and spending on campaigns under control — first time, first time since the Watergate scandal.” Yes, this is just exactly like Watergate, except for the burglary and breaking the law part.
Just like Watergate, it will create a scandal: “And I can tell you this, that has unleashed now in presidential campaigns a new flood of spending that will then cause a scandal, and then we will fix it again.” Er, what exactly is this scandal of which you speak, John? “The dam is broken. We’re now going to see huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal.” So a hypothetical future scandal.
LEAST BELIEVABLE LIE YET: “But what I worry about is future elections, too, not only mine.”
He said his robocalls linking Obama and terrorism are “legitimate and truthful.”
MEET JOE THE PLUMBER: “And Joe the Plumber — of course, Joe the Plumber is the average citizen, and Joe the Plumber is now speaking for me and small business people all over America.”
GET TO WORK ON THAT, JOE THE PLUMBER: “redistribution of the wealth? I don’t believe in it. I believe in wealth creation by Joe the Plumber.”
The bailout of the financial sector, however, just isn’t the same thing as the socialism or redistribution of wealth McCain is decrying: “That is reacting to a crisis that’s due to greed and excess in Washington.” So that’s okay, then.
WHAT SARAH PALIN IS: “She is a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America.” Sadly, he did not elaborate.
SARAH PALIN IS A FLOOR WAX AND A DESSERT TOPPING! “She’s a reformer. She’s a conservative.”
MR. HAPPY IS AROUSED: “And when I see the enthusiasm and I see the passion that she has aroused, I am so happy.”
WHAT AMERICANS ARE BEGINNING TO LEARN ABOUT SARAH PALIN: “And the fact is Americans are also beginning to learn that she ran a state.”
An email from Orrin Hatch for the National Republican Senatorial Committee warns darkly of the Democratic agenda “to force its radical agenda on American families” should they win 60 seats in the Senate:
Crippling new taxes
Staggering new government spending
Outrageous paybacks to labor bosses
Liberal censorship of talk radio
(Update: evidently this is a new campaign line. Newt Gingrich on a Sunday talk show said that Obama will try to eliminate freedom of speech for Hannity and Limbaugh.)
A sign of the opacity of Barack Obama: I have no real idea what his feelings are about McCain. Contempt? Pity? And is it based on Obama’s reactions to his views, his campaigning style, his intellect, his character? Does he see him as a doddering relic, a tragic hero who has given in to overweening ambition, a reactionary, a threat to the future of the country? You always knew exactly what Gore thought of Bush and what Bush thought of Gore and Kerry, and we’ve got a pretty good idea what McCain really thinks of Obama, which of his attacks he genuinely believes in and which he knows are campaign b.s. Obama, not so much.
I’m making no particular point there, just observing. Obama’s reserve may well prove an asset in actually running the country.
And then there’s Sarah Palin, whose contempt is always right out there for all to see. And just when you think your opinion of her can’t go lower, she talks about the “pro-America areas of this great nation.” I wonder how large a percentage of this great nation, in land and population, constitute the pro-America areas. Just curious.
In an interview with Al Arabiya, Condi Rice points to the many changes in the Middle East which she attributes to the Bush admin. For example, women can vote in Kuwait now, and “You have a situation in which throughout the Middle East, people talk about popular rule”. Oh, sure, these conversations take place in prison cells...
On Iran’s interventions in the US-Iraqi negotiations over a status-of-forces agreement, she said, proving once again that the irony fairy completely passed her cradle by, that Iran “is an external power and it should act as an external power,” and she engaged in some good old fashioned race-baiting, trying to stir up Arab-Persian animosities: “Iraq is, first and foremost, an Arab state. It is a founding member of the Arab League. It is a state that has always had a voice within the Arab world, and that is a voice that is regaining within the Arab world”.
From an email from the McCain campaign: “He’ll fight for the ‘Joe the Plumbers,’ ‘Joe the Florists’ and ‘Joe the Carpenters’ of America to reduce taxes and allow more men and women to realize the American Dream.”
Sarah Palin, campaigning in New Hampshire (is NH in play?), on why Alaskans are exactly like New Hampshironians: “We all love good moose hunting.”
A John Travolta movie due to start filming in Paris was called off after ten of the production’s stunt vehicles were torched overnight. The movie’s title: From Paris with Love.
In the 1960 presidential debates, famously, people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won while people who watched on tv thought Kennedy won. In 2008, though, we have many more options, and I’m curious about the effect of that balkanization on perceptions. I was doing the blog thing, so I was watching, writing and reading the online CNN transcript simultaneously, which meant I was listening more than watching and managed to miss most of the visuals, such as Sarah Palin’s winks during the veep debate and McCain’s air quotes last night around “health” of the mother, which make his callous, dismissive words so, so much more offensive – let’s look at that again now (20 seconds):
Wow, what a dick.
I watched the first debate on CNN but was so distracted by the constant movement of the audience reaction squiggles on the sides of the screen that I switched to uncluttered PBS for the later ones. I’m thinking now that that was a mistake, because PBS also mostly eschewed the split screen, which means I missed McCain fuming, smirking, twitching and rolling his eyes while Obama was speaking, and failed to get a full sense of just how irritable and petulant, undisciplined and unpresidential, he was being, like radio listeners in 1960 didn’t see Nixon’s flop-sweat and shiftiness. Of course there’s YouTube now, and embedded video clips like the one I just used, but it’s not quite the same as the cumulative effect over the course of 90 minutes.
But how many other versions of the 2008 debates were there? What did CBS or NBC, Fox, the BBC and MSNBC do? What other forms of “helpful” screen clutter were there, and how did they shape how viewers perceived Obama and McCain? What did Obama do while McCain was speaking – and do you think he practiced it? Share your viewing/listening experiences and thoughts in comments.
Bob Schieffer opened with a plea to the candidates: “By now, we’ve heard all the talking points, so let’s try to tell the people tonight some things that they haven’t heard.” McCain: “My left ball is bigger than my right ball.” Obama: “My left ball is bigger than McCain’s right ball.”
McCain: “It’s good to see you again, Senator Obama.” Obama: “Dude, you didn’t see me last time. Eye contact, dude!”
Okay, I’ll stop making stuff up now. Maybe.
McCain: “Americans are hurting right now, and they’re angry.” Dude, you are so totally projecting.
Okay, I’ll stop saying dude now. Maybe.
McCain falsely blames Fannie and Freddie for the housing crisis. Wants the bailout to put homeowners first.
Obama: We haven’t seen a rescue package for the middle class.
McCain: “a couple days ago Senator Obama was out in Ohio and he had an encounter with a guy who’s a plumber.” Cue porn music. Evidently Obama wants to raise the taxes of “Joe the plumber,” but “I want Joe the Plumber to spread that wealth around.” “The whole premise behind Sen. Obama’s plans are class warfare”. And that’s not warfare you can believe in, you know, the good kind of warfare McCain likes.
Seriously, how many times can both of them say “Joe the Plumber”?
McCain deployed a statistic: 50% of small business income taxes are paid by small businesses. Er, right.
McCain: “We need to encourage business, create jobs, not spread the wealth around.” Heaven forbid we spread the wealth around.
McCain on the budget: “I would have, first of all, across-the-board spending freeze, OK? Some people say that’s a hatchet. That’s a hatchet, and then I would get out a scalpel, OK?” An angry old man with sharp objects? Um, OK.
Another thing McCain knows how to do: “I know how to save billions of dollars in defense spending. I know how to eliminate programs.” Oh, John, is there anything you don’t know how to do?
Yay, the $3 million planetarium projector makes an appearance! How we missed you, $3 million planetarium projector.
Why does Obama never defend the $3 million planetarium projector?
McCain informs Obama, “I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
After McCain trots out the “Obama wanted to increase taxes on people with incomes of $42,000” line, Obama says even Fox News doesn’t believe that shit.
McCain: “But it’s very clear that I have disagreed with the Bush administration. I have disagreed with leaders of my own party. I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Somebody should remind him he got the scars from the North Vietnamese, not the Republicans, before there’s an embarrassing incident on the Senate floor.
Schieffer: are you two willing to say to each other’s faces what your campaigns have been saying about each other?
McCain: well, if he had agreed to the town hall meetings... And John Lewis hurt my feelings by comparing me to George Wallace, and Obama didn’t repudiate those remarks, even though, “Every time there’s been an out-of-bounds remark made by a Republican, no matter where they are, I have repudiated them.” He’s done what now?
And the Obama campaign has had the highest spending than any time since... gratuitous reference coming up in 3..2..1... Watergate.
Joe the Plumber again. How we’ve missed you, Joe the Plumber.
McCain says that people have shouted nasty things at Obama rallies too and there are “some t-shirts that are very unacceptable.”
Obama is talking about the shouts of terrorist etc at McCain-Palin rallies, but he is completely incapable of even faking outrage, like McCain just did. Interestingly, he mentions Palin’s remark that he “palled around with terrorists,” which means he brought up William Ayers before McCain did. McCain then says that he doesn’t care about an old washed-up terrorist but darkly demands that he reveal “the full extent of that relationship.” Oo, sinister.
And ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Maybe ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, creating a vortex that will consume us all.
McCain on Palin: a “bresh of freth air.” She “understands special-needs families... better than almost any American that I know.” Trig is, what, six months old?
Obama refuses to say if Palin is qualified to be president. Notes that McCain’s across-the-board spending cut would screw special-needs families.
McCain: “why do we always have to spend more?”
McCain on nuclear power: “Sen. Obama will tell you, in the -- as the extreme environmentalists do, it has to be safe.” Oh, those extreme environmentalists, always wanting things to be safe. Fortunately, says McCain, “We can store and reprocess spent nuclear fuel, Sen. Obama, no problem.” For 40,000 years. No problem.
McCain: free trade with Colombia is a “no-brainer,” but you’ve never traveled south of the border, so you wouldn’t know that.
Insurance. McCain: Joe the Plumber doesn’t want to pay a fine for not giving his employees health insurance. Obama tells Joe the Plumber he won’t pay a fine. Joe the Plumber must be very relieved.
Could you nominate any judge who disagreed with you on abortion? McCain: “I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.” Er, right.
Obama brings up the attempt in Congress to overturn the Ledbetter ruling on equal pay. McCain: “It was a trial lawyer’s dream.”
Obama, defending his vote in Illinois: “With respect to partial-birth abortion, I am completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions, partial-birth or otherwise, as long as there’s an exception for the mother’s health and life, and this did not contain that exception.” Dammit, he just legitimized the medically bogus concept of “partial-birth” abortions. “[N]obody’s pro-abortion. It’s always a tragic situation,” Obama says. I beg to differ.
McCain poo-poos the idea of exceptions for the health of the mother: “You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, ‘health.’” Oh, those extremists.
On education, McCain says vouchers vouchers vouchers. Also, we should reward good teachers. Oh, and we should let people who have served in the military “go right to teaching and not have to take these examinations which -- or have the certification that some are required in some states.”
Obama thinks America’s youth aren’t an interest group, they’re our... wait for it... future.
McCain, in an unwonted display of self-control, managed to say “My friends” only once, although he did address one remark, “if you’re out there, my friend,” to... Joe the Plumber.
Today Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced his latest plan for spending that blank check Congress gave him: buying equity in banks, including more or less healthy ones, in the hope that they’ll use the money for the greater good. What do we get for the $250 billion he’s planning to spend in this endeavour? Confidence! “Today, there is a lack of confidence in our financial system, a lack of confidence that must be conquered because it poses an enormous threat to our economy.” So it’s time for another episode of Everything You Need To Know About How Confident You Should Be In The Economy You Can Tell By the Expression on Henry Paulson’s Face.
I FEEL MORE CONFIDENT ALREADY: “Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans, me included.” Because the past record of Bush appointees running government programs to whose existence they have ideological objections is just so confidence-inspiring.
REALLY, JUST SO MUCH MORE CONFIDENT: “We are acting with unprecedented speed taking unprecedented measures that we never thought would be necessary.” Because having the people who never saw the problem coming beforehand acting with “unprecedented speed” in responding to it is just so confidence-inspiring.
Meanwhile, George Bush picked out an appropriate cup to fill with tequila to “build mah confidence until ah puke.”
Today, Bush has been hosting Silvio Berlusconi. Normally, as you know, I would be focusing on stupid things Bush said, but the cruise ship crooner said, “And I’m a hundred percent sure and positive that history will tell -- will say that George W. Bush has been a great, very great President of the United States of America.” And nothing even George Bush might say could be as stupid as that.
Sarah Palin says the Blanchflower Report cleared her of “any hint of any kind of unethical activity there” and insisted that Todd Palin was merely doing “what the state’s Department of Law Web site tells anyone to do if they have a concern about a state trooper.” So that’s okay then.
Here’s one of the Prop. 8 (anti-gay marriage) ads running in California.
So don’t give upstart commoners like this little oik ideas above their station.
The Palin position, at least as enunciated by her lawyer, is the Bushian tactic of defining the concept of “ethics” downwards, just as the Bushies did with “torture”: she did not violate ethics laws because her goal was not personal financial gain. Alaska law defines illegal unethical behaviour as “any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action.” Revenge, evidently, is ethical, unless you consider destroying your enemies utterly to be a personal interest (like stamp-collecting).
Sarah herself chose not to directly contradict the report, but to misrepresent it, saying, “If you read the report, you will see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member. You got to read the report.” She isn’t saying that the report says she did nothing unlawful or unethical, although she is hoping that is the implication you take away from her words (she is also hoping that even though you “got” to read the report, you won’t). Rather, she is saying that “you will see” that she did nothing unlawful or unethical if you read a report that concludes the opposite.
After addressing the nation this morning, calming the markets and dispelling our economic fears through the power of oratory alone, George Bush was able to wing his way down to Coral Gables and hang out with Cuban-Americans at Havana Harry’s.
BOY THOSE “ELITES” ARE JUST A PROBLEM EVERYWHERE, AREN’T THEY? “our message is to the Cuban people, you’re being repressed by a handful of elites that are holding back your great potential.”
WHAT’S SO SAD: “It’s so sad that right off the shores of our great, you know, nation that believes in human rights and human dignity exists this dungeon.” I wonder if even the most rabidly anti-Castro Cuban exile can hear that sentence without thinking, like all of you did, of Guantanamo?
(Update: He also said that after Hurricane Ike, “my government... offered aid from the United States to the Cuban people. But that aid was rejected by the Castros, which should tell the people of Cuba and the people around the world that the Castro people are only interested in themselves and their power, and not to the benefit and welfare of the Cuban people.” So what did your refusal of the Cuban offer of medical aid after Katrina tell us?
All three Republican Cuban-American congresscritters notably stayed away from the event.)
Meanwhile, at a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, John McCain demonstrated his Yosemite Sam impression.
She was curiously non-committal about what she’d do as vice president to get abortion banned: “I would just hope that my life can reflect what it is that we will do to usher in that culture of life in our government.”
She argued that Obama’s education policies are tarnished by his sitting with Ayers on that board: “It says that, I think Barack Obama’s position on that, thanks to his association with Ayers and the radicalism there with an education-- an education system that Bill Ayers, anyway, supports, I think shows you too that Barack Obama is so far out of mainstream America.” The logic is impeccable.
WHY THAT DOG WON’T HUNT (BECAUSE IT’S GONE): “Doggone it, he fails to tell the American people with candor and with truthfulness, what his associations are, and we have to know.”
AT LONG LAST, ACORN, WITH YOUR VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVES, AT LONG LAST, HAVE YOU NO SHAME? “It’s- it’s fraud that the connection there to ACORN and fraud has...I mean, that-- that too, it’s another thing that’s absolutely atrocious and you think, ‘Geez, doesn’t anybody have a conscience anymore?’” Funny, I was just wondering the same thing (although I may have used a different word than geez).
TAKING THE GLOVES OFF UNFAIRLY: “some in the mainstream media are saying well, we’re taking the gloves off unfairly.”
