Dear Mr. McCain,

You are applying for the job of my president. I have a few questions.

In 1987, you were involved in meeting with financial regulators investigating a savings-and-loan owned by real estate developer Charles Keating, a man who was also involved in real estate deals with your wife and father-in-law. A later Senate Ethics Committee investigation concluded you showed 'poor judgment' in this matter.

Still, in April of this year, the New York Times detailed a number of deals involving your help for a real estate developer. And the man you appointed to head the GOP convention this year, Doug Goodyear, resigned after Newsweek reported that he had once been a paid lobbyist for the thuggish military regime in Burma.

So, Senator, can you demonstrate to me that you are any better about choosing your associates, and what you do on their behalf, now than you were with Keating?

Also, Senator McCain, like me, you are a cancer survivor. I think that, since you are running for president, you should disclose to the public the latest detailed information about your current health status. Yet, despite having promised to release your medical records a number of times, they still haven't been released. I have to say that, personally, this makes me suspicious. I'm usually pretty chatty when I've had a clean check-up; it's when there's something potentially troubling that I start getting quiet. So, like, just what's up with that?

I realize that health records are personal, but, hey, you're the one who decided to run for the seat in the Oval Office. If you'd prefer your privacy, I understand. You are free to leave the race at any time.

Which gets me to another question I have. Your financial situation. You've released your own tax records. But looking at them pretty much just shows that you've structured your financial life so that most everything is in your wife's name. And she has recently said she'll "never" reveal her, which means also your, information. Which wouldn't matter to me quite so much if you weren't flying around on the corporate jet belonging to her company. She's always been deeply involved in the financing of your campaigns, and well, I did mention that back in the day she was financially involved with Charles Keating, right?

So, much as it may anger you, we do have a situation on record where you've used poor judgment and acted on behalf of someone financially involved with your wife, and she is providing financial support for your campaign, and yet we will "never" get details about 'her' finances?

That doesn't sound like 'straight talk' to me, 'my friend'.

I fully support your wife's desire for privacy in her business dealings, as long as the two of you are private citizens. Not if you are asking to be elected President of the United States. "With great power comes great responsibility" and all that. (You are familiar with that character the youngsters call "Spider-Man", aren't you?)


Of course, Senator, you may not care to clear up any of these questions for me, since I'd never vote for you anyway. There are plenty of compelling policy reasons to oppose you: your consistent support for foolhardy militarism, your consistent opposition to choice on abortion, your cockamamie economic and health care proposals.

But I have to say, it's the character issues that bother me the most.

Oh, and did I mention the erratic moods and the anger? That too.

Live From New York

One of the classic uses of humor has been political commentary, to say out loud truths that are too rude or too risky for 'serious' conversation.

Saturday Night Live's intro skit provides an excellent example.



Ouch.

(P.S. Sorry about the attached commercial. It's the trade-off for a high-quality clip that won't get pulled from YouTube by the NBC lawyers.)

Today's Riddle

Q: Why is a large, dull-witted, cuddly-looking black-and-white bamboo eater at the Boston Zoo like the current Clinton gas tax proposal?

A: Because it's a stupid pander.

The sight of the candidate so desperate for votes that she insults the intelligence of the voters so badly, and worse, continues to pound away at it, is painful to those of us who would like to maintain a positive opinion of her. Even if she isn't my choice, I'd like to respect her intelligence and good will.

But come on. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see the holes in this 'gas tax holiday' plan. Many others have eviscerated it, so I won't belabor the point. I do have to suggest, however, that the true elitism is to believe that the common folk can't figure out the basic flaw in the idea all by their little selves.

The guys running the gas station know that people will buy gas, and plenty of it, at the current price. And they also have the right to set their prices as they like, as we've seen them do. So, take away the 18 cents a gallon tax, and will they lower the price 18 cents? Um, no. They'll continue to charge the price people are grumpily paying now, and make 18 cents a gallon more profit. Even if the feds later tax the oil companies, it just isn't going to lower the cost of filling my personal gas tank. I won't even take home the $6 total that Obama is making fun of.

That's not really hard to figure out. So does Hillary think that the number of hard-of-thinking Indiana primary voters she'll win is larger than the number who will be insulted by her suggesting they were born yesterday, who resent being treated like rubes?

Or greater than the number she will lose by proposing a cheap trick she borrowed from the Republican candidate, even if she did put lipstick on the pig with talk of a windfall profit tax?

And does she really think, after all these years of George Bush, that what Americans are looking for is someone to put forward simplistic and stupid schemes, stubbornly refuse to abandon them when confronted by expert opposition telling them it won't work, use them to hypocritically club political opponents and introduce pointless legislation that won't pass Congress just for the point of advancing a rhetorical position for a personal political agenda?

I'm really tired of that. I thought we all were.

Update: An interesting snapshot from TPM Election Central.

Only The Best

The high standards of the Bush administration can be seen in everything they do. From New Orleans:

Gathering around a newly constructed portion of the 15-foot Harvey Canal flood wall, representatives with the Army Corps of Engineers staged a press event Friday on the West Bank to clarify their techniques for preventing floodwater from seeping through openings in the walls.

After a recent media report of joints between a New Orleans floodwall being stuffed with newspaper instead of the usual rubber material, corps officials said the work was a temporary solution in 2006 that is not being repeated elsewhere in area levee systems.

"You had a lot of work being done to get things up to snuff after Hurricane Katrina," said Maj. Timothy Kurgan, chief public affairs officer for the Corps' New Orleans district. "I don't want people thinking there's just a bunch of newspaper inside this wall, and that's the only thing keeping water out."

No, that's not the only thing. There's rubber, too, on top. But while it's not the only thing, it is, they admit, one thing. As a graduate of the Corps of Engineers Public Affairs course on understatement, Kurgan did offer this:

"It's not the preferred technique," he said.

Meanwhile, over there:

BAGHDAD (AP) — The new U.S. Embassy complex does not have enough fortified living quarters for hundreds of diplomats and other workers, who must remain temporarily in trailers without special rooftop protection against mortars and rockets, government officials have told The Associated Press.

Sorting out the housing crunch and funding could further delay moving all personnel into the compound until next year and exposes shortcomings in the planning for America's more than $700 million diplomatic hub in Iraq.

Well, if it's good enough for Katrina victims, why not some diplomats? What's the worst that could happen, formaldehyde?

Oh, wait. War zone. Right.

The issue of "hardened" housing in the U.S.-protected Green Zone has gained renewed prominence since Shiite militias resumed steady attacks on the enclave in late March as part of backlash to an Iraqi-led crackdown.

More than a dozen people have been killed in the Green Zone in the latest waves of attacks, including a U.S. civilian government worker whose housing trailer was hit.

At one point — during the heaviest barrages early this month — the State Department ordered all its Baghdad employees to wear body armor and other protective gear while outside buildings in the Green Zone, which also contains the British Embassy, key Iraqi government offices and other international compounds.

Staffers also were ordered not to sleep in their trailers, and hundreds of cots were placed inside the current embassy — a former Saddam Hussein palace.

Apparently, it's the closest thing they have to a SuperDome?

Sleeping in shelters on makeshift cots: does that sound like we're "winning" to you?

What Tom Hayden Said

In The Nation:

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

Read the whole thing.

While We're At It

Have people noticed that a prospective Democratic nominee was suggesting that we have a NATO-like commitment to respond with massive American military force to attacks in the Mideast.

SENATOR CLINTON: Well, in fact, George, I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region.

I mean, it's not like that's a volatile region at all. I'm sure all of us would be happy to have our troops sent to retaliate against attacks in that region. I mean, when was the last time anyone over there ever attacked anyone else? It isn't like there is a wide array of complex historical, ethnic, religious and economic conflicts there that we'd get be offering to be entangled by, right?

What has she been smoking? As Keith Olbermann remarked, this puts her somewhere to the right of the Bush administration, which he didn't think was physically possible.

And, since she was out there, why not prove that she respects the national intelligence community AND the intelligence of the electorate just as much as the current President:

You know, we are at a very dangerous point with Iran. The Bush policy has failed. Iran has not been deterred. They continue to try to not only obtain the fissile material for nuclear weapons but they are intent upon and using their efforts to intimidate the region and to have their way when it comes to the support of terrorism in Lebanon and elsewhere.

Yes, for those of you who have memories that extend as far as five months ago, the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran did indeed say that Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2003, and that we do not know that Iran intends to develop a nuclear weapon.

(Perhaps Senator Clinton was too busy reviewing the bios of everyone Obama ever served on a board with to have read that NIE. After all, she apparently didn't read the one about Iraq either.)

But remember, Obama knows a guy who was a Hippie bomber!!! And his pastor is an Angry Black Man!!!

Flag Pins and the Weather Underground

Among the mindboggling array of things we didn't hear about during the debate while Charlie Gibson and former Clinton staffer (what was up with that?) George Stephanopolous grilled Obama was this:

The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas

That's not my opinion, that's the TITLE of a report to Congress by that hot-bed of inflammatory rhetoric, the GAO.

More than six years since 9/11, and we not only don't have Osama, we don't even have a plan to have Osama. Of course, why should that matter?

al Qaeda is now using the Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place, including the identification, training, and positioning of Western operatives for an attack. It stated that al Qaeda is most likely using the FATA to plot terrorist attacks against political, economic, and infrastructure targets in America “designed to produce mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the population."

And yet, for some reason Stephanopoulous thinks it was important to question whether the fact that a former 60s radical once had people over to his house when Obama was running for state senate somehow suggests that Obama is maybe not patriotic enough to be President?

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, if you get the nomination, you'll have to -- (applause) -- (inaudible).

I want to give Senator Clinton a chance to respond, but first a follow-up on this issue, the general theme of patriotism in your relationships. A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough."

An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem?

In the vernacular, WTF??!!!! Is he kidding? We've got soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there appears to be no one at the helm (now that they've looted the treasury, torn up the Constitution and run the ship of state aground). And this is what he chooses to ask about?

SEN. OBAMA: George, but this is an example of what I'm talking about.

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George.

The fact is, is that I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.

Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn's statements? Because I certainly don't agree with those either.

So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't.

Damn straight. And it ought to have ended there.

Sadly, there was another former staffer from the Clinton Era there also:

SEN. CLINTON: Well, I think that is a fair general statement, but I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position.

And if I'm not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York, and I would hope to every American, because they were published on 9/11 and he said that he was just sorry they hadn't done more. And what they did was set bombs and in some instances people died. So it is -- you know, I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about. And I have no doubt -- I know Senator Obama's a good man and I respect him greatly but I think that this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.

And it goes to this larger set of concerns about, you know, how we are going to run against John McCain. You know, I wish the Republicans would apologize for the disaster of the Bush-Cheney years and not run anybody, just say that it's time for the Democrats to go back into the White House. (Laughter, applause.)

Unfortunately, they don't seem to be willing to do that. So we know that they're going to be out there, full force. And you know, I've been in this arena for a long time. I have a lot of baggage, and everybody has rummaged through it for years. (Laughter.) And so therefore, I have, you know, an opportunity to come to this campaign with a very strong conviction and feeling that I will be able to withstand whatever the Republican sends our way.

Right.

Sadly, Senator Clinton seems to have failed to notice that, during the years people have been rummaging through her baggage, quite a lot of dirt has stuck to her, rightly or wrongly, and while she may be still standing, it's completely unclear how the general electorate would respond to hearing it all over again this fall. Is she really reduced to contending that she's the better candidate because she's already been smeared?

And if the goal is to find a candidate best capable of taking on McCain, then why isn't the Senator from Illinois being asked to talk about McCain? Why is his policy position better?

Even, for god's sake, if they really can't resist the faux-patriotism thing, how does he feel about the fact that McCain often doesn't have a flag lapel pin on?

And wouldn't it be great if Senator Clinton thought the best way to convince people to put a Democrat in the White House wasn't by spending the spring rummaging through baggage, but by building a convincing message about just what a disaster the Bush administration continues to be and how the GOP candidate is not just nobody, but more of the same and worse?

Seriously, people. The Democratic nominee, whoever it is, will quite likely be the next President of the United States, and have to deal with historic environmental calamity, global economic change and crisis, shortages of fuel, food and water, and then more conventional threats like, you know, al Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, etc.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we need to be doing something about that.

Were those questions really the best way to be spending the time?

Bitter

You know what makes me bitter?

When the Ivy League-graduate multimillionaire former First Lady prompts such Working Class Heroes as Bill Kristol George Will and, oh yeah, John McCain, to spend days blathering about Obama's "elitist" comment.

Particularly when, all the while, the President of the United States has admitted to a criminal conspiracy and almost no one is talking about it.

What? You mean you hadn't heard that the President admitted to knowing and approving of his senior advisors plotting war crimes? (Doesn't that seem like the sort of thing a prospective Democratic nominee ought to be making noise about? Huh.)

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.

The senior officials involved included Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld Colin Powell, George Tenet and John Ashcroft. Remember just a few years ago, when these very same people were working hard to convince the world that the misdeeds of Abu Ghraib were the work of a "few bad apples"? I think we now know where the bad apples that spoiled the whole bunch were working, don't we?

Dan Froomkin details what really has me bitter:

The mainstream media by and large seem to agree with Bush that the ABC News Report wasn't so startling, and they have given Bush's remarks almost no coverage. There was no mention of Bush's admission in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. There was nothing on the major wire services. And nothing on CNN, CBS or NBC.

What I'd like in a presidential candidate is someone who, rather than rushing to smear a fellow Democrat and protesting an offense she has no right to feel, might be making an issue out of the really bad things the people in office have been doing.

But no. I guess that wouldn't fit with her 'win votes in the primary while doing John McCain's job' strategy.

Luckily we still have the ACLU.

The American Civil Liberties Union is calling on Congress to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate possible violations by the Bush administration of laws including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws.

'No one in the executive branch of government can be trusted to fairly investigate or prosecute any crimes since the head of every relevant department, along with the president and vice president, either knew or participated in the planning and approval of illegal acts,' said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. 'Congress cannot look the other way; it must demand an independent investigation and independent prosecutor.'

Fredrickson added, 'Congress is duty-bound by the Constitution not only to hold the president, vice president, and all civil officers to account, but it must also send a message to future presidents that it will use its constitutional powers to prevent illegal, and immoral conduct.'

Perhaps, once the punditry and the media have fully examined the burning, important matter of what Obama said, there might be time to talk about the way the Bush administration and its supporters, including John McCain, have throughly corrupted our government.

If they get a chance. They are very busy after all.

What Is She Saying?

From CBS:

Clinton defended her vote on the war saying voters should compare both her and Obama's records.

“I made a considered judgment, I didn’t make a speech, I made a decision and it was a decision based on my best assessment on what would be in the interest of our country at that very uncertain time.”

Clinton said that historians will judge if her decision was the right one, but she reminded voters that Obama’s voting record on the war is not very different than hers.

“When you want to compare, compare decisions so when Senator Obama came to the Senate, he and I voted exactly the same except for one vote and that happens to be the facts.”

Obama has been credited with foreseeing a troublesome war in Iraq primarily due to a speech he gave in 2002 while he was a state senator, where he spoke out against the war. Clinton said, “I started criticizing the war in Iraq before he did. So, I’m well aware that his entire campaign is premised on a speech he gave in 2002 and I give him credit for making that speech. But that was not a decision.”

So, Senator Clinton, you made a considered judgment? You, a sitting US Senator, with a staff of people to do research, and access to information, and your judgement was not as good as mine, when I just had reporting from Knight-Ridder, the foreign press, and the ability to imagine that the Bush administration might exaggerate or even lie outright. (Seriously, woman, no one listening to the administration’s rhetoric could have truly believed they would allow the UN to handle the situation.)

Why, exactly, should I vote for you to make decisions on my behalf when, on this crucial vote, you actually made a considered decision that was so wrong?

It also really wasn’t that “uncertain” a time. Iraq hadn’t attacked us, had no real interest to serve by attacking us, and, based on the reports of neutral observers, didn’t have the means to attack us. Plus, we were still engaged with the battle against those who HAD attacked us, a completely different set of folks.

Finally, that bit about historians judging whether the decision was the right one sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, that guy in the White House.

Sadly, Hillary, it isn't just historians who are judging that decision. It's me, and the other voters. I say it was wrong, and I am shocked that you aren't willing, at this late date, to frankly say it was wrong also. It also carries no weight with me that you and Obama have voting records that are similar on the issue of what to do about the war once we were stuck in it. Trying to make the best of a bad situation isn't the same as keeping us out of the situation in the first place. Don't try to con me.

And as for that last bit, about criticizing the war before he did? All I can say is, were you under sniper fire at that time?

(Come on, Senator. You're an intelligent woman. Why do you say these absurd things? Why should I have confidence in a candidate who is obviously trying to snow me? Are you sleep-deprived? Just how good would you be at 3am?)