Posts Tagged ‘McCain’

Colin Hanna, Liar.

I get that politics is rough and tumble and the both sides stretch the truth; I don’t love it as an old-school trained journalist, but with a decade of covering politics and nearly another decade as a participant, I kind of have a sense that you can stretch the truth in politics and people get that and factor it into their digestion of news and reporting.

But there are times when something gets so badly stretched that the truth is utterly snapped and someone needs to point it out. This time it comes from Chester County’s own Colin Hanna.

You might remember Hanna as a short-tempered, personality-challenged former county commissioner or may know him from his “Swift-Boat-Lite” PAC, LetFreedomRingUSA (and how someone showed up in both an LFRUSA commercial — the guy who says he won’t hire anybody if Obama is elected — and a McCain commercial makes one wonder about blatant violations of — wait for it — McCain-Feingold, but I digress).

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John McCain, as seen in his commercials

I decided to wait a few days to post anything, mostly because the last few days of the presidential campaign have made me so angry — I’m not sure I can trust myself not to say something I’d regret later.

Granted, the whole mess is frustrating and leads to a sense of de ja vu all over again — where we enter the bizarro world of presidential elections when facts stop mattering and whomever can lie the best wins. Just so we’re clear on this: John McCain is a bald-faced liar. As are his campaign trolls, who lacking anything like a semblance of fact on their side, are basically just making things up.

I suppose having it done to me four years ago should have made me less annoyed to see it again. And it’s a good thing that Obama continues to strike back, instead of stammering uselessly as both John Kerry and I did.

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God, I can’t believe today’s events have forced me to write three times today. Three times! It’s not like I don’t need to get prepped for football practice or anything. Oh, wait, I do (yeah, I’m coaching six and seven year olds in the local Y league).

But, sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Wolf Blitzer, one of America’s great self-parodying personalities (every other word is “thebestpoliticalteamontelevision”) had to just come on the air and announce that John McCain refused to do an interview with Larry King because CNN’s Campbell Brown was “mean” to a McCain campaign stooge last night.

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The Palin Family.

Barack Obama, God love him, argued yesterday that the families of the candidates are off-limits in politics. The truth of the matter — which I suspect he knows deep down — is that they are very much in play. If you trot out the kids to show what a loving, wonderful family person you are (and what politician doesn’t — me included) and then something happens, they get shoved into the spotlight. That’s just the way it is.

And I’m sorry that Bristol Palin is being forced into the spotlight. It has to be lousy to be a 17-year-old girl, a senior in high school, and pregnant. Multiply the factor of awfulness when your mom is the governor. Now take that number and cube it when your mom becomes the GOP nominee for Vice President. I personally, as a father, feel awful for Bristol Palin.

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Typical GOP Media operative

Man, the saga of Bristol Palin continues to get worse — because of just the lamest media relations instincts in the history of politics of our pals in the GOP and the McCain campaign. Instead of confirming the story and issuing a “tick-tock” — journalist-speak for the series of events leading up to John McCain finding out about the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teen daughter — they’re blaming the left-wing bloggers for the entire story coming out.

You gotta be kidding me. Yup, the people who brought you the Swift Boaters — not to mention all of the pathetic “Obama is a Muslim” crap are playing the “evil conspiracy” card. They are all whiny when a fact — not a rumor, not made-up fantasy — is reported. Yeah, sure the whole thing about little Trig was a bit over the top — and not something I was willing to take very seriously — but as wacko as it appeared, there was something to it, as it turns out.

But of course, blame the new media — not the McCain campaign for blundering. Not Sarah Palin. Not Bristol Palin. Not the silly abstinence method of birth control. Nope.

The blogs did it. Really.