Maverick the Great

By FRANK RICH
Published: September 27, 2008

WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country
first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to
get to the White House.

For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t
obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted
into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might
precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was
whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation
into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of
the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.

By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in
principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the
president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate
Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in
Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing
both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others
eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not
outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his
mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor
toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll
leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can
get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair
psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have
sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The
other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining
the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down
on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever
perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.

To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not
only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously
expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day
after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a
“once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the
umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As
recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page
bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I
have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he
was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)

Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was
holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain.
As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment
arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had
surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News
poll. The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to
belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new
polls from Fox News, Marist and CNN/Time, each with numbers closer to
Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose
strongholds of Alaska and Montana.

That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew
what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin.
The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to
be upstaged fast.

But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week.
Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between
his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at
the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most
of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated
his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on
Wednesday.

What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll
Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s
campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from
Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to
the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-
called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed
and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.

The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by
reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own
biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the
mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives
vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked
at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama
campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.) By contrast,
Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior
adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and
the reported head of his White House transition team all either made
fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms
that did.

By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this
news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying
diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance
that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian
Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he
had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New
York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)

It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark
that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced,
clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia
conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious
crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns,
debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended
immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his
Robin.

Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took
no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked
tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out
the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring
with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain
supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes
against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-
publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains, Bono,
and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global
Initiative.

There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads
remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones,
couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus.
This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous
“suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on
Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our
American hats,” he declared then, solemnly pledging that
conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin
Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead,
piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit
on the down-low.

Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it
had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did
drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess
with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth
to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent
McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the
cancellation “didn’t smell right.”

In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went
on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself
that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal
with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience.
Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist
while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS
studio in New York.

It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric
at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the
disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts
flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the
same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the
“CBS Evening News.”

Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about
McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No,
because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the
road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being
president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”

That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only
through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about
the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he
registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David
Blaine: Dive of Death.”

It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his
potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week.
He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk
wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.

Sometimes, even hard-core Democrats can learn from their Republican
counterparts. Some pithy quotes about John McCain from his own party...

"He is a vicious person"
Former representative Charles LeBoutillier R-NY

"An embarrassment to the party"
Arizona GOP state senator Susan Johnson

"There is nothing redeeming about John Mccain...he's a hypocrite"
Former house GOP whip Tom DeLay

"The thought of him being president sends a chill down my spine. He is
erratic"
Senator Thad Cochran, R- MS

"Hard headed is one way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. It's a
quality about him that disturbs me".
Larry Wilkerson, former chief aide to Colin Powell

"What happens if he gets angry in a crisis...? It's the president’s job to
negotiate and stay calm. I just don't see that he has that quality".
Former Arizona GOP chairman John Hinz

"His temper would place this country at risk...and the world perhaps in
danger. In my mind that should disqualify him"
Former Senator Bob Smith, R-NM

"I decided I didn't want this guy anywhere near a trigger."
Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:55:17 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

Sometimes, even hard-core Democrats can learn from their Republican
counterparts. Some pithy quotes about John McCain from his own party...

"He is a vicious person"
Former representative Charles LeBoutillier R-NY

"An embarrassment to the party"
Arizona GOP state senator Susan Johnson

"There is nothing redeeming about John Mccain...he's a hypocrite"
Former house GOP whip Tom DeLay

"The thought of him being president sends a chill down my spine. He is
erratic"
Senator Thad Cochran, R- MS

"Hard headed is one way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. It's a
quality about him that disturbs me".
Larry Wilkerson, former chief aide to Colin Powell

"What happens if he gets angry in a crisis...? It's the president’s job to
negotiate and stay calm. I just don't see that he has that quality".
Former Arizona GOP chairman John Hinz

"His temper would place this country at risk...and the world perhaps in
danger. In my mind that should disqualify him"
Former Senator Bob Smith, R-NM

"I decided I didn't want this guy anywhere near a trigger."
Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM


No no, trip. You got him all wrong. As his staff pointed out just the
other day if it weren't for him the bailout compromise would never
have been passed... uh... never mind.


GeoC

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:55:17 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

Sometimes, even hard-core Democrats can learn from their Republican
counterparts. Some pithy quotes about John McCain from his own party...


"There is nothing redeeming about John Mccain...he's a hypocrite"
Former house GOP whip Tom DeLay

Ah...OK, so that's 'tripper counted as firm in the "Tom DeLay is one of
the good ones" camp...IAC,

"I think he can be ready but right now, I don't believe he is. The
presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training."
(speaking about Obama)

"I stand by that statement"
(When asked about the above statement)

"I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think
the country would be better off."

"Yes, I do believe that..."
(When asked directly about the statement immediately above)

"The more people learn about them (Obama and Hillary) and how they
handle the pressure, the more their support will evaporate."

All Joe Biden

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:35:31 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:55:17 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

Sometimes, even hard-core Democrats can learn from their Republican
counterparts. Some pithy quotes about John McCain from his own party...


"There is nothing redeeming about John Mccain...he's a hypocrite"
Former house GOP whip Tom DeLay

Ah...OK, so that's 'tripper counted as firm in the "Tom DeLay is one of
the good ones" camp...IAC,

"I think he can be ready but right now, I don't believe he is. The
presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training."
(speaking about Obama)

"I stand by that statement"
(When asked about the above statement)

"I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think
the country would be better off."

"Yes, I do believe that..."
(When asked directly about the statement immediately above)

"The more people learn about them (Obama and Hillary) and how they
handle the pressure, the more their support will evaporate."

All Joe Biden

And how can we forget:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the
television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of
greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'"

Right. Obama's not ready for the prez and Biden sure as hell ain't
ready for the veep.

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:29:29 -0400, Dave LaCourse
wrote:

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:35:31 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:55:17 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

Sometimes, even hard-core Democrats can learn from their Republican
counterparts. Some pithy quotes about John McCain from his own party...


"There is nothing redeeming about John Mccain...he's a hypocrite"
Former house GOP whip Tom DeLay

Ah...OK, so that's 'tripper counted as firm in the "Tom DeLay is one of
the good ones" camp...IAC,

"I think he can be ready but right now, I don't believe he is. The
presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training."
(speaking about Obama)

"I stand by that statement"
(When asked about the above statement)

"I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think
the country would be better off."

"Yes, I do believe that..."
(When asked directly about the statement immediately above)

"The more people learn about them (Obama and Hillary) and how they
handle the pressure, the more their support will evaporate."

All Joe Biden

And how can we forget:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the
television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of
greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'"

We can forget it. It sounds like an honest mistake, and he isn't
commenting upon current context. Biden wasn't even born when the market
crashed, so it isn't "misremembering" and Roosevelt is the POTUS
commonly associated with the Depression. Granted, if Bush had said it,
all hell would have broken loose, but whoever said it, some 80 years
later, when used as an example, however imperfect/incorrect, and in
context, who the **** cares?

Right. Obama's not ready for the prez and Biden sure as hell ain't
ready for the veep.

Biden and McCain appear significantly more ready to be Prez than Obama.
Obama is a wildcard, and anyone who claims to know precisely how he'll
do is wrong. He might be a great one, he might suck, and about all that
can be done is to go on the evidence. The evidence says, right along
with Biden, he ain't ready to be POTUS. Same thing with Palin.

HTH,
R

wrote in message
...
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 27, 2008

WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country
first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to
get to the White House.







===============
I saw this, this morning, (not using google)
and noted that Rich didn't really talk about the international politics
angle

I agree with McCain about his attitude about Putin (KGB) but not about
Russia

Putin is not Russia.
Russian people like their new found wealth. (Although they got a massive
pullout of investiment which is due in part to the global meltdown but also
due to the Georgia thing turning investors off. It's a risk no matter
what)

THe RUssians would rather be safe and sound and wealthy

They trusted Putin til now because they were the above, or at least, a lot
of people became so that weren't previously

now, Putin will lose a lot of ground

we may need their petrodollars in exchange for something
they may need our ability to court investors to get back in there and deal
with them

We need to work with Russia but not with Putin, that's not that subtle, but
McCain has made it black and white, which it is not

mk5000

http://books.google.com/books?id=dq9...d+dealing+with

On Sep 29, 9:48*pm, "marika" wrote:
......
We need to work with Russia but not with Putin, that's not that subtle, but
McCain has made it black and white, which it is not


That's a problem that the US has had for a very long time in its
approach to foreign policy & international relationships. Clinton's
administration was an exception, so to some extent was Bush senior's.