TPM asks “How Low Will He Go?”

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And if that’s not bad enough…

Cindy McCain seems to think that Obama has been playing too dirty..?
From The Tennesseean:

McCain, who stopped to visit a half-dozen children at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt today, said the presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has “waged the dirtiest campaign in American history,” and her husband Sen. John McCain will use tonight’s debate to correct the distortions.

She’s got a pretty short memory. I seem to remember a time during the 2000 election when the George W. Bush campaign circulated a phony poll in South Carolina accusing McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child..

From TheNation:

Eight years ago this month, John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh. 

It worked.

The speech yesterday in Albuquerque NM given by her husband John McCain was one of the vilest speeches I have ever heard. I know she was there, because I saw her standing behind him nodding her head. That was the epitomy of a dirty campaigns..
This excellent post from Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

John McCain’s unprecedentedly ugly speech today

[..] And just now, John McCain — speaking in New Mexico — delivered one of the ugliest, nastiest, most invective-filled personality attacks a major candidate has ever delivered, blatantly designed to stoke raw racial resentments and depict Obama as a Manchurian candidate funded by secret Arab Terrorist sources — a truly unstable and hate-mongering rant filled with lines like these, delivered with an angry scowl to screaming, howling, booing throngs, while Cindy McCain stood behind him shaking her head in disgust at each fact she heard about the Black Terrorist daring to challenge her husband:

[McCain speaking]
I don’t need any lessons in being honest with the American people, and if I did, I wouldn’t seek it from a Chicago politician. . . . There’s much we don’t know about Senator Obama. For a guy who has authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. Who is the real Barack Obama? 

It’s as if somehow the usual rules don’t apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that . . . His campaign had to return $33,000 in illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors, and this weekend, we found out about another $28,000 in illegal donations. Why has Senator Obama refused to disclose the people who are funding his campaign? Again, the American people deserve answers.

(McCain Trashes Obama – Allows Supporters To Call Him A Terrorist!!)

I wonder what it is about Obama that allows “the usual rules not to apply” to him? McCain also repeatedly claimed that the fault of the financial crisis lies with Democrats who (despite controlling no branches of Government) forced banks to give mortgages to poor people who couldn’t afford them (which, as we’ve seen, means minorities) and that Obama “aided and abetted” these practices. What are typically Rovian attack themes disseminated underneath the surface are being unleashed in their naked, unhidden form. As Marc Ambinder just put it with real understatement: “Sen. Barack Obama is, Sen. McCain said in New Mexico just now, a mystery, a liar, complicit in the economic crisis and an unaccomplished naïf, at all the same time.”

There are 30 days to go before this election is over. What we’re seeing explode in front of us are both the devastating fruits of eight years of unchallenged right-wing rule under the Bush/Cheney administration and the tactics of a desperate, dying, rotted movement descending further and further into the sewer in order to cling to power. The more they unmask themselves this way, the more smashing will be their defeat, the longer their banishment will be. [..]

Read the rest of this very well written post by Greenwald. (He has 5 updates as well.)

I don’t think we’ve seen the worst yet of what this man intends to dish out. Not yet, and that makes me ill. How low WILL he go? I don’t know that I even want to find out. It is a campaign of mass destruction.

With each passing day John McCain demonstrates his total lack of character and judgment, his total disregard for the terrible troubles facing this nation, and he has instead lifted the veil on his absolute desperation and naked, greedy ambition. If he cared about the plight of millions of Americans, he would be addressing those tremendous problems facing the nation in a straightforward and honest way with real ideas and plans of his own. He can’t because he has none.

So, instead he is resorting to sludge. Pond scum. He is not worthy of the office, he is not worthy of our respect, and he is not what this country needs at this crucial time in our history.

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Filed under Election 2008 - Presidential, Features - Video, Opinion

Tags: John McCain, nwmuse @ TPZoo