Why do I get the feeling that the entirety of McCain's "message" will consist of a stream of vile lies about Obama? After all, the Big Lie is the essence of Rovian politics, dismantling your opponent's strengths by using the media to hammer the public relentlessly with untruths and half-truths that exploit their fears and prejudices.

Kerry and Gore foolishly failed to confront these tactics head on. Let's see if Obama is smart enough to have learned the right lessons. Based on his recent direction, I wonder if he is.

jj

jj, I agree, when you have a rovian heading the charge, a MSM backing him and some ignorant and arrogant voters - it will be an uphill battle for Obama. He definitely needs to take on the lies that will be launched at him right away and you can bet there will be many everyday to make it look like he'll be defending himself more than talking about his agenda. See how this rove stuff works? Is the only way to tackle this by launching truths at mccain and not the lies that he'll be launching?

What a political system, eh?

Obama needs to re-title his book "The audacity of giving hope to big corporate interests" The big money is on Obama, most likely your next good looking symbol of big power and money.
He's giving no hope to American's plummeting quality of life. It's the status quo, not health insurance, it's staying the course on the robber barons in the MIC. He's a total fraud who's well worth ignoring.

I used to think you were a hero you white trash piece of shit.

He's worse than white trash. He was a collaborator in Vietnam who gave information in turn for transfer to a cushier prison. He was a songbird. Nevermind the evasion of taxes in California, the foul temper, the inability to keep his own thoughts straight from day to day, his wife's connections to the mob, and .................

Rove's guy should fit just about perfectly into this guy's campaign.

We have to make sure he doesn't become President. I think he is very tempered, and he wants revenge. After what he has been through, the hatred must float through his veins.

I have listened to him talk on C-Span at the Latino conference this past weekend. Before he even started to talk, he made a litany of complaints in front of the crowd about how he wanted this to be in a 'town-meeting' setting and how he was upset that Obama was speaking after him instead of at the same time in a 'town-meeting' setting. How he wanted to ;answer questions' instead of speak...blah, blah, complain complain. What a way to begin a speech in front of people you are trying to impress.

A whiner isn't what we want as President, or a man with a temper who will fly off the handle, and maybe even push the button before thinking. Please, please American people, do not vote him in! We need a break from angry, war mongers as President.

I have to agree with Wesley Clark's comments this past weekend. Having a military record or serving in a war doesn't make someone qualified for President. It is their thinking on issues in times of crisis, how calm under pressure they are, how open they are to diversity and others opinions instead of saying "I am the Decider" (no dictators allowed), how they act, how they treat their wives and family and how they view the world that really matters. Going to church proves nothing...ACTIONS speak louder than words..Always remember that.

Reagan, Bush, McCain, Clinton and Obama . . .
They are all from the same mold. If you want things to stay the same then vote to support the two party corporate system. Pick a Democrat or Republican and go with it. If you want things to change then make the change yourself. Vote for a third party. I don't care which one, Green, Libertarian, Constitution, whatever. But the first step in making things change is to change yourself. That you can control and that you can do. The rest is just wishful thinking.

Mendo, are you TRYING to get this Bush clone elected?

This McCain is a world away from the McCain I was for in 2000. At first, when he started on this campaign, I thought maybe he was doing what several here have said Obama might be doing - playing politics to get elected, planning to become real once he's in the White House. This latest move, with Rove's cronies, has smashed flat the already tightly nailed shut and buried coffin of those thoughts. Maybe it's all he's done, plus the creeping dementia, and the built-up rage he carries like a shield, but McCain is pure SCUM!

There are other choices, y'know. There's Bob Barr and the Libertarians, Chuck Baldwin and the Constitutionals, Cynthia McKinney and the Greens, and Ralph Nader's hat is in the ring as an independent. You don't have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, friends; indeed, the country's decline may be traceable to just that behavior pattern of the voters.

(Me, I haven't voted for either of the two majors since 1996; I voted Libertarian in 2000 and 2004, and I have the comforting knowledge that my vote wasn't wasted because I did NOT hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.)

Address??? President White Trash Piece of Shit, Washington, DC.

Fraid so.

Libertarians like Bob Barr and Ron Paul may be for getting out of Iraq, but they are not progressive. Their mantra is deregulation, no taxes, return to the gold standard (as if this might be possible), no social security, no medicare or medicaid, privatization of public schools. What about the poor? They should make themselves rich or die!

Look at the friggin' picture.
Is this the man you want to elect as president of your country?
He looks like a Blackwater agent.
Ditch the baseball cap and shades you idjit.

Yes, he does look like a Blackwater contractor. Rove looks like a pig. And McSame looks like a bobblehead.

"Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Rove's operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of presidential advance in the Bush White House..."

Wow, you mean Fox News and Bush White House are linked in some way? Naah...

I see that Karl Rove has infected the W$J with his hate messages and Obama attacks. Heckovajob Rupert.

Here we go again! The Goebbels machine still allowed full reign. Does anyone still believe we beat the Nazis in WWII?! Remember, they brought MANY of those scumbags here, & protected them.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich. Everything we were taught about our great "free" nation was a lie!

cruz_ctrl July 3rd, 2008 5:04 pm
Look at the friggin' picture.
Is this the man you want to elect as president of your country?
He looks like a Blackwater agent.

-Exactly what I was thinking, or a SWAT team member getting ready to raid a crack house, certainly not presidential.

Third party voters may feel a moral imperative to vote as they do but there votes are invariably wasted and, worse yet, the victor of a three-way race invariably wins only by plurality. This means the second- and third-place factions now must live under a true minority party. McCain elected by plurality is a very repugnant thought.

I say preserve a strong two-party system by all means. If there is enough discontent with either today's Democratic or Republican parties, a coalition of parties should be formed. This happened in the 1850's when the Whigs, Free-Soilers, and Know-Nothings, along with Northern Democrats formed the original Republican Party. John C. Fremont was its first presidential candidate in 1856 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

In order for a strong two-party system to work for the overall best of the nation, each party must mean many things to many people--to be as inclusive of as many American political viewpoints as possible. Historically here and abroad, democracies naturally shift to the left or to the right anyway. There is no third direction.

Does anyone see the Dems, the Greens and the Naderites getting together? Actually swallowing their collective pride and hashing out a visionary platform to guide us responsibly through 21st century?

Forget the fireworks and the flag-waving. What the Founding Fathers did 232 years ago tomorrow was for them a matter of life and death. They fought for freedom and created a working government from nothing. But they did it. They did it to provide the best form of government for the most who would live under it. They faced their conflicts passionately and compromised often bitterly, but progress they did. Granted, the ensuing two-party system wasn't prescribed; it just happened naturally. All-in-all, the Spirit of '76 was both daring and complex.

I, for one, feel the Democratic Party has become too set in its ways and too proud to make wholesale improvements. Some conflict resolution and compromise is in order because, let's face it, divisive politics has strangled progress in America for the past 25 years. It's high time all people left of center coalesce for the better. Who knows, it could even be better than better.

A very high voter turnout is 60% of the registered voters. Most of the 40% and up who don't vote don't because they are too lazy to look at the other candidates. Getting them to vote for other party candidates is a major step in the right direction. Even the anarchist libertarians have a few things right better than the existing power structure.

Wait till you see McCain's veep choice. I bet that will be a real prize candidate. Considering the age health etc. McCain could die any minute.

how sad that the trained monkeys have forgotten the lessons of 2004.

Here we are at a critical time in history needing the bestest and smartest leadership possible, but the choice MUST be from the R's or the D's even though neither of those candidates is on your side on the most important issues.

Are we more devoted to preserving the 2-party system than we are to preserving our country itself?

Rule one for me. Vote for a NON-corporatist. Then we might actually have a chance for the government to become the PEOPLE's GOVERNMENT, like it was intended to be. Instead of a FASCIST GOVERNMENT run by the corporations, as it is now.

Pick out the most important issues that have been voted on in the Senate. Then look at McCain's and Obama's votes. Not much difference there.

If the FISA bill passes, everything else is pointless. The bill does NOT provide for a way that the FISA court could actually monitor who is being spied upon. Our legislators, including Obama, have been lied to about this part of the bill. Everything is in place to spy on campaigns and to intercept and change the votes on election day. It was a bit trickier to hack and adjust the votes when the voting methods varied and not all polls had computer voting lacking any hard copy method of verifying the votes. A mainstream media consortium ownership of the exit polls has now made that check method extremely problematic. The shreds of our democracy are rapidly evaporating with writers and pundits and the like playing make believe, denying or in denial at what has been happening. We either stand up here and now in a last ditch stand or its all over but the lies, the corporatists' new realities.

I was right there when that photo of McCain and Schmidt was taken.

Schmidt is saying, "Ok stupid pay attention, I'm only gonna say this ten times."

Betcha a hundred bucks those baseball hats and sunglasses were made in China

Obama has almost lost my support due to his cave-in on the FISA Bill. I'm looking around at the other political parties right now to see who I will be voting for in November, I'm a lefty American and neither mainstream party is looking very appealing to me right now! I do not want to throw my vote away, but I cannot back folks who flip-flop on their word just to get elected!

tommytoons...I've just recently had my eyes opened re the FISA Bill. While it provides retroactive immunity, that immunity is from CIVIL suits only. Criminal suits are, in fact, provided for in the revised legislation. Perhaps the "cave-in" is just a bit of smart strategy on Obama's part, REGARDLESS of what the outcome of the election.

America needs to repudiate Rove and anyone connected to Rove. With any luck, Karl Rove will soon be indicted. Birds of a feather...........apparently McCain is very comfortable with Rove.

McCain and the Rovian. So, what's new?

And who is "advising" Obama?

This is a cosmetic democracy, just make-believe, anyway. When the press (alone) kept Kucinich out of the debates, then Edwards long before even 10% of the primary votes were cast, which Dem said anything about it? Nooo, none of them have any tie to democratic Process.

In 2000 Ralph Nader was hauled off by the state police in Massachussettes for simply wanting to attend the First "Presidential" Debate in Boston. Not only did the "rules" keep himn from participating in the debate as a cadidate for president, other "rules" or rulers, got him stopped from even being present in an adjacent room. Who spoke out even then??

This is all just a very unpleasant game we play while others do the deciding and acting.

The "advisors", the security, debates, primaries, etc. are just props in the play; we accept our passive role, and many think we're somehow in charge.

TAILCAP,CRUZ CTRL, KEM PATRICK

yeah, what does that cap say?.........GRAVY?

P.S. happy 4th of jul..................

ooops - july...........

I wonder if McCain has some serious health condition, for he certainly seems oddly ghost or ice-cold dead white. I've seen pictures of him when he seemed to have a normal skin tone, but there were a couple of times that he seemed to be of this dead-like whiteness.

He does have one ghoulish whiteness imo, anyway. And it's not regular with him, but is irregularly recurring; I've seen odd photos of him before and he seemed like some walking dead (of unfriendly sort). Look at him and the two other whites in the picture, and you see a drastic difference. Either he has a real and serious enough health problem, or he's suffering from ... some other condition, whatever it is; for his dead-like paleness, even whiter, just isn't normal to me.

Good point ~MIKE~, it ain't natural at all. It's the color of a corpse. ___ Cancer, or it could be from some medication he takes.

And good will to you also ~COCO~ .

Gravy? Maybe, he hee.

The vote for President this time, like alas so many others, is about a vote AGAINST the other guy. So a Vote For Obama is actually a Vote Against McCain and the Republicans, more than it is a vote for Obama.

Yes, Obama can be supported for much of his agenda as well, and he personifies change simply by who he is. But mainly, the Rove shit-politics bulldozer and the rule of the NeoCon CorpoFascist Warmachine Republicans must be destroyed. Any other vote than one for Obama will be effectively giving an advantage to McCain, that corrupt psychotic egotistical warmongering flipflopping foolish blockhead (see his record).

That is why Obama must be supported. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate, as the Republican agenda is vile to its core. That is why one cannot vote For more worthy candidates, like Nader or others. Because it would Not be a vote AGAINST McCain, but rather a piss into the wind.

America was definitely NOT better served by having Bush for a President instead of Gore, or Kerry. There are differences, just look at the Supreme Court these days. Even if we wish for far bigger differences, and better political leaders, there are big differences now between McCain and Obama. The real choice is: do you want McCain/Rove and their satanic minions to ride roughshod on this country for more years, or NOT?

If NOT, then you must vote for Obama, the real moral equivalent of a NO vote on McCain as President. End of story.

TO TOMMYTOONS: WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK, TT? ANY OF THE CANDIDATES ARE RUNNING FOR ANY POLITICAL OFFICE JUST TO TRAVEL AND SEE THE SIGHTS? THEY WANT TO GET E L E C T E D, SCHMUCK! GEEZZZZZZZZ!

Isn't Steve Schmidt the guy who smeared McCain with the "illegitimate black baby" story in 2000?

Nice to see McCain hasn't abandoned his principles....appearantly he never had any to abandon...

I think he is sick too. He continually loses his train of thought, always looks like he may fall down any minute.

I don't think he will live four more years. The VP that corporate america picks for him will be a revelation.