McCain Defends Obama As Slovenia Awaits New Parliament

Funny. While John McCain’s campaign is attacking Barack Obama and potraying him as associating with terrorists, John McCain defends his Democratic rival as a decent an honest man. In this BBC video

20081014-mccain.jpg
(source)

Have the things gone out of control in the Republican campaign, has John McCain finally had it? Or is he simply letting others do the dirty work for him, while he seemingly defends the other guy, if only to reiterate what Republicans think of him?

In any case – we’ll be back in Slovenia tommorrow, as the parliament convenes for its first session and elects its leadership. Stay tuned! 😀

Published by

pengovsky

Agent provocateur and an occasional scribe.

13 thoughts on “McCain Defends Obama As Slovenia Awaits New Parliament”

  1. Well, this comes a week after two widely publicized incidents (the one where someone yelled “he’s a terrorist” and McCain winced slightly but said nothing, another where Palin didn’t say anything when someone yelled “kill him!” about Obama while she was speaking). On one hand, McCain is starting to get a ton of crap for the nastiness and racism of his campaign. On the other hand, I imagine he’s got the secret service asking him to cool it…the level of hate and rage being expressed in the last few weeks has been out of control (and seemingly endorsed by the McPain campaign).

    Couple that with the economic crisis and you could end up with civil unrest breaking out post-election. McCain has no choice but to pull back the rhetoric and try to reclaim the image of respectable elder statesman. He’s losing bad with the current Rovian tactics his campaign has been taking.

    Let’s just skip ahead to November already!

  2. Hey! 🙂

    Yes, it was rather unpleasat watching this… But hey, we’ve got experience of this here. Remember Ambrus? Janša got elected on racist and bigotous anti-Roma rhetoric in 2004.

    Speaking of elections – you guys are up for election soon, right? Your third is four years, if memory serves… 😉

  3. Don’t forget Sen. Lewis’s stab at the Mc Ain’t campaign for inciting hatred, drumming up comparisons with Alabama’s Governor George Wallace (a racist and vehement segregationist republican) running for the presidency back in the ’60’s. People over on this side of the pond should never forget that there’s still a serious division between WASP Americans and their coloured compatriots, especially in the mid western states (just last night I watched the movie ‘Thunderheart’ again, where David Crosby’s character calls the Lakota ‘goddamn prairie niggers’; a very apt characterization of white sentiments near the Indian reservations in the Dakotas). We Europeans should not forget that this is considered the electoral heartland of the USA and that heartland has been voting GOP from way before we were born.

    Mc Ain’t, of course, doth protest, even though his campaign ran ads about Obama ‘palling around with terrorists’ (dixit Sarah Palin) and Obama being too risky for America, playing the race card in a very subtle but nonetheless not to be misunderstood way. They probably thought it was business as usual, as these electoral smear campaigns are part and parcel of the latter stages of the campaign trail and they’re running behing in the polls. This, of course, after Mc Ain’t had promised last March to not resort to such tactics and to run a ‘clean’ campaign.

    Concerning Mc Ain’t, I think it’s a good suggestion to read this. While it may be a long read, it sheds some light on Maverick Mc Ain’t and his mavericky career. No doubt liberal media propaganda to all Republicans, but and interesting read nonetheless.

    Ending on a funnier note, P, I find it strange (but understandable, as this is first and foremost a blog about Slovene politics and naked humans ;)) that you haven’t picked up the whole the whole Tina Fey hype yet. Last night, the BBC’s Panorama put a segment of Palin’s NBC interview with Katie Couric next to Fey’s parody of the interview. Eerily funny how reality and parody are so closely tied…

  4. Sorry, spam filter picked up your comment due to more than one link.

    I only found out about Tina Fey hype yesterday :mrgreen: What I like about her (beside her Palin impersonation) is the sentence she used on one of the recent award ceremonies: “I hope to be done doing Palin by November 5th” 😈

  5. I hope that, before she’ll be done on Nov.5th, Tina will spoof Palin’s comment on her impersonations. ‘I liked it a lot, but I watched it with the sound off’. That one almost made me choke in my morning coffee, were it not that I don’t drink morning coffee… :mrgreen:

  6. I hope that, before she’ll be done on Nov.5th, Tina will spoof Palin’s comment on her impersonations. ‘I liked it a lot, but I watched it with the sound off’. That one almost made me choke in my morning coffee, were it not that I don’t drink coffee… :mrgreen:

  7. Well to be honest it’s not like the Democrat side is beyond hatred. I don’t think I’ve ever seen people hate someone as much as the left hates G. Bush. Say what you will about him, but I just think it’s a little crazy to get that worked up over politicians.

    Anyway, I was just going to say I find it disheartening to see those type of ads being run by the republican side. Honestly a lot of that is just cheap tactics used to sway the stupid. I mean there are so many pertinent issues that the Republican campaign could use to hammer on the Democrats & Obama, but they resort to this useless drivel. Sometimes I think these campaign managers are all morons.

    The one issue that really gets me is all the political ads from the left slamming the right on the economy, and basically saying deregulation by republicans is the cause. I’m not sure if many of you saw the media footage, (they parodied some parts of it on SNL), showing how all these Democrats on the Finance committee in Congress were basically calling the regulators liars & berating them for even hinting at the fact that Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae had any kind of wrongdoing going on as far back as 2006. I’m sure deregulation has some part in it, but still, when you don’t even listen to the few regulators you do have what good is it to have more?

    Either way whoever does get elected, I don’t think either will fix the economy. I guess we’ll all just have to pray the economy fixes itself. 🙁

  8. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen people hate someone as much as the left hates G. Bush.”

    Quite similar was the right’s contempt/hatred/etc for Bill Clinton. A mirror image. 🙂

    While I’m clearly not on the Republican side, I agree with Michael N that the stupidity of the McCain campaign has been mind-boggling. Picking Palin, who is so clearly out of her league, to get the Hillary vote? Messages that primarily appeal to their strongest base? Are they actually afraid that that the far right won’t vote for them?

    There is lots of video footage of the nastiness at McCain-Palin rallies floating about. Where does it come from? The next time you’re driving around in the US, check out the backroads in rural areas, and play around with your radio dial until you find some political talk radio program. Oh, the crap you’ll hear.

  9. Hey hey! 🙂

    Yes, indeed, we have an election coming up. Today! 😀 So I am off to the polls soon to cast a vote and watch very little change (at least that is the prevailing opinion). Our own little Jansa, PM Harper, is stating that obtaining a second slim minority gov’t will give him an “overwhelming mandate to rule”. Spin, Forrest, spin!

    As for partisan hatred, I disagree, Michael, that this is similar to how Dems hate W. Bush has faced mockery and dislike for what he has done (taking the country off to fight a bloody war unrelated to 911 in any way, allowing the country to barrel into unprecedented debt, lack of environmental policy, the horrendous and ongoing Katrina fiasco) but not who he is.

    Partisan nastiness is par for the course in politics, but what is going on with Obama is different. The Othering of him “he’s a terrorist, he’s an A-rab, he’s a Commie, he’s dangerous, he’s un-American” is an appeal to a racist America (supposedly) of the past. It is a very dangerous thing to use as a tactic because the consequences are not just more insults but rather violence, rioting, lynching and political assassination. It’s one thing to say that your opponent is a dummy, is worthless, is a liar, etc… It’s another to state that he is an enemy of the people. That just empowers a segment of the population to believe that it is their duty to their country to “do something about it”.

  10. Hmm, well I guess I missed what I was trying to get across by making my post too brief. 🙂

    What I was trying to get at wasn’t just the hate. It was the type of people on the left who I’ve heard say “I wish G.B. were dead”, or “someone should kill him”. That was my point, there are wackjobs on both the left & right.

    Yes, it may not be an appeal to racist America, but that certainly doesn’t make it any better or worse.

  11. 🙂 That is the good thing about this round of elections…people are engaged like I’ve never seen before, and really willing to talk about it. Not to mention, Michael N. is always easy to talk with 😉

    Now off to cast my ballot for real, luckily my choice is easy. The incumbent in my area is fantastic, one of our best MPs in the country I would say.

Comments are closed.