They know that the media won't correct this -- they will, rather, harp on "redistribution."

Lie, rinse, repeat. Thanks, corporate media!

Pure Rovarian. Up is down, right is left, etc. Tactics to misdirect have over the centuries made pick-pockets gainfully employed. Anyone who buys this malarky isn't worth the trouble. Honestly, f America ends up buying this crap we, as a country, deserve McAce and palinaroundwithterrorists for the next eight years. nauseating...

What the hell is McCain talking about? Closing tax loopholes for Big Oil is one of the corner stones of Obama's campaign.

Any bozo who repeats McCain's baseless attack deserves to be boycotted from the press corp working the Obama White House.

It's a panicked response, but it's one that's worked thus far to prevent the harshest (i.e. true) criticism from reaching McCain: anytime he COULD be criticized, he actively criticizes Obama in exactly that way. I think among those who would otherwise be turned off McCain by hearing the truth instead disregard it as "backlash."

Fortunately, Obama doesn't need americans to know the truth about McCain to win. Knowing the truth about Obama is enough.

Is the difficulty in coming up with new ways of describing things why you've recently reported several items as "breathtaking"? I was going to suggest you get checked for hypoxia.

We really don't need the superlatives. We're pretty good at detecting absurdity from the facts.

(This sounds unduly harsh. Sorry. I read nearly every message you write, I just get a bit put off when ad-speak shows up.)

Since McCain's campaign is setting new lows in honesty and integrity can't we just name the standard after him. How big a dishonesty was it? it was McCain 08 bad. He really needs to become synonymous with dishonesty and sleaze. forget Rovian as an adjective and start using McCain 08 or McCainish or McCainian.

If Obama wins, every one of these last-minute smears will be playing at full volume from Rush Limbaugh and his pals for the next 8 years. He'll say that even the liberal Washington Monthly reported on the charges, without mentioning that you did so purely to debunk them. And then Broder&Co will sagely opine that all this whiff of scandal couldn't possibly be without some foundation.

Cue Obama doing the brushing-off-the-shoulders thing. He is not the kind of sheep-like Democrat we're used to. Have you caught all the recent instances in which he's been light-heartedly but pointedly mocking Faux News? This shit worries the Nervous Nellies a lot more than it does Obama.

The McCain/Palin/Bush/Cheney/GOP lexicon...

Up = Down
Right = Wrong
Freedom Agenda = Torture
Freedom Agenda = Stoking radicalism
Maverick = Same old sh*t
Politics = scurilous lowlife patriotism smears
Transparency = FU subpeonas
Work with investigators = FU subpeonas
Strong on Defense = Outting CIA Agents
Pro regulator = Lifelong deregulator
I'm not Bush = I heart George Bush

McCain's strategy seems to be taking every mistake he's made in the campaign, removing his name and inserting Obama's.

By Saturday, McCain will be blaming Obama for puting Palin on the Republican ticket.

...it's altogether more challenging to find different adjectives that sufficiently capture the madness emanating from McCain campaign headquarters...

Try...batty, berserk, bizarre, chaotic, crazed, crazy, cuckoo, daffy, daft, delirious, dementate, demented, deranged, eccentric, frantic, frenetic, frenzied, insane, irrational, loco, loony, lunatic, maniac, maniacal, manic, non compos mentis, nuts, screwy, touched, unbalanced, wacky...

Having copy-and-pasted all that, I'm guessing that the McCain campaign's real purposes are to:

(1) Throw up as much chaff as possible in order to confuse voters, and
(2) Whine about media bias when called on their bu11sh!t.

McCain has officially gone down the rabbit hole.
Seriously though, there are just too many instances of these outright Orwellian claims/ads he's making. To brush them off as just plain stupidity or lack of strategy is a mistake.

This is how far republicans have sunk. They are knowingly peddling outright lies; up is down, black is white, etc. etc.

Shows you how much respect they have for average Americans who actually do have critical thinking skills.

The object is to win an election, not to score more points in some kind of formal, prissy, elitist debate. The Republicans understand this, and the Democrats don't. So the Republicans always win, and the Democrats always lose.

John McCain is going to seize on every newsworthy event and spin it for his side. Period. It's really a pretty simple tactic, but it gives Democrats fits, because they argue from inside the box. By the time they get done putting together a formal rebuttal to McCain's nonsensical, but persuasive charges, everyone else has moved on to the next seven explosive accusations that McCain has made, and the Democrats are left with their shoes hanging out of their mouths wondering why nobody's listening to them.

They have merely embraced the propaganda theory of the Big Lie. They can't stop now. They have told too many lies to turn back. The only thing that will save them is victory at all costs.

For those who know how evil manifests .. lucifer .. it always manifests by attempting to make what is true false, what is false true, black is white, and so on ... that is why this piece of secretion out of the asshole of lucifer himself should rightly be called McEVIL WITH HIS BITCH MRS 666

I think McCain has adopted the Bush administration's strategy of overwhelming the opposition through the use of rapidfire absurdity, which makes countering each individual outrage that much more difficult.

... it's altogether more challenging to find different adjectives that sufficiently capture the madness emanating from McCain campaign headquarters.

Well, if you would stop being such a level-headed, shrill-free, sober and intelligent commentator it'd be easier for you -- you'd have a whole host of profanities at your disposal.

:-)

That's actually why I stopped political blogging -- my posts wound up reading like a transcript of what an old Eddie Murphy routine would be like if he also had Tourette's.

1) Attack your opponent's strength from your weakness.
2) Accuse your opponent of doing what you're doing.

Rule 1 & 2 of the Karl Rove Handbook.

"We have 'em right where we want 'em, my friends!"

Hark,
I'm sorry but you're wrong. This is what Obama's team has been expecting if you haven't noticed. Barack warned folks about this less than a week ago that things might be tightening up.

What's more is that each McCain attack has bounced off leaving McCain's team more shrill. The numbers are such that it doesn't matter what McCain sez over the next four days.

It's one thing to be concerned and worried but it seems to me that you're panicking over nothing.

More of the same strategy from these folks.

The long term vision of the ReThuglican power center (not Rove etc but their backers/string pullers) is the Grover Norquist strategy. Make the government so weak so as to do away with it`s power to interfere in the agenda of business (greed, greed, & yet more greed.)

They see (some observers even claim that it`s being deliberately triggered) major disaster coming for the world, not just the U.S.A., and want to blame it all on the "other side" so as to continually drive home the point (to each generation) that government is BAD and everyone needs to flee to the "safe" arms of the titans of money & to stop flirting with democracy, equality, freedom etc.

Really. Zoom out and take the longer view.

Wake The FU !

"...it`s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine..." - REM

Sarah Palin says the Washington Monthly vindicates her and Sen. McCain's argument that Barack Obama is the socialist candidate of big capitalists. She urges everyone to remember to vote and for Democrats to vote Nov. 5.

Rush always takes it one step further- he was outraged over how much exxonmobil paid in taxes!

Apparently he thinks they should pay LESS in taxes.

The mind, it reels.

Bet there are quite a few undecided voters out there who wouldn't mind a little socialism where ExxonMobil's profits are concerned. Alaska's totally unique and utterly non-socialist wealth-sharing arrangement probably sounds like a good deal to a lot of people right now, eh?

You should also point out the the energy bill Obama signed resulted in a net increase in taxes on big oil.

From Factcheck.org - http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/factchecking_mccain.html

*** The bill McCain is talking about here is the 2005 energy bill, which actually raised taxes on the oil industry a little bit overall – by about $300 million, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile, McCain himself proposes to cut the corporate rate for all companies – oil included – and that would result in an estimated $4 billion cut for the five largest U.S.-based oil companies, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Obama, on the other hand, is promising that he'll strip oil companies of "tax breaks" to the tune of an amount yet to be determined.

The bigger story, and the one that the media has not really picked up on, is the McCain campaigns utter contempt for the truth.

The media focuses on debunking each individual lie instead of pursuing the overall theme that the McCain campaign (and Republicans in general) have begun to view the truth as an inconvenient reality.

Whatever happened to the commandment, "thou shalt not lie"?

The Republicans have adopted the attitude that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it. The truth becomes irrelevant if the story is reported as two competing versions of reality, not as one is correct and one is fantasy.

I said it months ago McCain is running against himself.

He was a Celebrity, is Not Ready To Lead, does not put Country First, by his own standard is a socialist, pals around with terrorists - see G. Gordon Liddy, and is dangerous, risky, and inexperienced at diplomacy.

John McCain can't hear you. He's busy reading:

"Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us ... and What to Do About It" by Dick Morris and Eileen Mcgann

I REALLY don't think liberals are getting the truth of the right's message to their own, and to us.

This is how conservatives actually think about us these days. Be it Talk Radio brain-washing or Coulter's "Treason" book title going unchallenged, or McCain's grossly inaccurate ads, or our pathetic media using personal opinion for factual reporting, this is how the conservatives are looking at liberals these days.

We've let them get away with the worst name calling, the untrue allegations, and the worst of character assassinations. It is pervasive, insidious, and dangerous to split a country this way.

They get the national media (NPR did a sweet little pro-Fox blurb just last week), they get the national airtime by both Talk Radio and using Christian radio as well (thank you, Dr. James Dobson), they've gotten email and whisper campaigns ciruculating down to the lowest income brackets. Those income brackets BELIEVE THIS STUFF.

And we have let them continue, no matter how ridiculous or just plain wrong they are. What, do we think it will blow over, or if we take the mud with dignity that will somehow negate the damage, or that getting liberals back into power will change their minds (really?), or some miracle occurs like the media waking up?

Exactly what will it take to shut the Republican Mouth up, to stop this verbal trash?

Verbal trash that is slowly turning physical.

And physical slowly turning deadly...

The high visibility conservatives aren't going to shut up. They aren't going to stop this kind of slandering and lying on their own. They aren't going to come together after this election and help get this country going in the right direction if McCain looses. The verbal garbage will continue, the implied worthlessness of liberals will continue, and the cohesiveness of one political/religious set will harden against the rest of us who have gay, religious, or political differences.

Have liberals stood this long enough yet?

Can't we stand up for ourselves, our values, our characters, our issues? Can't we say who liberals are, instead of letting conservatives say who we are?

What the right spews is the conservative view point of liberals, and there are darn few conservatives checking into liberal media to see if their talking points are incorrect. If liberals don't get the liberal view point out there, it will remain the domain of the conservatives to define us.

And they define us as evil today. What will they define us after they loose this election? Think they will be bitter just a bit?

What worse can a person be called beyond treasonist, anti-American, unpatriotic before liberals react with enough self-preservation to make these slanderers stop?

Liberals aren't doing enough to rebutt the conservative spin machine and now the right's talking points have become truth to a very large percentage of this nation.

If Obama doesn't do well (or even well enough), and liberal sympathies die off, weak as the leftist party defense mechanisms in truth are, we could actually be undermined and taken over by another Roveclone intent on a permanent Republican Majority.

Have liberals stood this long enough? I know I have.

Respectfully. Sorry about the length.

Sounds like a perfect opening to get up with an ad in response to this lunacy. Sort of a WTF? ad.

Begin by pointing out what he said, then ask, "Is he serious? Is this the same McCain who..."

Then just list all the points in the post:

The $1.2 billion tax break McCain wants to give to ExxonMobil; the $4 billion in tax breaks McCain supports for America's largest oil companies; the fact that McCain's energy policy reflects Big Oil's wish list; McCain's abysmal record on alternative energy solutions; the lobbyists for the oil industry who are running the McCain campaign.

Turn it back on McCain, hit it hard and make it stick.

By far, my favorite Joe Biden quote from the campaign would make the perfect response to this latest attack:

"You're joking, right?"

Who in the hell can keep a straight face when a republican accuses a democrat of siding with big business. Can you imagine Obama going after McCain for increasing social programs.

It's funny to watch this campaign, because back in 2000 and 2004 people actually listened, now no one wants to call the old geezer a liar, but we are all rolling our eyes.

One word:

PROJECTION

That one little word perfectly describes GOP politics in the Rovian era.

And McCain wonders why he "can't get no respect" in the media? The sheer audacity of this is just astounding!

The GDP may have fallen into negative territory

No, as was pointed out last time you made this mistake, just a few posts ago, it has not. The Gross Domestic Product has not fallen into negative territory, its is the growth rate of the GDP that has done so.

Please stop repeating this.

Obama has called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies where the taxes would be put into alternative energy sources.

We need other energy sources and more efficient use of energy to reduce our dependence on oil.

There was a focus on energy (before Wall Street crashed) and that makes it nearly impossible to justify any government monies going to the oil industry. Obama realized that and began to think we should tax their recent war-related high-oil-price profits to begin promoting the shift to other energy sources.

The talk of taxing them and regulating the commodities market for oil had an immediate impact and oil prices have dropped steadily since then. Congress has already legislated tax breaks for alternative energy and with an Obama administration there will be follow-through to move us along this transition.

Of course, there are many other details and parts of the picture that will be made clearer as we go along.

I have not had the energy to look up the more recent comparisons for their third quarter profit.

But, Exxon's SECOND QUARTER PROFIT of $11.2 Billion is about the same as the GDP of Jamaica ($11.2 billion) and handily beats that of Paraguay ($10.7 billion), Georgia ($10.2 billion), and Afghanistan ($9.26 billion).

This is obscene.

By Saturday, McCain will be blaming Obama for puting Palin on the Republican ticket.
Posted by: tomeck

Well of course it was Obamas fault; if he had picked Hillary, JM would never have picked Palin.
snickersnicker

Exxon sold $137.7 billion of stuff in the quarter and profit was $14.8 billion - 10.7% profit. What was the profit margin of the other US companies that sold $137 billion of stuff? I don't think there were any.
One thing I expect from the Obama administration is the intelligence to consider all the facts before taking actions. And not just the facts that support a pre-conceived notion or support a purely political action - we had that for 8 years now and look where we ended up. Yes, Exxon made a great big pile of money, but they sold a bigger pile of 'stuff'.

Exxon sold $137.7 billion of stuff in the quarter and profit was $14.8 billion - 10.7% profit. What was the profit margin of the other US companies that sold $137 billion of stuff?

They were selling a commodity that was at record highs on the world market. Now it's starting to come down in price again, so their profits will be smaller next quarter. I think it's kind of a stretch to claim that Exxon was really, really good at selling $4 a gallon gasoline so they deserve all of their profits.

I judge pigs by profit margins. Exxon has big profits because it has big sales, but its margins are reasonable. Look at profit margins and lib favs like Apple and Ben and Jerry's pop up.