Old Bigot McCain Rushes to Aid of White Supremacist Sessions

 Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from Alabama
sees defending Donald Trump as mission of Justice Department

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) heard enough of the uppity woman from California, Sen. Kamala Harris, pummeling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from Alabama and challenging his "honor."

Harris had the gall to disorder the racist, former senator now serving as United States Attorney General, making the southern man, "nervous."

At a hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sessions was questioned by Sen. Harris who persisted in examining Sessions' "batter-fried nonsense," (Pierce, Esquire), that his refusal to answer questions about President Trump was justified by the long-standing, secret DoJ policy that the attorney general could not cite because it does not exist.

Sen. Harris was having none of Sessions' making up policy, and her questioning made Sessions look ridiculous.

But the old, bigoted Sen. McCain from Arizona who in 1983 voted against Martin Luther King, Jr. Day could not watch his racist, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it," friend fold on national television, certainly not under examination by a woman, (Mal Contends), (Washington Post).

Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 by the Republican-controlled Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which voted down Sessions 10-8 for being "unfit," (Phillips, Washington Post, New York Times).

No problem for McCain. McCain championed the Sessions nomination to attorney general this year, and is now running political interference for the old bastard as attorney general.

Notes Jonathan Chait, (New York Magazine):

Is the policy is written down, she asked? 'I think so,' replied Sessions — an answer lacking the level of legal precision one might hope to get from the federal government’s top attorney. Harris tried to drill down into just how Sessions learned about this policy. Sessions said he had followed a 'principle,' which apparently is more of an oral tradition or something. That’s when John McCain, off-camera, jumped in to complain about Harris’s questioning. 

It appears McCain is following his own long-standing, secret policy with respect to coming to the aid of racists.

2017 is not 1986. It's starting to look like 1956 when being a racist was not a disqualification for high government positions.

John McCain—The increasingly incoherent senator

Everyone knows John McCain is a liar.

Everyone knows McCain gets unhinged, and is a man unsuited for public service.

Now, we see a man lost and incoherent, as yesterday's Meet The Press shows the nation—John McCain, the whack who can't lie well anymore.

As Steve Benen writes:

Looking back at the tragic and deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last fall, we know quite a bit about what happened. We also know, thanks to an independent investigation, that "Republican charges of a cover-up" were "pure fiction."

But as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued yesterday, he can't be bothered with facts -- he has a partisan vendetta to pursue. ...   McCain, just a few days after explaining how important it is not to be "disagreeable," became unusually belligerent, asking the host whether he cares about the deaths of four Americans.

Gregory tried to get an answer anyway, responding, "You said there is a cover-up. A cover-up of what?" McCain, unable to think of anything substantive, said, "Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans."

Even for McCain, whose capacity has deteriorated sharply in recent years, this was a pathetic display. ...

The exchange on [Feb. 17, 2013] "Meet the Press" wasn't awkward; it wasn't bizarre; it was alarming.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

McCain the Petulant

Though Maureen Dowd left out the deplorable GOP voter obstruction efforts that John McCain embraced in 2008, Dowd's column sums up what McCain has become: Petty and vindictive.

With President Obama, McCain’s objections seem motivated more by vendetta than principle.

He angrily turned on his former base, the news media, during his campaign when his lame performance on the economy and his irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin got panned.

In 2000, McCain would devilishly point out Tom Brokaw or a Times journalist to town hall audiences as 'one of the last Trotskyites, left-wing, Communist, pinkos of the American media.'

In 2008, he snarled to political aides about journalists whom he had once admired, like Brokaw and Charlie Gibson, and he cut off The Times completely. He talks about the media betrayal with the same outsize scorn that he once reserved for his Viet Cong captors.

The famous twinkle is gone, replaced by an infamous bitterness.

Hey McCain, Stop Pitching

Senator John McCain is the central front in the War on Error.

No, that's too generous. The smug pitchman for escalation in Afghanistan is more like a fabulist with a bitter ideology who can't stop selling war without end—no matter the costs, the truth, or the will of the American public.

Frank Rich eviscerates Fiasco John this morning:

The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued.

Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was ‘the central front in the war on terror’ when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war ‘easily.’ Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would ‘probably get along’ in post-Saddam Iraq because there was ‘not a history of clashes‘ between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could ‘in the long term’ somehow ‘muddle through’ in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to ‘muddle through’ there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the ‘remarkable success’ of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony ‘truce’ ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: ‘I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.’ As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, ‘What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?’

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that ‘we have no choice’ but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? ‘The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,’ they wrote. ‘The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.’

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that ‘there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members’ — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must ‘win’ in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.

Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a ‘war of necessity.’

Pew Center Data Is Trouble for GOP

If you want to know why RNC Chair Michael Steele and his allies have become so shrill, it's not only because these guys are unhinged.

They have access to electoral data and a changing America spells trouble for a major political party that is overwhelmingly white, xenophobic, hateful and ignorant. These guys are desperate and Rush and the crew are increasingly impotent.

Consider the just-released Pew Research Center data in the Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History report.

Black, Hispanic and Asian participation is up, and white voting is down. As a percentage of the population, whites' share of the voting electorate has decreased from 84 percent (1988) to 76 percent (2008). That's because the composition of eligible voters has changed in roughly the same proportion.

White voters did support John McCain (55%) over Barack Obama (43%) nationwide.

But white voters alone do not decide who is president, no matter the voter suppression efforts of John McCain and the GOP.

And the sub-headline at Pew: "Black women had the highest voter turnout rate in November's election -- a first". There goes the neighborhood.

Earmarks No Good? Tell That to Janesville

Update: Mike Madden in Salon - "President Obama urges pork reform and signs a bill with earmarks in it on the same day. Republicans make an unconvincing show of outrage."

From today's State Journal: "U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl D-Wis., added $951,000 to the federal Omnibus Appropriations Bill for Black hawk Technical College to provide job training and placement services for former employees of General Motors in Janesville and it supplier companies."

The horror ... because the job training and placement services are an earmark, according to Wisconsin's Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Middleton) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) and of-course the ever-foolish John McCain.

Reads Feingold's statement:

By passing the omnibus spending bill today, which included more than 8500 pet projects costing taxpayers $7.7 billion, Congress failed to show the American people that it is committed to spending their money wisely. When Congress passed the economic recovery bill to create or save millions of American jobs, it did so without including a single earmark. Congress should have done the same thing with this omnibus spending bill and it should do so with all future bills. The president should veto the omnibus, send it back to Congress to be cleaned up and make it clear to Congress that pork-laden bills like this are no longer welcome.

And from Paul Ryan's op-ed in Racine Journal Times: "If we can’t get this issue right, how are we ever going to tackle the more pressing challenges we now face? "

More "pressing" than helping autoworkers get a new job? Mere "pet projects"? Earmarks are less than one percent of the spending bill, and the projects are needed.

You would think that Wisconsin's Feingold and Ryan would know better than to throw more barriers in the way of helping these workers who lost their jobs at GM. Both Ryan and Feingold have intimate links to the community.

But they choose to join McCain and spout this nonsense that dedicated, federally-funded projects are the main problems facing Americans. Ridiculous.

And thank you Herb Kohl for your common sense on the issue!

- See also McCain's Nuts, Feingold and Ryan Following.

via mal contends

McCain's Nuts, Feingold and Ryan Following

Update: Herbert: "Freaking out over earmarks is like watching a neighborhood that is being consumed by flames and complaining that there is crabgrass on some of the lawns."

Sen. John McCain is like a man on the Titanic complaining to the bartender that there’s not enough vodka in his drink as outside the iceberg approaches.

Reads a fundraising e-mail from McCain complaining about “pork” in a big spending bill (now blocked by Republicans threatening a filibuster in the U.S. Senate) as McCain seeks reelection in 2010:

My Friend, … I have called on the President to take a principled stand and veto the bill if it is sent to him, but unfortunately, he appears ready to sign it into law, which is nothing more than politics as usual.

(I)n nearly 30 years, I have never witnessed the type of alarming and irresponsible spending as I have seen in Washington over the past few weeks. I am appalled to see this legislation being rushed through the Congress while containing so many egregious earmarks. It is unconscionable that while we are asking Americans to do more with less in these trying economic times we are about to spend $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa, $2 million for the promotion of astronomy in Hawaii ...

"(N)ever witnessed?" Was McCain in Congress the last eight years? "Alarming ... spending?"

Unfortunately, Wisconsin's Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Middleton) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) are joining McCain and spouting this nonsense that dedicated, federally-funded projects are the main problems facing Americans.

Ridiculous. Did you guys happen to read the newest jobs report? Do you know that the Dow has lost some 50 percent of its value over the last few months? Do you know that a world-wide depression is a distinct possibility, if we're not already there?

Feingold and Ryan are embarrassing themselves by teaming up with the self-promoting McCain who is proving again that he really doesn't care about the American people.

Maybe Feingold and Ryan can go tell the folks in Janesville that what they need to be really concerned about is helping our Iowa neighbors who are sick about pig farms (not pleasant). And that workers' losing their jobs as America heads into an uncertain future have to take a backseat.

McCain, Feingold and Ryan are not helping by working against a primary lever to stave off an economic catastrophe, distracting us with a ludicrous diversion that constitutes about one percent of a spending bill.

They are now part of the problem obstructing critical efforts to help Americans.

- via mal contends

McCain Underperformed with Religious Voters

Barack Obama outperforms Gore and Kerry among Protestants and evangelicals From MyDD:

Barack Obama received a higher share of the Protestant vote, 45%, than any other Democratic nominee since at least 1972, the earliest year for which I have data. By comparison, in 2004 Kerry received 40% of the Protestant vote and in 2000 Gore received 42%.

Even though McCain honed his campaign message to appeal to the religious right, alienating much of the country in the process, there was at a significant increase in Obama's share of the religious vote over Kerry's, especially among Catholics.

McCain's lack of appeal to the religious right and his poor people skills have been obvious since the inception of his campaign.

As we write here on Jan. 31. 2008:

Democrats are looking forward to a John McCain GOP nomination for president.

McCain faces the impossible task of disentangling himself from George W. Bush and presents the close-to-impossible task of bringing along the religious right.

You can bet that not just McCain but the remaining congressional Republicans will have similar results as McCain when they try to appeal to the American people through obstruction, assuming they are as sociopathic as Bush which is a fair assumption.

Election Day: November 4

First states to look for, election scoreboard, and leaked exit polling

- Two key early states to look for:
Indiana, after 5:00 PM (central): (except for Democratic-leaning Gary that closes at 6:00 PM).
Virginia closes at 6:00 PM (central).

If they both go Obama, Obama wins. In one state goes Obama, Obama is 99.999% certain to win. If neither does, no worries, McCain needs them, not us.

Useful links:

Election Scoreboard
Election Day ScoreBoard (Daily Kos) - great stuff

Leaked Exit Polling
Check back at the following sites around Noon Central time:

- MyDD
- Daily Kos
- BuzzFlash
- Huffington Post
- Drudge Report (I Know)

Loser, Loser, Loser

Brian Adams, a mathematics and computer science professor at Franklin & Marshall College, reports that there's a 99.98% chance that Sen. Barack Obama will win the presidential election on Tuesday.
- Political Wire

See also:
- Intrade Prediction Market Electoral Map

- 538.com

- Real Clear Politics

A corrupt hack like J.B. Van Hollen cannot change anything, though he tried his worst.

As Josh Orton writes on Van Hollen and his judicial follies: "Really the best of both worlds: Barack Obama would win Wisconsin even if the suit failed - but now another careerist Republican looks foolish having failed to politicize the voting process."

NJ Insiders Poll: Obama and Obama

National Journal Washington Insiders Poll

Republicans (71 votes)
Q. Who will win the presidential election?
John McCain 18%
Barack Obama 82%

Democrats (74 votes)
Q. Who will win the presidential election?
John McCain 0%
Barack Obama 100%

Obama's 30-Minute Spot Enrages Republicans

Let them whine.

From the Washington Monthly:

On MSNBC yesterday, far-right pundit Willie Geist said Obama's ad reminded him of 'the Soviet invasion,' because it 'take[s] over the airwaves.' Yesterday afternoon, Elisabeth Hasselbeck called the Obama ad 'repulsive.'

Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, said, 'John McCain's only chance is to disqualify Barack Obama. He has seven days. Every day that people are talking about Barack Obama's infomercial is a day that John McCain isn't getting his message out.'

McCain: Bad Liar and Loser

Update: Politics of bigotry may finally be over
Amid the voter suppression, the GOP corruption (for example Wisconsin Atty Gen. J.B. Van Hollen, US Atty Gen. Michael Mukasey), the appeals to fear and xenophobia (one can go on), an observer can plainly see why John McCain is going to lose.

Sure, the structure of the campaign in light of the economy and a divided GOP are instructive.

But one other aspect of the McCain campaign is clear: He's a horrible liar, hence an unsuccessful GOP presidential nominee for which lying is a necessity to winning a presidential general election. [The same imperative does not apply to the Democratic nominee but that's for a different column.]

"Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to the qualities the person is supposed to have, " writes Dr. John Arbuthnot in Treatise on the Art of Political Lying (1714), (cited by Hitchens, Grand Street, Autumn, 1985).

In other words, the political lie has to be plausible. It must fit onto the existing image if it is to be believed, and the target audience of the lie has to be susceptible.

As Wall Street veers wildly and Americans fear for their families' futures, McCain and Palin are repeatedly and desperately hitting Obama for being a "redistributor," a President Robinhood who wants to take your money for which you work and then give the money away to others.

Give away to whom? It is darkly suggested in the paranoid, fearful minds of the Republican base though not explicitly stated, that blacks and Mexicans are the amorphous 'others' whom we must fear, along with their bag man Obama.

McCain and Palin have two problems with their political lies.

Never mind the incoherence with which Palin and McCain deliver the message, the existing psychological matrix of the electorate is inadequate for McCain's purposes; the public sees minorities absent the hostility of 30 years ago.

That's why few "independents" and "moderates" are buying McCain's snake oil.

Considering Obama's obvious qualities, the lie of his taking away our money and giving it away just does not ring true.

Not in Obama's biography that is well known now, not in Obama's steady debate performances, not in Obama's reasonable-sounding economic and tax proposals, not in his clear empathy for working families, and certainly not in the money being taken away right now from our retirement accounts by the cold free markets and years of Republican rule that Obama is in no way a part of, but with whom McCain is intimately and indisputably tied.

And as millions of Americans see $10,000s of their savings go down the drain, the "redistributor" brand just does not seem all that threatening anyway; it even has a certain appeal.

The lie is implausible and the audience is no longer there to believe it.

That's what makes McCain an ineffective liar and a political loser.

- via mal contends

McCainCon Conducting System Testing

Team members of McCainCon are conducting last-minute system testing though the objectives have already been met: John McCain's campaign is dead.

The plot to sabotage the GOP nominee for president of the United States by conservative movement officers, rightwingers and anti-McCain allies is brilliant. The members participated with faint energy in the McCain campaign, holding back, watching a man they dislike take the fall in a Goldwateresque election for the GOP.

After the election, McCainCon begins the acceptance phase that results in finding the man who they want as the next president in 2012: Sarah Palin.

Watch out for subplots and counter-espionage, and for Kirk Douglas to emerge out of the wreckage of the McCain campaign and blow the whistle.

Happy Monday

- Poll: Obama Widens Lead in Va. (Post) - We win Virginia, we win.

- End of Battle Centers on Turf Bush Carried (NYT) - Enough said.

Obama Hits 51 at Pollster.com

For the first time, Pollster.com shows Obama breaking the 51 percent mark as he opens up his eight-point lead over John McCain.

Obama national lead of 51.2 to 42.4 comes as key battleground states show Obama opening up a sizable lead over McCain.

On election night keep an eye on Virginia.

If Obama takes Virginia, have the champagne bottles pointed in a safe direction, because McCain will be virtually without a shot at winning not matter how many votes they try to suppress.

Dane County Expects Record 90%-plus Turnout, Unofficial Estimate Says

A veteran elections official said today that Dane County is preparing for a record-breaking, 90-percent-plus turnout in the Nov. 4 presidential election.

The official said that the unofficial estimate is based on the number of absentee ballots requested and already cast, among other signs of high voter interest.

Election officials in Dane County are telling poll workers (election inspectors) working the second of two shifts on election day to expect a late night because absentee ballots cannot be counted until after the polls have closed, per Wisconsin law.

Poll workers can work a 6:00 AM-1:00 PM shift, a 1:00 PM-till close shift, or an all-day shift.

It's doubtful, the official said, that absentee ballots could be counted before 11:00 PM in some Dane County municipalities.

Dane County Cushion for Obama

Dane County supplied a 90,000-plus, winning margin for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in 2004, and is expected to provide an even higher vote margin for Barack Obama this election cycle.

An analysis of the national electoral college states conducted here shows that if Virginia or North Carolina goes for Obama, Wisconsin will become a must-win state for McCain, based on current state polling numbers.

The record-breaking turnout may make a relatively early election night impossible if Dane County, usually at or among the highest in voter turnout of Wisconsin's 72 counties, has numerous wards reporting in around midnight.

The network exit polling, however, could show a Wisconsin victory for Obama shortly after the polls close, if current pro-Obama trends continue in the state.

America is not a one-party state

No words of condemnation suffice to describe the repugnant anti-democratic actions of J.B. Van Hollen and the Republicans on voter suppression.

Here's another piece that comes close. From the Democratic Strategist:

Let’s say it simply – America is not a one-party state. The people in the federal law enforcement and criminal justice systems are supposed to stay out of politics – not work to support the party in power. There are specific rules and long-standing institutional traditions in the DOJ against publicly announcing a major political investigation during the last few days of an election campaign. ...

McCain likes to argue that 'I’m not George Bush'. But Dems can fairly reply 'No, but the DOJ will obviously be run in exactly the same, repulsive way that it was during the Bush administration.'

In fact, it’s actually ironic. The last-minute intrusion of the FBI into the 2008 campaign actually gave John McCain the ideal opportunity to show that he really would be a different kind of Republican from George W. Bush. Instead, he used the opportunity to show that he will be exactly the same.

Obama Looking Good in Wisconsin

The good news just keeps on coming.

Voting in Fitchburg (pop. 20,501), Wisconsin (Dane County), located next to Madison, was brisk this last week as voters rushed to cast absentee ballots.

Obama should increase the 90,000-vote cushion that Dane County gave John Kerry in 2004.

Republican attempts at voter suppression in Wisconsin are naked, well-publicized and on Thursday or soon after likely be given a legal scolding. [Having too many blacks voting will not play well this particular election as a political message though J.B. Van Hollen and the Republicans will not stop trying.]

Obama endorses SeniorCare in Wisconsin, the popular Prescription Drug Assistance Program, that helps seniors buy needed prescriptions.

McCain favors letting people choose to pay for drugs or not get them. This will help Obama with a key voting demographic here.

And nationally, Obama looks to achieve an electoral landslide.

Colon Powell endorses Obama.

McCainCon Nearing Completion

Poor John McCain.

His campaign embraces McCarthyite tactics; appeals to fear and racism, throws around the GOP charges of voter fraud, and the rightwing still hates him.

As we have noted here before, though there's no open talk from GOP insiders: There is a secret let-McCain-fall program: Call it McCainCon [a play on the secret EComCon conspiracy from the Seven Days in May movie based on the Fletcher Knebel-Charles W. Bailey II book].

McCain is a fatally weak GOP candidate to face Obama, and it’s likely that many GOP movement wingers see him as a 2008 sacrificial sheep happily slaughtered to the 2012-2016 gods.

That appeared clear months before.

Now, McCain has really miffed the rightwing. The Hill reports that McCain

has alienated the Republican base by supporting a $700 billion Wall Street bailout and proposing that the federal government buy mortgages facing default, conservative lawmakers and observers say.

Three conservative House Republicans (speaking on background) said Sen. McCain (Ariz.), the party’s presidential nominee, missed an important opportunity to prove his credentials as a proponent of limited government by opposing the massive bailout.

I'm suggesting a plot by conservative movement officers to sabotage the GOP nominee for president of the United States.

And many conservatives need only participate with faint energy in the campaign to add their support to this McCainCon conspiracy, watching a man they dislike take the fall in a Goldwateresque election for the GOP.

I wonder if the Council for National Policy and other McCainCon operatives will watch McCain fall with modesty and grace.

- via mal contends