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Palin Probe Could Mean Election-Eve Trouble for McCainIt looks like John McCain's new running mate, Sarah Palin, could be hit with some decidedly negative PR at the worst possible time. The Alaska legislature's investigation of whether Governor Palin improperly fired a state employee is scheduled to wrap up and release its findings just days before the November election.
The firing is at the center of a scandal that has largely remained confined to the Alaska press, but is now likely to become a national story in the wake of Palin's selection -- one that could conceivably have an impact on the presidential race.
As it happens, we've been tracking the story closely here at TPMmuckraker.
The scandal concerns allegations that Palin's office improperly fired the state's public safety commissioner because he refused to remove Palin's ex-brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper after his bitter divorce from Palin's sister. In addition to the legislature's investigation, the Alaska attorney general is also looking into the matter.
Palin had at first denied that her office had a hand in pushing to have the trooper fired, but was forced to retract those denials when taped evidence emerged that a staffer in her office was involved.
If the investigation finds that her personal involvement was more extensive than she has admitted, it could create some damaging headlines for the McCain campaign at the worst possible moment.
Running for War President at Any Cost
McCain can win only as a war president. He neither knows nor cares much about the economic meltdown, which is the consequence of the deregulation mania that he has supported at every turn during his career in the Senate. If McCain had to run on his economic policy record in the Senate, he might be a loser even in his home state of Arizona, whose residents are suffering mightily from economic disarray presided over by the Republicans. Better to dwell on the dubious success of the surge in Iraq than on the surge in home mortgage foreclosures and the price of gasoline that has crippled Arizona's and the nation's economy. Still better to change the subject to the Russians and Georgia rather than dwell overly long on the disaster of Iraq, which has cost our nation trillions of dollars and where the prime minister now is far more zealous than Barack Obama in calling for an early withdrawal of U.S. troops. But whatever McCain's problems from cheerleading for Bush's war, they pale in comparison to his vulnerability on the most pressing domestic issues.
Instead of learning the hard lessons of the need for stern government oversight of the financial sector from his own compromised involvement as a member of the Keating Five in the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal, he voted to have more of the same. McCain became a booster for all of the banking deregulation legislation advanced by the Senate Banking Committee's then-chairman, Phil Gramm, who, more than any other legislator in the past decade, should be held responsible for the current mess.
Instead of recognizing that Gramm had pursued a disastrous course as the subprime mortgage scandal was exposed, McCain appointed the former-senator-turned-banker to be his campaign chair. McCain fired Gramm over a verbal gaffe but has not retracted any of his key votes liberating the financial community to fleece those desperate to become homeowners, and, were that the subject of the presidential campaign, he would lag way behind in the polls. This is not the season for laissez-faire corporate capitalism.
That's why he needs a new Cold War, but it's a bad fit for the world we face. The danger from Russia is not that it has imperial ambitions driven by the remnants of an expansionist communist ideology. Even China, which is still a communist-run state, knows that old-fashioned imperialism doesn't pay. What drives nations to madness these days is not ideology - communist, Muslim or any other flavor of the month - but rather an assortment of nationalist and religion-fueled grievances. In the case of Russia, the evolution of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin from the man Bush so admired to the one McCain despises was driven by hostile U.S. policies-from NATO expansion to placing anti-missile rockets near Russia's borders.
The first step in adjusting U.S. foreign policy to a multipolar world is to recognize that other nations, as well as the United States, have causes and concerns that may be legitimate, even when they differ from our view. The hope of the Obama campaign was that a less U.S.-centric view might be in the offing, but that might be too great an expectation in the midst of a presidential campaign.
Is John McCain a Christian or an Opportunist1. In 2006, you recanted your claim six years earlier that Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell were "agents of intolerance." What changed your mind?
During the 2000 campaign, you famously claimed that the late Jerry Falwell was an "agent of intolerance." But when Meet the Press' Tim Russert on April 2, 2006 asked whether you "still believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?" you reversed yourself and said, "no, I don't." The next month, you gave the commencement address at Reverend Falwell's Liberty University. Just weeks earlier, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart asked you, "Are you going into crazy base world?" to which you replied, "I'm afraid so." Why did you change your position on Falwell and Robertson being agents of intolerance? Were you pandering to the "crazy base world" of Republican primary voters?
Romney Genuflects for Little Johnny McCain Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) walked into a bipartisan wave of condemnation in Colorado when he told the Pueblo Chieftain that the 1922 Colorado River compact, which governs the allocation of the river’s water among seven states, “needs to be renegotiated over time”:
“I don’t think there’s any doubt the major, major issue is water and can be as important as oil. So the compact that is in effect, obviously, needs to be renegotiated over time amongst the interested parties,” McCain said while on his way to the Aspen Institute. “I think that there’s a movement amongst the governors to try, if not, quote, renegotiate, certainly adjust to the new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource.”
Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) called the compact “sacrosanct,” adding that opening it up “would only happen over my dead body.” Senate candidate and former U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer (R-CO) agreed, telling the Grand Junction Sentinel, “Over my cold, dead, political carcass.” The Denver Post editorialized that McCain “displayed a disturbing ignorance of the realities of the West’s scarce water resources.”
Now, one of McCain’s top surrogates, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is claiming that McCain didn’t mean what he said. Romney told 9News that McCain “has no interest in reopening the compact“
POW mate calls McCain 'liar' over 'turncoat' chargeFormer Orange County Supervisor Edison Miller is lashing out at John McCain, saying the presidential candidate falsely fingered him as a turncoat who was "actively aiding the enemy" while the two were imprisoned during the Vietnam War.
"He lied about me," said the Irvine resident, who retired as a Marine Corps colonel shortly after the war. "The attacks on my character and integrity are totally without merit or justification. I did stand up and say the war was wrong. I would speak against the war, but I never spoke against my country. And I gave up no secrets."
In McCain's book, "Faith of My Fathers," the Republican presidential candidate writes about two "camp rats" who "had lost their faith completely."
[ ]...Miller was promoted to colonel and given an honorable discharge. But a letter of censure placed in his file said that his conduct "was severely detrimental to both the welfare and morale of your fellow prisoners."
Miller went on to graduate from Western State School of Law in Fullerton, and had a career as a criminal defense lawyer. He fathered seven sons and a daughter.
He says his memory is foggy on whether he voted for Ronald Reagan for president, but that he has since voted Democratic for commander in chief. He is particularly critical of the current administration, and says he has opposed the invasion of Iraq from the outset.
"We've had a dumb president for the last eight years and we don't need another one," he said when asked about McCain's candidacy.
And Barack Obama?
"I don't feel comfortable with him," he said. "I'd like to vote for Ron Paul."
When Pastors Go PostalI would be more sympathetic to the flight attendant, Sharon Brown, if she weren't demanding 10 percent of Osteen's fortune to compensate for injuries including a "loss of faith" and hemorrhoids somehow incurred from a frontal assault. But it isn't easy being a flight attendant in this era of layoffs, pay cuts and packed planes--certainly not compared to being a millionaire on her way to Vail. Whatever dubious substance Victoria Osteen faced on that first-class armrest, she should have been able to derive some serenity from the fact that the church she co-pastors draws 40,000 worshippers a week and that her husband has been dubbed "America's Most Influential Christian."
Just another celebrity meltdown set off by insufficiently servile servers? Recall Russell Crowe's 2005 assault with a telephone on a SoHo hotel clerk, or Naomi Campbell's attacks with similar weapons--cell phone and Blackberry--on members of her own staff. But there's a curious antecedent here that Christians would do well to ponder: in 1997, another megachurch pastor and leading televangelist--Robert Schuller--was prosecuted for an eerily similar first-class tantrum.
Schuller, like the Osteens, is a proponent of positive thinking--the doctrine that God intends for you to be rich, healthy and generally "great" right here in this life. While politicos have focused on the Christian Right, there's been far less attention to the fast-growing brand of Christianity Lite, also represented by televangelists Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar. Positive thinking is the theology of the modern mega-church, and it avoids all mention of sin--including the "sins" of abortion and homosexuality--lest such "negative" topics turn off any potential converts or "seekers." Its promise is that you can have anything you want simply by "visualizing" it or, as Osteen puts it, "believing for it"--a doctrine derided by some Christian critics as "name it and claim it."
Schuller faced a different biohazard on his first class flight in '97--cheese. When the flight attendant gave him a fruit and cheese plate for dessert, Schuller insisted that the cheese be removed. The flight attendant refused, explaining, reasonably enough, that all the fruit had been plated with cheese and could be contaminated, from a cheese-allergy- sufferer's point of view. But the pastor was simply on a low-fat diet and did not want to see the cheese on his plate, so he got out of his seat and accosted the flight attendant, shaking him violently by the shoulders. Schuller ended up paying an $1,100 fine and undergoing six months of police supervision.
In the theology of Christian positive thinking, "everything happens for a reason." The Osteens may conclude that the divine intention was to prod them into to emulating Joyce Meyers and Creflo Dollar by investing in a private jet. But there's another possible message from on high: that this brand of Christianity fosters a distinctly un-Christian narcissism.
John McCain the presidential candidate some Arizonans know I never did fall for him in the way reporters fall for politicians, probably because he wasn't much to fall for back in the early 1990s. In those days, McCain was still rehabilitating the image he'd later sell to the national media. He was known then for cavorting in the Bahamas with Charlie Keating, rather than for fighting for campaign finance reform and limited government spending.
No one seems to remember Keating much, anymore. Amazing. McCain and his fellow Arizonan, Democrat Dennis DeConcini, were hauled before the Senate Ethics Committee along with three other senators to explain their actions on behalf of Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan.
Keating gave the senators hefty campaign contributions, then called on them to meet with bank regulators to pressure them to go soft on an investigation of Lincoln. There were two infamous meetings. McCain attended both.
It's true that McCain was the first to back off when the appearance of impropriety became obvious, and the ethics committee was easier on him than most of the others, partly because some of McCain's actions on behalf of Keating took place while he was in the House, and therefore not under the purview of the Senate Ethics Committee.
More important, what often gets lost in the retelling is McCain's close personal relationship with Keating. McCain took trips with Keating, including to his retreat in the Bahamas, and reimbursed him only after the fact was made public.
It was also revealed that Keating had a business relationship with Cindy and her father, Jim Hensley, who ran a very lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Phoenix.
Most shocking, perhaps, given McCain's image today, is that McCain took more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from Keating and his employees, between 1982 and 1988.
You may be surprised to know that in 1987 and 1988, McCain voted against federal legislation reforming the campaign finance system. It was only in 1990, in the aftermath of Keating and the shadow of an upcoming re-election campaign, that he started supporting reform. Ditto for his efforts to cut government spending.
And I've got to pause to say something about both of those efforts. In a word, they're a farce. McCain famously sponsored a law designed to control special interests' grip on Washington, but at the same time, he took money from those interests. Years ago, I analyzed McCain's contributions, compared with the favors he dealt as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee ("An Endowed Chair," November 25, 1999). - *complete story at link
Cracking the Pentagon Pundit CodeAs reporters and researchers know all too well, releasing information isn’t necessarily the same thing as releasing useful information.
Case in point: the Pentagon’s military analyst program. In early 2002, the Defense Department began cultivating “key influentials” — retired military officers who are frequent media commentators — to help the Bush administration make the case for invading Iraq. The program expanded over the years, briefing more participants on a wider range of Bush administration talking points, occasionally taking them overseas on the government’s dime.
In April 2006, the group was used to counter criticism of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The apparent coordination between the Pentagon and the pundits piqued the interest of New York Times reporters. Two years later — after wresting some 8,000 pages of internal documents from the Defense Department — the Times exposed the Pentagon’s covert attempts to shape public opinion through its so-called “message force multipliers.” A few weeks later, the Defense Department posted the same documents publicly.
It wasn’t the high-octane data dump it first appeared to be. Sure, paging through the emails, slides and briefing papers is interesting, and occasionally you come across something noteworthy. But the documents are formatted in such a way that systematically exploring them via keyword searches is impossible. A cynic (or realist) might think the Pentagon was doing damage control by putting the documents out in the open, while making it near-impossible to find crucial needles in a very large, chaotically-compiled haystack.
Luckily, the Center for Media and Democracy has top-notch tech staff. Thanks to them (especially Blake Hall), we are making searchable versions of the Pentagon pundit documents available, on our SourceWatch website. (A few sections remain unsearchable, because the image quality of the original pages is so poor.)
To see what lurks in the emails of the Pentagon’s top PR staff, I searched for a few of the usual suspects.
Move America Forward
“I know they are overloaded in theater,” reads a June 2006 email from Pentagon pundit Thomas McInerney to Defense Department press secretary Eric Ruff. But “Melanie appears to be very determined to do this with or without DOD support so I think it is worthwhile to work with her.” (See pages 44 and 45 of this document for the email.)
Melanie in this case is Melanie Morgan, a conservative columnist, former San Francisco talk show host and the head of Move America Forward (MAF). MAF describes itself as a non-partisan pro-troop organization, but since its founding in 2004, it’s been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the “war on terror” and other Bush administration policies. That’s not surprising, as the group was co-founded by, and continues to receive significant support from, the Republican-linked public relations firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. Indeed, some of MAF’s most reviled targets have been Democrats; they’ve called Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi a “domestic enemy” and the 2004 Democratic National Convention “a ‘Blame America First’ pep rally.”
In July 2005, MAF helped bring six conservative talk radio hosts to Iraq, including Morgan and then-MAF board member Buzz Patterson. Dubbed the “‘Voices of Soldiers’ Truth Tour,” the trip sought to “get the story straight from [the troops] without the filter of the liberal media,” as Morgan explained to the San Francisco Chronicle.
MAF’s 2005 Iraq trip is mentioned in the Pentagon pundit documents, as part of a long list of “intelligence briefings to very important persons (VIPs) and senior officers.” Also on that list are Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, multiple executives of the Booz Allen Hamilton lobbying firm, participants in the WHINSEC / School of the Americas Officers Course, the Spanish Ambassador to the United States and Congressman Pete Hoekstra. (See page 5 and surrounding pages in this document for the list.)
The following year, MAF wanted to return to Iraq, this time with people who had lost family members in the war. But it seems like the Pentagon wasn’t too hot on the idea at first.
“Any help would be very much appreciated,” Morgan emailed to McInerney, as recorded in the Pentagon pundit files. “In the attachment, you will find the letter of response to Centcom [U.S. Central Command] about our Gold Star Family member trip to Iraq.”
It’s not clear how Morgan knew McInerney had high-level Pentagon access — an interesting question — but he did his best to help. McInerney highly recommended MAF’s proposed trip to the Pentagon’s Ruff, writing that it “sounds like a good idea” and “would get very good play in the media and tell our story with these dedicated families of our deceased members.” Ruff quickly responded that he would “check into it.” A few months later, MAF’s Gold Star families group was in Iraq.
“Under the cover of utmost secrecy, the parents of U.S. troops who died in Iraq have made a surprising and historic visit to Iraq,” opens a MAF press release from November 4, 2006, announcing their arrival. “The trip will allow these parents to see the newly liberated Iraq that their children gave their lives for.”
Getting McCain's Georgia's War On"We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia's security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation," McCain said.
Calling on NATO to "stabilize this dangerous situation" is not going down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have put the country in a very vengeful mood. It's hard to imagine what measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and who runs around singing "Bomb Bomb Iran!" it's not hard to guess--and even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009, should he win.
McCain's call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it's also delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen's own recent assessment.
But McCain's brain remains undeterred by reality, a fact that became painfully clear today in Des Moines when he also demanded, "The US should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course."
The problem with McCain's bold demand about going to the UN is that Russia already tried doing exactly what McCain called for--and got rejected by McCain's neocon pals in the Bush Administration. Early this morning, Russia convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council, calling on both sides to immediately cease hostilities, return to the negotiating table and renounce the use of force--but the last part about renouncing the use of force is exactly what Georgia's president Mikhail Saakashvili refuses to do.
Condi undercuts McCain, says country will be safe under ObamaAt one point back in the day, Condi Rice was touted by the knuckle-draggers as a Veep choice or even a presidential candidate, but once she mildly praised Barack Obama for his speech about race, the Freepi turned on her. Today she made an equally mild observation that the country wouldn't blow up if Obama took the helm
How Washington's Right-Wing Wrecking Crew Robbed Us BlindBad Apples All Around
So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichs roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors' glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists' mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.
Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a "culture of corruption," a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology -- an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.
Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. "The White House belongs to you," its dust jacket told us. "So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a citizen of the United States." For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.
The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can't bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.
We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protg and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the "bad apple" thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was "greed gone wild," asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He "went native," say others. Above all, he was "sui generis," a one-of-a-kind con man, "engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of."
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff's in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.
Misgovernment by Ideology
But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don't get the message.
It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story's worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities -- priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.
Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people -- Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years -- have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.
Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulch millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.
For McCain, Another Problem FundraiserA two-year suit against Berkman was decided last month when a jury found he had defrauded investors and ordered him to pay them $28 million.
Berkman, a former chairman of the Oregon GOP, co-hosted a $1,000-a-plate fundraising luncheon for McCain in January, and has donated $4,600 to McCain’s campaign, the maximum allowable by law, the paper reported today.
In a March filing in his trial, Berkman said he owed debts of $12.5 million beyond what he was actually worth. Two months later, Berkman gave the Republican National Committee $23,900.
McCain's Desperate AdsWhat the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
This is what some people are calling the Hannity strategy. Right wing nut-muffin Sean Hannity employs a slick strategy of repeating canards very quickly over and over, day in and day out, which aren’t challenged by his TV co-host Alan Colmes or by any of his radio listeners. By relentlessly repeating falsehoods day after day, the theory goes, it becomes embedded in the media. There is truth in this. In 2004, the Bush campaign ran an ad and daily repeated that John Kerry was a flip flopper, running a Kerry clip with the Democratic candidate saying he voted for an $87 billion military appropriation before he voted against it. It sounded bad when ripped out of context. Kerry voted for it in committee, and then voted against in on a floor vote when the bill included giveaways to Halliburton he didn’t support.
The distortion took on a life of its own, parroted by mainstream media including Chris Matthews, and even the Tom Brokaw and the late Tim Russert. It is a case study in how effective advertising can work when it is done relentlessly and consistently…even if its untrue. Hannity enployed the same strategy conflating a passing acquaintance between Obama and former unconvicted Weather Underground activist William Ayers with "an association" with Obama...for months. He talked it up every day. He finally goaded ABC's George Stephanopoulus to ask Obama about it in a televised debate. It didn't matter that Obama has nothing that could be construed by a thinking person like "an association" with Ayers. He raised the question just by repeating it daily.
