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(xposted from FDL Campaign Silo, 'cause I thought you might enjoy it
 

Apparently the McCain campaign is behind the story that he can't use the internet due to injuries he suffered as a POW. This, from Jake Tapper:

Assuredly McCain isn't comfortable talking about this -- and the McCain campaign discouraged me from writing about this -- but the reason the aged Arizonan doesn't use a computer or send e-mail is because of his war wounds.

I realize some of the nastier liberals in the blogosphere will see this as McCain once again "playing the POW card," but it's simply a fact: typing on a regular keyboard for any sustained period of time bothers McCain physically.

He can type, he occasionally does type, but in general, the injuries he sustained as a POW -- ones that make it impossible for him to raise his arms high enough to comb his hair -- mean that small tasks make his shoulders ache, so he tries to avoid any repetitive exercise.

Again, it's not that he can't type, he just by habit, avoids when he can, repetitive exercise involving his arms. He does if he has to, as with handshaking or autographs.

It's certainly possible that the Obama campaign did not know this, since McCain makes it sound in interviews as if this is a matter of choice, not discomfort because of his war wounds.

"I read my e-mails, but I don't write any," McCain told Fortune magazine in 2006. "I'm a Neanderthal -- I don't even type. I do have rudimentary capabilities to call up some Web sites, like the New York Times online, that sort of stuff. No laptop. No PalmPilot. I prefer my schedule on notecards, which I keep in my jacket pocket."

Or, as Ben Smith points out in Politico, it's possible that the Obama campaign doesn't "know" this for the same reason that the McCain campaign has been reduced to pushing the story on background - because McCain himself says he's learning to go online, and he already uses campaign chief Mark Salter's blackberry. Knowing that Jake Tapper sees factchecking as an abusive liberal practice explains a fair amount, don't you think?

So anyway,  it sounds as if his campaign's story about the extent of Senator McCain's disability is evolving, and there is some indication that's the case.

 

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I know it's twice as fashionable to dislike that book as it used to be to like it, but I read all thousand plus pages in a marathon sitting and it made me cry a few times (and laugh a few more, which is harder). I really enjoyed the essays too.

RIP

Ron Fournier's war on Obama: one possible explanation

earlier here

shorter MoDo: when I did everything in my power to put George W. Bush in the White House and keep him there he was way smarter than this

I have a response to today's David Brooks atrocity up here.

I should be better about linking to those pieces - the archives are here if you want to browse.

Check out the young man introducing him.

Did you know that he wrote Hold On, I'm Coming, When Something Is Wrong With My Baby, and Soul Man, and that he was the first african-american composer to win an Oscar?

Isaac Hayes, RIP

Michael Tomasky gives us some of his thoughts on post-partisanship. Specifically, he'd like to see more of it out of Barack Obama

I would like to see Obama return to the post-partisan, one-America idea himself. It's an electoral winner and a governing essential, should he be elected.

It's an electoral winner because Democrats can't really triumph in divide-and-conquer elections. No, it's not that they're too noble for them. It's just that they're not as good at it as the Rove Republicans are, and progressive core positions don't translate as well into fear-mongering rhetoric. The Democrats fear-monger pretty effectively about Social Security -- as well they should -- but beyond that, it's hard to scare people into fearing that the other guy is going to cut your taxes too much or be too tough on our enemies.

See, that's kind of interesting, there.

In the wake of Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, DeLay, the mortgage crisis, the bridge to nowhere, a crippling deficit, $4+ gas, Pakistan sheltering al Qaeda and bin Laden: Running and Hiding Season 7, is there anyone out there who isn't a well-placed DC insider who genuinely thinks that the public perception of what Republicans do in national office is lowering taxes and being too tough on our enemies?

I mean, this guy's pretty well placed and he clearly doesn't

The election isn't about Obama
It's about John McCain and the failed policies and stale ideas of the Republican party

...Some leading conventional-wisdom meisters, like Time's Mark Halperin, like to say that this race is completely about Obama. When they say that, you can hear them setting themselves up as Obama's judge and jury, just waiting for him to trip up so they can say that he's failing to "close the deal" and there are just "too many questions" about him, as they nudge their readers toward McCain, a media darling for many years now.

Well, there is some truth to it. The race will be, to a certain extent, probably a considerable extent, about white voters' comfort with Obama. But it's not all about Obama. It's also about an unnecessary war that was based on lies. It's about a lousy economy and a housing boom that went bust. It's about $4-a-gallon gas. It's about America's dreadful reputation in the world. It's about federal inaction on a wide range of problems, most notably healthcare and climate change, but a bushel of smaller things besides. It's about 84% of Americans thinking the country is on the wrong track.

In other words, it's about the Republicans - their stewardship (failed), and their ideas (stale). And it's about how committed McCain is to that stewardship and those ideas.

Those - a race about Obama and a race about what the GOP has done to the country - are two different races. And Obama is more likely to win the second one.

so what on earth could have caused Mr. Tomasky to write two such very different (not to say diametrically opposed) analyses of the race within a month of each other?

Well, the first was written for the pro-war, Bush-cheerleading, NCLB-loving* happy warriors at the Washington Post. The second was written for the liberal guardian.co.uk, where Tomasky writes about US politics for the british.

Do you suppose Janus ever gets a headache?

*the Washington Post Company makes most of its money from Kaplan, Inc. (of Testing Center fame), which is a preferred provider for NCLB

in the course of this week's massive kabuki extravaganza over race (I'll save you some time: neither campaign has ever heard of it), Sen. McCain took some time out to hat tip Martin Luther King (what are the odds)

McCain Defended Opposition Of Federal MLK Holiday By Saying He Supported Arizona’s State Holiday. During a press availability in Panama City, Florida, John McCain said, “I have supported hundreds of pieces of legislation, which would help Americans obtain an equal opportunity in America. I am proud of that record, from fighting for the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday in my state to sponsoring specific legislation that would prevent discrimination in any shape or form in America today.”

He also had some stuff to say about Dr. King when he spoke to the NAACP a few weeks ago

McCain spoke of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in 1968, while McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"In our circumstances at the time, good news from America was hard to come by," he said. "But the bad news was a different matter, and each new report of violence, rioting and other tribulations in America was delivered to us without delay. The enemy had correctly calculated that the news of Dr. King's death would deeply wound morale, and leave us worried and afraid for our country. . . . If they had been the more reflective kind, our enemies would have understood that the cause of Dr. King was bigger than any one man, and could not be stopped by force of violence

Aw. McCain was so impressed by the cause that the VC used the assassination of Dr. King to wound his morale. That's touching.

Oddly, something Senator McCain was just that deeply affected by didn't make much of an impression on him once he came home

McCain voted against the creation of a holiday honoring King in 1983, a vote which was supported by a large number of Republicans. McCain claimed this week that he was largely unaware on the importance of King's work at the time, due to his Vietnam-era service overseas. Speaking on Thursday to reporters, he explained that his conversion occurred around 1990:

"I voted in my...first year in Congress against it and then I began to learn and I studied and people talked to me. And I not only supported it but I fought very hard in my home state of Arizona for recognition against a governor who was of my own party."

But McCain's voting record since 1990 doesn't support this explanation. In addition to voting to oppose a state holiday in 1987 (which he later supported) and a federal holiday in 1989, McCain voted in 1994 to cut funding for the commission that promoted King's holiday.

He said something similar in Memphis on the 40th anniversary of that morale-sapping occasion when he was apologizing for the dilatory nature of that proud support

Sen. John McCain apologized Friday for opposing a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. as he honored the slain civil rights leader at the hotel where he was assassinated 40 years ago.

In a speech outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, McCain said he was "slow ... to give greatness its due" before eventually supporting a state MLK holiday in Arizona.

"I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona," he said. "We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans."

See? All the dogwhistling about race has nothing to do with race. Race is totally yesterday as a political issue.

Or it will be, as soon as we can get everyone in America to run for president.

fyi, of those 88 stories, upwards of sixty are about the defunct pay-cable show and alcoholic beverages inspired by it.

Which is probably just as well. It would suck if we started often referring to a pivotal group of "key" voters before we had time to figure out which of two diametrically opposed phenomena they represented.