Raindrops in a green theme here.
During the April 1 edition of the CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric noted, “The national debt is expected to reach $10 trillion next year, which means it will have nearly doubled this decade.” CBS correspondent Anthony Mason went on to report that “the national debt is growing $1 million a minute,” and then aired a clip of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) saying, “We have great risk that we’re going to become a mediocre country that’s in debt, and we’re going to handcuff and put a millstone around the next two generations because we won’t act like adults now.” At the conclusion of Mason’s report, Couric asserted, “And that debt is mind-numbing,” echoing Mason’s earlier statement that the national debt now stands at “a mind-numbing $9.3 trillion.” However, CBS News cited no Democrats during the report. Nor did Couric or Mason point out the extent to which deficit spending by Republican-led Congresses, in particular for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the Bush tax cuts, has contributed to the federal debt.
The MSM more then anyone else is aware that the publics memory is about two weeks long. Our national debt is a large part of the reason we may be in for one of the worse economic down turns in modern U.S. history. This situation didn’t happen overnight it happened over the course of ten plus years in which a Republican controlled Congress along with a supply side curmudgeon in the Whitehouse dictated economic policy. To report these facts would not make CBS liberal, simply a public broadcaster living up to their public mandate to inform their viewers of the facts. Coburn has been in a position to help guide our tax, spending and regulation toward fiscal sanity, but has chosen not to. For him to as much as pretend he was in the mens room was all this was going on is just another example of Republicans shedding responsibility like a duck sheds water.
It is still early and we’re bound to see several tacts taken by the Right to sell McCain to the American public. The one that has been put front and center is that McCain is a foreign policy guru with a crystal clear vision. Yet he sadly continues deserve the nickname McBush for his foreign policy bobbing and weaving that passes for straight talk in right-wing circles, but may trip McCain up with the general public – McCain’s century-long problem
The point seems to have been largely forgotten, but back in November, after months of insisting that Korea could be a model for a long-term troop presence in Iraq, McCain abandoned this position, saying he doesn’t want to use Korea as a model, and adding that the “nature of the society in Iraq” and the “religious aspects” of the country make withdrawal inevitable.
Soon after, McCain went back to his original position again, saying that a Korean model is entirely appropriate. So, for those keeping score at home, McCain 1) endorsed a multi-decade presence in Iraq; 2) denounced a multi-decade presence in Iraq; 3) re-embraced his first point; and 4) blasted those who agreed with his second argument as being incompetent.
This are not simply gaffes of an older Senator that has a lot of things to deal with. McCain is creating a pattern of dangerous distortions to justify his foreign policy decisions as a Senator and those he wants to implement if elected president. He has bucked the rigidity of the Republican party on occasion, but he’s only a maverick if the term is defined so loosely that it becomes useless for anyone, but the MSM who always seem to be looking for easy labels to build a narrative around, a myth created by the media –
On Iran and its nuclear program, McCain has been so flippantly bellicose — singing “Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys tune — that some conservatives have warned that a President McCain would take America to war with Iran.
McCain last Sunday said: “There’s going to be other wars… I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”
[ ]…But if McCain’s strategic vision is to strike Iran militarily, he has not explained how that might be achieved without further endangering the already failing U.S. mission next door in Iraq, which he also believes in continuing without a timetable.
McBush or McSame has bucked or given the appearance of bucking the Republican ideological straight jacket now and again, not a difficult task in the party of partisan orthodoxy, but he is as far to the fringe Right as any other Republican. Judging by his behavior the last year he has certainly abandoned the straight-talk strategy and opted for Bushspeak. For the thirty percent of the public that still thinks Dubya walks on water this is great news, four more years of economic and foreign policy disaster.
The Long Goodbye 