McCain, in shift, seeks U.S. help for homeowners
In both tone and substance, McCain’s remarks were something of a departure from a speech the senator delivered last month in California in which he warned that “it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers,” and noted that there had been “rampant speculation” by both lenders and borrowers who had expected the values of homes to keep rising.
The smell of fresh chads in the air means it be election season so McCain’s Straight Talk Express has gathered around the latest polls and decided do a leaping flip-flop off the high board. McCain does a mighty fine flip-flop which hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Senator from New York,
Clinton said in a statement that “Senator McCain is apparently of two minds on the housing crisis and neither seems to know how to steward the economy effectively.”
“Just two weeks ago,” her statement continued, “Senator McCain said he’d rather do nothing than something about the housing crisis and attacked my plan with tired rightist talking points. Today, it looks like he’s proposing a warmed-over, half-hearted version of the very plan he criticized, to help families restructure mortgages to save homes and keep housing prices from falling further.”
Those rightie talking points are as predictable as Rush Limbaugh having an anal cyst to avoid the draft. Maybe there is a little crisis, but its not the slip shod lending pratices of mortgage lenders who are responsible its those people that came in an filled out a loan application having the audacity to think they could participate in the American dream. Mighty John McCain will teach them a lesson, just keep those sharp pencils and those hopes and dreams in a box under the bed where they belong. McCain is no stranger to the the Republican Testament of Flip-Floppish, The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day where he was against MLK Day before he was for it. Pangs of conscience or political convenience. McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill
Last week, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill — which contained a provision banning waterboarding — to the floor for a vote. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), an outspoken waterboarding critic, voted against the bill. (2-20-08)
Yet McCain is on record as saying waterboarding is a “terrible and odious practice”, which is what the bill would have prohibited. McCain’s straight talk probably does pass for straight talk in a room full of kool-aid drinkers, but with regular folks probably not so much.
The Right seems to have a fetish about making bizarre historical analogies. By itself a practice that highlights a severe lack of integrity. Yet that is enough, the analogies always lack the kind of substance one should bring to the war of ideas. Their honor free bilge is only fitting for a party that is the antithesis American ideals, Occupying Iraq Is Just Like Occupying … Alabama?
Today, RedState sent an email alert to readers to further push the point … making a, shall we say, novel argument (emphasis added):
Clearly McCain was talking about a peace time standing presence … Someone should ask the Democrats if they think we’re still at war with the confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese given all the standing American armies in the South, Germany, and Japan.
As I said in my previous post, “Claiming a 100-year occupation in Iraq would be like Germany or Korea reveals an immense lack of foreign policy knowledge, judgment and vision. The situations and political dynamics have absolutely no similarity.” (For more on that point, check out Agence France Presse, Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, Talking Points Memo, Booman Tribune, The Newshoggers and Juan Cole.)
How can anyone have a serious debate with people that equate the rag-tag militias and tribes of Iraq with the well trained, well armed, and for their day state of the art military machines like Japan and Germany. People who imagine they’re the same in the video game that seems to be running 24/7 under the tin-foil inside their heads.
Independent Online
“The historical settings and the international and local and cultural peculiarities are so different in our two cases … that even the most imaginative and daring historians would think twice about taking on such a comparative project,” believes Christof Mauch of the German Historical Institute in Washington.
“Circumstances in the current situation are so different,” Mauch told an audience at a symposium Monday in the US federal capital, held jointly by the institute and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.
The US administration appears to proffer such comparisons between Iraq and Germany in order to justify the United States’ huge economic and military engagement in Iraq.
and who wants the Korea model for Iraq. McCain among others,
Bush is Insane: Iraq v. South Korea (Booman Trib)
So…twenty-six years after the end of the Korean War there had been nothing but military dictatorships, a coup d’etat, sham elections, and an assassination of the head of state by the director of central intelligence. At this point it must have turned into a bastion of liberty, right?
The biggest problem with Bush, McCain and the Right’s analogies to Korea is that we’re not in South Korea to impose order and some kind of semi-liberal democracy on them, we’re there as a protection against the supposed threat from North Korea.
A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach by Irish realist painter Stanhope Alexander Forbes (1857-1947)
The Long Goodbye 