Palin Stretches Truth about Plane on eBay

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Exactly - the media and many on these boards would rather assess whether Palin is a good mother. Pitiful.

I'm also still waiting for some evidence in support of Obama's narrative that he is a change agent?

It seems Obama coined the term "Change" and then HRC & McCain started infusing that word into their speeches.

I'd be interested in hearing McSame's strategy for implementing "change"; btw, he uses the word "maverick" so darn much that it has lost its effect. He's been a politician for 26 years in DC and seems like he's more an entrenched part of the establishment, just by the number of years he's been devoted to political life and voted with Bush 90% of the time (he admits this on video). What is so "maverick" about him? For disagreeing 10% of the time?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly - the media and many on these boards would rather assess whether Palin is a good mother. Pitiful.

I'm also still waiting for some evidence in support of Obama's narrative that he is a change agent?

It seems Obama coined the term "Change" and then HRC & McCain started infusing that word into their speeches.

I'd be interested in hearing McSame's strategy for implementing "change"; btw, he uses the word "maverick" so darn much that it has lost its effect. He's been a politician for 26 years in DC and seems like he's more an entrenched part of the establishment, just by the number of years he's been devoted to political life and voted with Bush 90% of the time (he admits this on video). What is so "maverick" about him? For disagreeing 10% of the time?

He "coined the term change"? That's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Joe Biden, of course, is change personified, right? Biden is a twice-failed presidential candidate who was the youngest man elected to the Senate and who's served there much, much longer than John McCain has. McCain has been in the Senate 22 years, I believe, with a term or two in the House before that. Biden's served 36 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly - the media and many on these boards would rather assess whether Palin is a good mother. Pitiful.

I'm also still waiting for some evidence in support of Obama's narrative that he is a change agent?

It seems Obama coined the term "Change" and then HRC & McCain started infusing that word into their speeches.

I'd be interested in hearing McSame's strategy for implementing "change"; btw, he uses the word "maverick" so darn much that it has lost its effect. He's been a politician for 26 years in DC and seems like he's more an entrenched part of the establishment, just by the number of years he's been devoted to political life and voted with Bush 90% of the time (he admits this on video). What is so "maverick" about him? For disagreeing 10% of the time?

He "coined the term change"? That's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Joe Biden, of course, is change personified, right? Biden is a twice-failed presidential candidate who was the youngest man elected to the Senate and who's served there much, much longer than John McCain has. McCain has been in the Senate 22 years, I believe, with a term or two in the House before that. Biden's served 36 years.

McCain was elected to the House of Representatives on November 2, 1982. So his political career thus far spans 26 years. I've never heard the word "change" as often as I've heard as during this campaign. McCain certainly said it pretty often during his RNC speech. Was Joe Biden running on the "change" platform during his previous presidential campaigns?

If we're going to go back a couple decades regarding Biden's plagiarism, why don't we bring up McCain's Keating Five involvement? That sounds far more serious. He "improperly interfered with the federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the bank Chairman whose Lincoln Savings & Loan became one of the biggest failures in the savings & loan disaster during the late 1980s" which btw was also during a Republican administration. I thought Republicans were supposed to be good in business and private sector. Or is it just manipulation of the private sector for the gain of a few well-connected at the top.

[Anonymous]

Keating Five is old, old news. The Senate criticized McCain for "poor judgment" but found that he did not act improperly. I am far less concerned about Biden's plagarism than about his outright lies about his academic record and accomplishments, which seems to stem from his (IMO) overly high self-opinion. I mean, the guy was drummed out of the presidential race for those lies in 1988. Seriously.

But his pattern of grandiose overstatements or misstatements -- all of which would be termed lies if a Republican said them -- continues today and seriously undermines his claims of expertise in areas such as Iraq. I posted his Meet the Press appearance from Sunday, which was absolutely full of distortions. Today Dan Senor at CFR, who was a senior advisor to the Coalition in Iraq, takes Biden to task for his statements in a WSJ op-ed piece:

Iraqi Leaders
Opposed Biden's
Partition Plan
By DAN SENOR
September 9, 2008
On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Sen. Joseph Biden made a series of stunning arguments in defense of his plan for segregation of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines. When Mr. Biden first announced his partition plan in May 2006, Iraqi leaders and U.S. officials understood it to mean the establishment of strong Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regional administrations. The Biden plan would have also begun a phased redeployment of U.S. troops in 2006 and withdrawn most of them by the end of 2007.

Despite deep resistance from the Iraqi government, Mr. Biden tried to turn his plan into U.S. policy, introducing a nonbinding Senate resolution that called for its implementation. But his effort completely backfired in Baghdad. The proposal ended up unifying all the disparate Iraqi factions in opposition.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who called on the Iraqi parliament to meet and formally reject the Biden plan, immediately went on Iraqi television with a blistering statement: "[Biden] should stand by Iraq to solidify its unity and its sovereignty . . . [He] shouldn't be proposing its division. That could be a disaster not just for Iraq but for the region."

On "Meet the Press" Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Maliki's objections because the Iraqi prime minister's "popularity is very much in question." Based on what? Most independent analysts who have recently traveled to Iraq point to his heightened popularity as a result of the stabilization of Anbar province, the decimation of al Qaeda in Iraq, and his decision to successfully confront Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra.

The notion that a number of other Iraqi leaders supported the Biden plan is not correct either. Actually, it was just the opposite.

Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq. It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states."

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars also denounced the plan. "This is a dangerous partitioning based on sectarianism and ethnicity," said Hashim Taie, a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni party in the parliament.

Qays al-Atwani, the moderator of the popular "Talk of the Hour" television show, interviewed Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis about the Biden resolution. He concluded: "For the first time in Iraq, all political blocs, decision makers and religious authorities agree on rejecting the [Biden] resolution that contradicts the will of the Iraqi people." The Senate resolution even managed to provoke radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's political supporters to momentarily join their rivals -- all in opposition to the Biden plan.

Secular Sunni parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi held a news conference in Baghdad to call on the Iraqi government to formally declare Mr. Biden "a persona non grata" in Iraq. As for Iraq's neighbors, The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League both denounced the Biden resolution.

The uproar was unsurprising, as partition would have involved expelling Iraqis from their homes. How would a partition work, for example, in major cities like Kirkuk, which is majority Kurdish but also has a large Sunni population, and substantial Christian and Turkomen populations? The likely outcome would have been forced relocation. This could have sparked a wave of renewed sectarian violence, if not civil war.

On Sunday, when Mr. Biden was asked about the current progress in Iraq, he managed to take the lion's share of the credit: "I'm encouraged because they're doing the things I suggested . . . That's why it is moving toward some mild possibility of a resolution." But we should be grateful that Iraqis did not do as he suggested. Mr. Biden's frustration with the looming Iraqi civil war in 2006 and early 2007 was understandable. The U.S. was on the verge of total defeat and Iraq was at risk of collapse. But Mr. Biden's plan would have inflamed Iraq's already volatile situation.

Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a founder of Rosemont Capital. He served as a senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.

Biden (and now Obama) are attacking Palin relentlessly rather than deploying a positive Democratic message. I think that diminishes Obama in particular. And I'm really concerned that Biden is such a self-reverential windbag that he is seriously distorting the message on Iraq and undermining his own supposed expertise. Polls show he's added nothing at all to the ticket and has the lowest approval rating of all four candidates. I'm afraid the more exposure he gets, the worse he looks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly - the media and many on these boards would rather assess whether Palin is a good mother. Pitiful.

I'm also still waiting for some evidence in support of Obama's narrative that he is a change agent?

It seems Obama coined the term "Change" and then HRC & McCain started infusing that word into their speeches.

I'd be interested in hearing McSame's strategy for implementing "change"; btw, he uses the word "maverick" so darn much that it has lost its effect. He's been a politician for 26 years in DC and seems like he's more an entrenched part of the establishment, just by the number of years he's been devoted to political life and voted with Bush 90% of the time (he admits this on video). What is so "maverick" about him? For disagreeing 10% of the time?

Still waiting for Obama's "change" credentials. Bravo to him though for coining the term.

Yes, McCain has been in Congress a long time (not as long as Biden, but a long time) and has long been viewed as taking issue with the entrenched interests, actually. His opposition to, and refusal to seek, earmarks distinguisghes him markedly from other members of Congress, including Biden and Obama. The problem with earmarks is not simply that they are of often "wasteful spending," but that they represent a means of securing support for legislation by bartering with members for votes. Seeking agreement on a bill by doling out random favors to various members' contituencies is the prevaling practice in Congress today and allows special interests to play too big a role in determining legislative outcomes. By promising to use the veto power to reign in earmarks, McCain has most certainly suggested a very real, dramatic and positive change in the way our federal dollars are allocated. It would be a big change, if successful.