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From Fox News Sunday, Nov. 9, 2008. Wrap your heads around this "logic" from Brit Hume. Liberals don't want to be called liberals anymore because they are ashamed of it and want to be called progressives instead because we all know it's a right wing country. Or something like that. Maybe someone else can explain what's going on in this man's twisted brain to me. I thought the terms were just pretty much inter-changeable, but hey, what do I know? Here's the transcript to read just in case watching him causes anyone physical pain.

Wallace: Brit what do you think are the key debates that over the next year that Republicans need to have about the future of the party?

Hume: I think this is not the moment for the Republican party to start trying to reinvent itself. The Republican Party's opportunity will grow out of what happens in an Obama administration and if Obama is shrewd and so far he seems to be in the little, in what little indications we have now is he won't try to pull the party and the country too far, his party and the country too far to the left or let his party pull him too far to the left. But if he does, ah, it won't be popular and it won't work, the programs won't work even if they can be stuffed through the Congress and the Republican party will reap the benefit just as the Democratic party reaped the benefit here.

The idea that there's been ideological shift is belied by the polls and it's belied by one other symptom you can see it time and again and that is what is, what is, what is the liberal, what are liberals call themselves these days? Do they call themselves liberals? No sir. They still call themselves progressives. This is a, this is a political philosophy that an America still to this day dares not speak its name. And, and until that changes, I think we can safely say that we, it's a center right country and the liberals know it.

John Amato:

For weeks John McCain, Sarah Palin and the entire Conservative base called Obama a Socialist and a Marxist. They tried to paint him as the Distributer in Chief, taking from Joe the Plumber and giving it to Cadillac welfare queens who are much too lazy to get a job. And guess what? the American people elected him anyway. There are millions of us who proudly call ourselves "liberals" and donated boat loads of cash to his campaign. Nobody is afraid of the term liberal more than the Hume's of the right because their time has come and gone and they are petrified. And their brand is in the middle of a complete melt down as we speak. And as Bob Cesca documents, this ain't no right wing nation via the polls. I would really love to think that Hume is unemployable if Fox ever let him go.

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The rats are jumping from the ship, and the biggest rat of them all, Karl "I should be in jail" Rove, sits down with Chris Wallace to admit that indicators are not good for the McCain campaign:

WALLACE: One thing that we are witnessing already is dissension within the ranks of the McCain campaign. There's a big article today in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about it. There have been a bunch of other reports. People pointing fingers at each other about what went wrong with the McCain campaign even before we get to the election. Why do you think that this has started so early and so publicly?

ROVE: Well, look, we've seen this a couple of times this year. We saw it in the Clinton campaign. Now we're seeing it in the McCain campaign, where before the election is totaled up, before the votes are all cast, before the decision is made, people start pointing fingers and blaming each other. It is a sign of undisciplined people who do not have the loyalty that they ought to have to the candidate whom they're serving and it's -- it's a sad sight to see. Nobody makes themselves look good by this process.

WALLACE: It is not generally a phenomenon we see in winning campaigns, however, is it?

ROVE: Occasionally you see it. You're right, it's in campaigns that are behind and people want to make certain they escape with the best reputation they can.

Frankly, considering how many of them came from Rove's coterie, I think that ship has sailed. Rove also acknowledges the fact that even Sarah Palin has gone "rogue" with a non-answer answer that points to the end of John McCain's presidential aspirations:

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John McCain attacks Barack Obama as a socialist because of his tax policy and because he wants to help the entire population, not just the wealthiest of us pm FOX, but when Wallace reminded the Senator that he voted for the government bail out of Wall St. and wants to bail out bad mortgages using government funds he said that " oh well, I'm just trying to help."

He makes our case that government should be used to assist this country when it needs it. And the talking point about socialism is another desperate measure by John McCain. He really makes no sense at all. He flip flops from being a conservative to a populist to a socialist from sentence to sentence.

WALLACE: But you did it indirectly, so let me ask you for some straight talk. Do you think that Senator Obama is a socialist? Do you think that his plans are socialism?

MCCAIN: I think his plans are redistribution of the wealth. He said it himself, "We need to spread the wealth around." Now, that's one of...

WALLACE: Is that socialism?

MCCAIN: That's one of the tenets of socialism. But it's more the liberal left, which he's always been on. He's always been in the left lane of American politics.

WALLACE: But, Senator, when we talk...

MCCAIN: So is one of the tenets of socialism redistribution of the wealth? Not just socialism — a lot of other liberal and left wing philosophies — redistribution of the wealth? I don't believe in it. I believe in wealth creation by Joe the Plumber.

WALLACE: But, Senator, you voted for the $700 billion bailout that's being used partially to nationalize American banks. Isn't that socialism?

MCCAIN: That is reacting to a crisis that's due to greed and excess in Washington.

And what this administration is doing wrong, and what Paulson is doing wrong, is not going out and buying up home loan mortgages, home mortgages, and giving people new mortgages at the new value of their home so they can stay in their home.

They're bailing out the banks. They're baling out these institutions.

WALLACE: But you voted for that.

MCCAIN: Of course. It was a package that had to be enacted because the economy was about to go into the tank.

Transcript below the fold:

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Chris Wallace played the sickening Bill Ayers robo calls and insists he will continue the political strategies that he said he would never use. Wallace even brought up a Bill O'Reilly clip of him saying his campaign would not be about Ayers, but about issues that are so important to this great country.

WALLACE: But Senator, back — if I may, back in 2000 when you were the target of robo calls, you called these hate calls and you said...

MCCAIN: They worked.

WALLACE: ... and you said the following, "I promise you, I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."

Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo calls against you to — reportedly, to do the robo calls against Obama and the Republican Senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo calls. Will you do that?

MCCAIN: Of course not.

McCain only hates things when they are targeted at him. These robo calls are vital to his campaign and are all he has left. We know the kind of man he is when his back is against the wall and he turns to the Lee Atwater politics of personal destruction. John McCain employs his usual tactic of filibustering Wallace whenever he brought up a tough question for him and said that he would not even listen to Rep. Susan Collins, who asked McCain to stop using those horrible robo calls.

LA Times:

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, facing a tough reelection fight, urged GOP presidential contender John McCain on Friday to stop making automated calls into her state linking Democratic nominee Barack Obama to a 1960s radical.

"These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics," said Collins' spokesman, Kevin Kelley. "Sen. Collins urges the McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately.

Even the odious Norm Coleman asks them to stop. McCain, have you no decency?

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), who called for pulling all of his negative advertising Oct. 10 (though the NRSC was running anti-Franken ads), has called now for all "attack ads and phones calls" to be pulled across the country, including robo-calls paid for by the Republican National Committee. "It's time for all of these attacks to end," Coleman said, per a release, during his Obama-sounding "Hope Express Tour."

Full FNS Transcript:

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After Rick Davis tried to downplay the news that Palin was found to have abused her power in Alasks with the Troopergate scandal, a heated exchange appeared on FNS with Chris Wallace, when Obama's campaign manager told McCain's camp guru Rick Davis that he's selling access for McCain to lobbyists...

Axelrod: Look I think the way you root out corruption in Washington is first take on the lobbyist culture and you know what we can't have are lobbyists making millions of dollars selling access to public officials as Rick has done selling access to Sen McCain. That is not how you clean up Washington.

Is it false that you sell access to Senator McCain. Do you sell access to Sen. McCain?

Davis immediately cuts him off and starts yelling at David. It was like this a lot. It's been reported over and over again that McCain's campaign is chock full of lobbyists who were paid off...How can Rick Davis talk about cleaning up DC when he's one of the leading causes of its downfall?

Davis floats around a new canard for McCain---that it'll be bad for America if the White House and Congress go to the Democratic party.
I know it would be just exquisite for Rick Davis if it all remained a total Republican Congress and White House just like before. He didn't complain when Bush and his cronies were rubber stamping each other.
If the country is lucky enough, we will have kicked out the people that are responsible for the political corruption that has helped destroy our economy and give us a chance to rebuild America....
And don't worry, the Conservatives will do everything they can to block any good piece of legislation anyway they can no matter who's in charge.

On the heels of the announcement that a deal has tentatively been struck to bail out Wall Street, John Kerry appeared on Fox News Sunday and put John McCain's campaign-suspending stunt into perspective:

Barack Obama was in constant touch with Secretary Paulson almost every single day, sometimes several times a day for the last two weeks. Barack Obama was the first person to speak and lay out at that meeting at the White House for about seven or eight minutes the entire parameters of what we had resolved. John McCain, when offered the opportunity to speak, passed, didn't speak until the very end, and when he spoke, did not offer a solution and did not say what he would support. The fact is that on a Monday of about a week ago, John McCain said the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Within a few days, John McCain was suspending his campaign because of the greatest crisis since World War II. He suspended his campaign and it took him 22 hours to get from New York to Washington, a one-hour flight, had time to go do Katie Couric in an interview, had time to give a speech to the Clinton millennium, and when he got here, he wound up -- I mean, he said he was going to interrupt his campaign to come down and save the negotiations. Most people believe what he did was interrupt the negotiations to come down and save his campaign. 

 Usually when Lindsey Graham is on TV flaking for McCain, he looks like he had a transfusion of Red Bull, but today on FOX NEWS Sunday, after some bad poll results came out for McCain, he was not his old self and gave a one line answer to Wallace's long question.  Chris had to make up for his lack of answer and push him to continue, Graham then announced that Obama did great in the polls after the Friday debate, he replied, "I'm tired."

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Wallace: The early indication from polls are that the public in these polls that were taken overnight favored Obama---thought he did better. CBS News poll of uncommitted voters 39% thought Obama won, 24% thought, preferred McCain  24%,  and 37 % thought it was a tie. And while voters thought Obama did better on the economy and McCain did better on foreign policy, Here is the bottom line. McCain's rating on being prepared to be president didn't change, but Obama had a 16 pt jump on that same question. Sen Graham. McCain keeps saying that Obama is not ready to lead, but according to the several polls voters watching the debate thought he was.

Graham: There's an 18 pt difference between who is best able to do the job, we'll take that. <then a silence>

Wallace: What you're saying is that even though Obama got more of a bump, there's still a lead...

Graham: It's Sunday and I'm tired and Sen Obama did well. Sen Obama helped himself according to the polls

Wallace: You can't be tired on Sunday morning, sir...(laughter)

He's tired on Sunday? Welcome to the club. I think it's frustration....This is another indication that they are not happy with the outcome of the debate.

USA TODAY/Gallop: Obama won

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows 46% of people who watched Friday night's presidential debate say Democrat Barack Obama did a better job than Republican John McCain; 34% said McCain did better.

Obama scored even better -- 52%-35% -- when debate-watchers were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country's problems.

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Maybe...just maybe...Chris Wallace had enough of McCain Campaign Manager Rick Davis's ridiculous spinning on Sarah Palin that he wasn't about to let Davis get away with the standard campaign glossing over of her "executive experience."  Who knows, maybe Wallace is nursing a grudge for not being able to book Palin this Sunday and having to settle for the unctuous Davis.  Whatever the reason, Wallace was uncharacteristically hard on Davis's attempt to bolster Palin's reputation for being a reformer. 

But honestly, I think that all of this sturm und drang about Palin is EXACTLY what the McCain campaign wants.  Suddenly the campaign has become all about Palin vs. Obama, shunting off McSame into the shadows, where he gets to spend less time trying to refute that his will be a third term of proven failed Bush policies.

Palin's aggressive stance in getting federal money is the same thing that every governor does (although as a Californian, who pay more taxes than we get back, the per capita federal funding makes me a little ill--think of how much better our infrastructure would be here in Cali, if we didn't have states like Alaska sucking us dry).  I don't think that there should be that much focus on it other than to point out that Palin herself was named THREE TIMES by none other than McCain as a Pork Barrel Princess.

So doesn't this go more towards the poor and reckless judgment of McCain, who picked someone as a running mate that he personally has castigated in the past for her fiscal irresponsibility?  

So are they trying to tell us that this kind of hypocrisy is acceptable?

transcripts below the fold

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Republicans ought to thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Fox News Sunday.  Where else could you get away with this laughingly lame deflection?  When Obama Campaign Manager David Axelrod reminded viewers in an earlier segment that McCain's "reformer" claims are at odds with the people with whom he chooses to staff his campaign--a whole bunch of connected lobbyists, led by uber-lobbyist (allegedly retired) Rick Davis, Davis dismisses the charge by saying that the Obama campaign has nothing left but to chase after "ghosts of the past."

The past, you say?  Oh really?  Only if you consider "the past" to be just a few weeks ago.

Transcript below the fold

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Oh dear.  Does Cindy know? 

After only one meeting before naming her his running mate and little to no vetting, McCain has decided that Sarah Palin is his "partner and soulmate".  Ew, that's a little creepy.  Can you imagine him saying that about his true partner, Joe Lieberman, if the GOP hadn't demanded he not pick Holy Joe as his running mate? 

McCain continues the lies -- he must really count on the low info voter taking everything at face value -- by claiming he's been following Palin's career for years and years. Oh really?  What's McCain doing following a ex-beauty queen turned small town Alaskan mayor's career, because she has hardly had enough time at the Governor's mansion to be tracked for a year, much less years and years?  And she stood up against oil interests?  That's not what environmentalists are saying. Being FOR drilling in ANWR is hardly standing up against the oil companies. 

My favorite line?   I don't particularly enjoy the label "maverick"

Yeah, rrrriiiiiiiggggghhhhhtttttt.

 Transcripts below the fold:

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On Fox News Sunday when asked to "assess the Bush presidency" by Chris Wallace, John McCain asserted that "history will judge the president" and ran through a litany of talking points attempting to differentiate himself from the current administration. One area he was most insistent about was that he is a "maverick" who continues to oppose the Bush administration's use of torture.

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McCain: I obviously don’t want to torture any prisoners. There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on, but I also think ...

Wallace: You’re not suggesting he did want to torture prisoners?

McCain: Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration and according to published reports was used, but the point is, we’ve had our disagreements, and I've been called a quote "maverick," and I'm not the most popular person in my party.

Though McCain himself was a victim of torture and has been outspoken about his opposition to it, his voting record has not matched his rhetoric.

ThinkProgress:

McCain seems to forget that he voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding. In fact, when the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. Thus, McCain’s claim that he “obviously doesn’t want to torture prisoners” rings hollow. Indeed, because of Bush’s veto, the CIA retains the option of waterboarding prisoners. ..(more)

And it wasn't just torture that John McCain was being disingenuous about. His oft-repeated claim that he is a "maverick" is a myth. His own home state paper, The Arizona Republic, concluded otherwise, finding through an analysis of his Senate votes over the past decade "that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives." Just like he did on torture, he oft pretends to be against something but only until his vote is actually needed to count, and whenever that happens he falls reliably in line.

Likewise, his attempts to differentiate himself from Bush would be laughable if so much weren't at stake. John McCain has voted with George W. Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007, and has voted with him 100 percent so far this year.

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Let me say first that while I didn't support Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, I could certainly understand why her supporters did.  She's tough, she's arguably one of the smartest people in Washington and she's extremely capable.  And even her detractors must admit that it was a very tough primary season, made worse by the media's need to fill up 24/7 with content that appeared to relish pitting Democrats against one another, usually quite unfairly.

That being said, if any Hillary Clinton supporter actually goes through with this suggestion from Bill "I'm not right about anything, but I still get my regular TV gig to screw over the national discourse" Kristol, you are being played, big time.   This is Operation Chaos in all its nakedly partisan glory.

Kristol (who, by the way, is NEVER right about anything, have I said that recently?) is clearly scared of Obama's pick of Joe Biden for the vice president slot, because as he admits, Biden has the foreign policy experience, the alleged lack of which they are so fond of attacking Obama.  So in the only battlefield that Kristol has the gonads to scale, he challenges Clinton supporters (naturally, it's easier to be brave when others are the soldiers, isn't it, Billy?) to launch a protest by nominating Clinton as the Vice President at the convention, forcing a roll call vote. 

KRISTOL: Look, Senator Obama is going to be the nominee, there's no point in contesting that roll call. What I would encourage Hillary supporters to do...

WILLIAMS: Oh boy...

LIASSON: No!

KRISTOL: ...is to express their outrage over the pick of Senator Biden over the better qualified Senator Clinton as the Vice Presidential pick by putting her nomination for the vice presidency. That would be a good roll call vote, don't you think? Clinton and Biden. Although I'm not sure she wouldn't beat him. And that would be exciting and that would be a ben...it would be a favor to Senator Obama. Because the truth is Obama/Clinton is a much stronger ticket. It is a stronger ticket than Obama/Biden. Does anyone seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton would bring all the Clinton voters over? Whereas Biden I think is going to have a tough time doing so.

WILLIAMS: It would be drama. But I think that you make
that suggestion as a subversive act...

KRISTOL: You think? [laughs] No...no...

Listen up, for those of you considering this:  THIS IS A SUGGESTION FROM SOMEONE WHO THINKS THE IRAQ INVASION AND OCCUPATION WILL MAKE GEORGE W. BUSH A GREAT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY BOOKS. 

Can I possibly reiterate how wrong Kristol ALWAYS is? 

I don't care how unfairly you think Clinton was treated during the primaries (and frankly, I might agree with you on that) nor how great a VP you think she'd make (she'd be great and it would be a historic administration with an African-American and a woman leading the country--I'll stipulate the whole to you for the sake of argument), it is simply bad for the party, bad for the country and insulting to our collective intelligence as Democrats and/or liberals to do anything that the leading neo-con cheerleader for the Worst. President. Ever. suggests.

Don't even think about it.

Full transcript of his pathetic tactics below

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  Condi Rice went on the Sunday talk shows this morning to send out a little propaganda to the peoples on the Russia/Georgian front and she had the usual help from everyone. There wasn't much background on the US involvement that has fueled Russia's anger.

Kevin Drum and JPM has some thoughts on what actually happened. The Sunday Shows backed up McCain's position as much as they could and gave no context to Putin's response that I saw. (Please let me know in the comment section if anyone did)  I heard Gregory read Condi a NY Times quote and it seemed like he was going to include real background on the issue, but that didn't happen.

As PublEuS says: Since when does the Bush Admin think international "reputation" matters a lick?

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 Condi: ...this forward leaning modern Russia, well, you know, that reputation is frankly in tatters and so, that in itself is a significant consequence...

Yes, Europe grabbed a newspaper and hit Russia on the nose with it and said: Bad Russia, you're a very bad Russia. Stop making messes in Georgia...

  (video and post sent in by PublEuS via email)

Neo-Con Man Bill Kristol had one of his weekly ironic moments...

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"...if countries don't have confidence in our ability to help them, it's going to be a much more dangerous world."

Uhhhh.... In which case, maybe we should have (1) finished the job in Afghanistan, and (2) not invaded Iraq in the 1st place????

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. On FNS, Bill Kristol was furious that President Bush went to the Beijing Olympics instead of watching it on TV because of the propaganda value that Bush gave to China against the pro-democracy agenda.

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Kristol:  You can talk to human rights and pro democracy activists both in exile and over here and those over there. They did not want him to go and to legitimize what is a giant propaganda festival for Beijing.My wife told me I shouldn't say that I disapprove of Bush going, I disapprove of the dictatorship in Beijing. I disapprove of the totalitarian propaganda spectacle on Friday night. She said this would make me look "crotchety" ...

Kristol is the Minister of Propaganda at FOX so for him to complain about it really is high comedy. And I'll throw in the fact that his wife called him---errrr--crotchety. Yea, that too...