In a disturbing expose Sunday, the McClatchy papers joined the growing list of press, pundits and politicians raising a red flag about John McCain's out-of-control temper. Following on the heels of the devastating revelations from the Washington Post in April, McClatchy documents many of the tantrums, outbursts and eruptions that continue to call McCain's presidential temperament into question. And as Mitt Romney's campaign revealed in January, those McCain tirades are directed at friend and foe alike.

Starting with an f-bomb hurled at GOP colleague John Cornyn, McClatchy details McCain's long history of explosions, a record which led Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran to conclude "the thought of (McCain) being president sends a cold chill down my spine":

There's a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to John McCain's white hot temper.

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The Washington Post yet again manages to produce an op-ed only fit to wrap fish in, as neocon Michael Rubin - ex of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an advisor to Rummie, political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and unpaid hack for propaganda articles produced by the Pentagon's PR firm, the Lincoln Group - blames Joe Biden for eight years of Bush administration foreign policy failure in a desperate attempt to label Biden as "Iran's favorite Senator".

Here's how Rubin's logic works, as explained by Ilan Goldenberg of Democracy Arsenal:

Rubin makes a convoluted and nonsensical argument that A.  Joe Biden supported engagement with the reformist Khatami government of Iran during the late 1990s and first half of this decade.  That B.  During that time trade between Iran and the EU increased.  That C.  A National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had stopped working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  From this he deduces that it's Biden's fault that Iran has moved ahead on its nuclear weapons program because it used increased trade with Europe to fund a nuclear weapons program.  What???

... Rubin basically takes a bunch of unrelated facts and uses them to conclude that Iran must have spent 2000 to 2003 working furiously on its nuclear weapons program and that it did it with money from Europe that somehow Joe Biden was responsible for.  Yup, putting those rigorous analytical skills that he learned that the Office of Special Plans to work.

Rubin also forgets to mention little details.  Like the fact that under this Administration trade with Iran has actually increased ten-fold and is at its highest levels since before the Iranian revolution.  Or the fact that the 2007 NIE concluded that Iran did in fact stop working on its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was still years away from building a bomb.

Rubin then claims that Biden's vote against Kyl-Lieberman was partisan politics because Biden said that he didn't trust this Administration.  Ummm.... Trying to prevent war with Iran is not exactly a partisan activity.  It's not partisan to fear that an administration that has a track record of escalating conflict and misleading the American public might do it again.  That is in fact the exact opposite of partisan if you believe that war with Iran is against America's interests.

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Matthew Engel at the UK's Financial Times thinks so:

The protest by the US team that cost Churandy Martina of the Netherlands Antilles his silver medal in the 200 metres was seen by some, perhaps unfairly, as bullying of a small nation. There was also the bizarre election scandalette in the poll among competitors for athlete-representatives to the International Olympic Committee. The US tried to ensure victory for its candidate, Julie Foudy, by offering team members a $50 (€34, £27) shopping voucher if they voted.

The consolation for Americans is that they believe they are triumphant. The medals table is unofficial and, indeed, frowned on by the Olympic Charter, which insists the games are “between athletes . . . and not between countries”. Nonetheless, its format is well established: the number of golds decides the placings, with minor medals used to settle ties. At least, it is well established outside the US.

The American media add up the golds, silvers and bronzes, giving them equal weighting, which is ludicrous. By an amazing coincidence, this puts the Americans on top, well ahead of China. The normal method has the US far behind. But guess which way plays better in Peoria?

Engels thinks that the problem, other than the effect of George W. Bush’s presidency on America’s global standing, is because America doesn't play team sports the same way as the rest of the world - for the joy of taking part rather than the joy of winning.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, might agree with him. At least, so suggests Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post as she satirizes him for condemning Usain Bolt for his celebrations while ignoring alleged underage competitors and helping supress political protests at the Games.

Sour grapes from losers, or a sign that just maybe Ugly Americanism should try to keep its head down in public so as not to furnish convenient distractions?

[image from the MoveOn ad] A memo to the media: did you look at McCain's record and his actions pertaining to the Georgia/Russian conflict... Didn't he act like he was the President? Wow, The Washington Post noticed that too:

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: "If I may be so bold, there was another president . . ."

He caught himself and started again: "At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America's advocacy for democracy and freedom."

With his Democratic opponent on vacation in Hawaii, the senator from Arizona has been doing all he can in recent days to look like President McCain, particularly when it comes to the ongoing international crisis in Georgia.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he talks to McCain, a personal friend, several times a day. McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia's government. McCain also announced this week that two of his closest allies, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would travel to Georgia's capital of Tbilisi on his behalf, after a similar journey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The extent of McCain's involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.

  It’s not surprising at all that the Washington Post’s David Broder would prefer to see the presidential candidates stick to responsible, substance-driven campaigns. It’s also not surprising that Broder would enjoy a series of town-hall “debates” between the two candidates.

What’s odd, though, is seeing Broder try to connect the two, suggesting the lack of the latter has a causal relationship with the lack of the prior.

The first question I asked John McCain and then Barack Obama was: How do you feel about the tone and direction of the campaign so far?

No surprise. Both men pronounced themselves thoroughly frustrated by the personal bitterness and negativism they have seen in the two months since they learned they would be running against each other.

“I’m very sorry about it,” McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. “I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings” together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

First, it’s interesting that McCain is “very sorry” about the tone of the campaign now, given that it was just one week ago when McCain told reporters, “I’m proud of the campaign that we have run. I’m proud of the issues that we have been trying to address with the American people.”

Second, the notion that the campaigns “could have avoided … some of this” if there’d been 15 debates instead of three doesn’t make any sense. It’s a classic non sequitur — whether McCain runs a relentlessly negative, substance-free campaign has nothing to do with his proposal for extra debates.

And yet, Broder really seems to think there’s something to this.

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  This week, Americans were introduced to Wrong-Way McCain. To be sure, it's the same John McCain ("McSame") who would continue the policies of George W. Bush that 80% of Americans believe have put the country on the wrong track. It's also the same "Jukebox John" who has changed his tune 61 times on issues foreign and domestic, including a dizzying 10 times in two weeks back in June. But as he showed repeatedly over the past several days, Wrong-Way McCain is also the Republican presidential nominee who simply can't keep his stories straight.

Whether the result of crass political opportunism, transparent deceit or just plain confusion, on at least 7 occasions this week alone, Wrong Way McCain couldn't remember what he stood for, if anything at all.

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   Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, has spent most of the year devoting his columns to bashing Barack Obama. Today, he mixes things up a bit by bashing a different Democrat he doesn’t like: Senate candidate Al Franken.

Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled “Porn-O-Rama!” in which he enthuses that it is an “exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography.” The Internet, he explains, is a “terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved.” Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the “Minnesota Institute of Titology.”

Orwell would be so proud.

“Porn-O-Rama!” is a modern campaign document every voter should read — the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism. It has the literary sensibilities and moral seriousness of an awkward adolescent nerd publishing an underground newspaper to shock his way into campus popularity. But, in this case, the article was written in 2000 by a 48-year-old man.

Gerson goes on (and on), highlighting various excerpts from Franken’s satirical works, some of which are funny, and some of which aren’t. Gerson’s broader point, it seems, is that Franken has contributed to a coarsening of our culture — in the “cause of relevance and realism” — and it would be another setback to allow this coarsening to affect our “political discourse.”

Gerson insists politics “should not actively push our culture toward vulgarity and viciousness,” which, Gerson argues, “Sen. Franken” would do.

I’m all for a civil discourse, but I find Gerson’s complaining wildly off-base.

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When I read this last year I suspected it wouldn't be long before I'd be seeing something like this in today's WaPo:

Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets nabbed immediately because his brain has given him away.

Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 movie "Minority Report," starring Tom Cruise and based on a Philip K. Dick novel, I'm not talking about science fiction here; it turns out we're not so far away from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one?

It's a question I think we should be asking as the federal government invests millions of dollars in emerging technology aimed at detecting and decoding brain activity. [...]

Will this be enough evidence for an arrest? Can it be used to convict a person of intent to commit a crime? [...]

These are just some of the questions we must ask as we balance scientific advances and the promise of enhanced safety against a loss of liberty. And we must do it now, while our voices still matter. In a world where private thoughts are no longer private, what will our protections be? ...(more)

That story follows one from yesterday's WaPo that the Bush admin is set to launch a new domestic spy program, "rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority."

I don't think I'll ever hear Alan Parsons' Eye in the Sky (YouTube) the same way again.

Yes, we love any excuse to post another Anne Taintor magnet, but just how much more misogynistic can The Washington Post get? Not satisfied with the "why are women so stupid?" story, today's editorial by Michael Kinsley regarding how long it takes Senator Clinton to get ready in the morning seems like an office dare gone horribly wrong.

As more than one insightful blogger has asked, "You taking the afternoon off, Michael?"

  The Washington Post, for reasons that defy comprehension, published a 1,700-word thought piece yesterday on women in America being dumb, shallow, and generally kind of pathetic. The author, Charlotte Allen, made her spectacularly dumb case with the kind of nonsense one might expect from a misogynistic child — women are bad drivers, they have physically smaller brains, they’re awful at math, they have bad taste in entertainment, etc.

The problem, it seems to me, is not Allen. Her foolish attack on women is easy to dismiss as petty nonsense, best suited for a He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club blog. Instead, the fault lies with Washington Post editors who thought Allen’s anti-feminist hit-job deserved to be published on the front page of the paper’s Outlook section.

The WaPo’s Outlook editor took a moment to respond to criticism.

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.” […]

Pomfret said that being an opinion article, he’s not surprised readers reacted to it strongly. But added: “Perhaps it wasn’t packaged well enough to make it clear that it was tongue-in-cheek.”

I found it hard to believe Pomfret would publish such tripe. I find it even harder to believe this is his explanation for such poor judgment.

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All the major newspapers refused to print Wexler, Gutierrez, and Tammy Baldwin's impeachment op-ed recently so it's surprising to see The Washington Post finally allow an argument to be made for just that on their sacred pages: "Why I Believe Bush Must Go: Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse." The Village elders will be most upset.

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters:

Attentive readers of Howard Kurtz's washingtonpost.com weekday media column may have noticed that on the fifth and final page of his 3,000-word December 6 post, Kurtz finally addressed the media controversy that erupted when Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald highlighted an egregious error made by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. Klein had mocked a supposed Democratic legislative maneuver in Congress for being "well beyond stupid" and stressed how Democrats remain soft on the war on terror.[..]

The story, which raged online for more than two weeks and was commented upon by virtually every major liberal blogger, unfolded at the intersection between politics and media -- the same intersection that Kurtz writes about for a living as perhaps the most-read media writer in the country. Yet for weeks Kurtz remained silent about the Klein story; nothing in the Post, nothing in his online daily column, and nothing on CNN's Reliable Sources, the weekly media program that he hosts.

The deafening silence was baffling. As Greenwald noted in an email to me, "The story involved the most-read political journal in the country and one of the best-known pundits. It entailed numerous key media issues which Kurtz is assigned to cover, including the corrupt use of anonymous sources, uncritical reliance by reporters on partisan spin, and a media outlet's refusal to correct its errors honestly and clearly."

Unsurprisingly, nearly 3 pages of Kurtz's 5 page post was about either Bill or Hillary Clinton, neither getting particularly flattering coverage.

  Don’t look now, but the Washington Post is on the hair beat again. Washington Post’s fashion writer Robin Givhan had this 500-word piece in yesterday’s A Section about a certain former governor’s perfect locks.

Romney has been accused of having anchorman hair — the kind of glossy perfection that lies neat and immobile atop the heads of men such as NBC’s Brian Williams and movie land’s Ron Burgundy. The comparison is not meant as a compliment.

The historical record includes photos of Romney surrounded by those of lesser locks walking into the wind. Everyone else’s face is lashed by their hair; Romney’s hair remains as tidy as a Ken doll’s. When he ran with the Olympic torch in 2006, his hair remained frozen in place. Before the airing of his sweat-soaked-hair ad, the last time Romney’s silken strands moved appeared to have been Oct. 10, 1994, at a Columbus Day parade in Worcester, Mass., when a mighty wind nudged them ever . . . so . . . slightly.

And on and on it went. Givhan, who has also been overly-fascinated with Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and cleavage, not only scrutinized the quality and appearance of Mitt Romney’s hair, she parlayed this overwrought analysis into a political examination, explaining what voters will think (and expect) from a candidate’s coiffure.

Worse, the WaPo followed it up with yet another reference to — you guessed it — John Edwards’ hair.

This so-called "journalism" is really beyond belief. Under the heading "Understanding the leading Presidential Candidates" The Washington Post allows Robin Givhan free rein to talk about "how many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her closet" and "does she ever wear them in the same combination more than once?".

But Ms. Givhan really goes overboard (I am not. making. this. up.) when she refers to the hues within the wardrobe and refers to "Clinton-the-human-color-wheel."

Taylor Marsh says it better than I could:

Time to call your editor, Robin, the first female to have a prayer at the presidency is obviously above your pay grade. Read more...

"Bush administration officials, for all their bellicose rhetoric, still hope that diplomatic pressure -- backed by ever-tighter economic sanctions -- will persuade Iran to compromise." -- David Ignatius, Oct. 28, 2007

"In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own." -- David Ignatius, April 27, 2004

Media Bloodhound has the rebuttal.