In fairness to the Lieberman, when he said "between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not." I think he meant Obama has not worked acorss part lines, not that Obama hasn't put country first.

The media is not covering these babbling surrogates because they know that the Republican party won't denounce or repudiate any of their surrogates. Unless someone crosses the line and use race, but everything else is fair game to McCain's Republicans.

Isn't it possible that the national press knows how huge a landslide that McCain is going to collapse under and doesn't want to be seen prematurely picking at the bones? Although it's in their best interests to promote the "close race" scenario, (real) journalists are far too hard boiled and realistic to not see the writing on the wall, the same writing that all of the Republican nominee contenders saw last January when they gave pathetic, half-hearted attempts at campaigning (Huckabee excepted: he really thought he could win). Nonetheless, the media understand how bad for business it would be if they called the race three to six months early. No one is paying attention now. Imagine who would pay attention if the whole country knew the election were a fait accompli.

So, don't expect them to start letting the air out of McCain's balloon too soon. Once the conventions and debates are over, the blowout will be obvious and the corporate press can end its game of Let's Pretend.

They don't want to cross the Maverick. They've seen him angry and they know to be afraid. Very afraid.

comments were disabled for a sec. apologies

I think the press only played that game during the Dem primary because Obama and Hillary were pushing that reaction. Obama isn't pushing the issue which is why it is ignored. Look at how the McCain reacted to Gen. Clark's comments and how the MSM covered it, or even the "race card" issue. If Obama wants it to be covered he needs to raise a big stink about it.

I don't think the Obama camp wants to get in a "Who's Patriotic" battle because he will lose it because in order to fight it he would have to attack McCain on the issue and that's taboo.

I guess he could frame it as we're both Patriotic and Lieberman is a scumbag for saying otherwise. I just don't think Obama wants this to become an issue at all, and if he blasts away on it, it just causes the MSM to cover the issue. Obama wants the issues to be what this election is decided on. McCain wants anything but the issues to be the focus of this election.

here's a thought i had:

that crafty barry guy changed his name to barack hussein obama so he could be more popular with an america that just loves muslims as evidenced by the all-powerful lone muslim in congress. sure that happened when barry was 45 years old but still, you get my point.

i actually had that thought after putting a plastic bag over my head for 10 minutes, see how the other 28 percent lives and all.

I think the MSM is still afraid of the Liberal Media Bias label. So it was easy for them to go to town on Hillary v. Barack remarks, but calling out a Republican gives them pause. Plus, McCain has some kind of Teflon with the media.

I think Obama will handle this fine once he's back from vacation, VP lined up, etc. That, and Greg keeps up the great analysis and we'll be in good shape.

Good Job. Keep going Greg. I think folks at TPM have some way to go towards realizing one of the Big Truths.
Corporate Media - Vs Reality.
These people own the lenses, the microphones, and the broadcasting towers.
They have been quite effective at altering our perception of Reality.

So please stop confusing what is going on with Madness. Lunacy. Bamboozlement. Warped Minds, Wayward Journos, One Networks Slant vs another Networks Slant. The TPM headlines are full of such stuff. It is NONE of those things.
Many readers will credit Greed, Ratings, Bottom Line. Not really so with Media. Profits and Ratings will come when you own the Machine.

What is really going on is owning the Machine. Maintaining perfect control of the Reality Warper Gizmo. Beating down all who would dare lay their hands on the Machine, keeping total control.
That is why every dem is demonized. That is why ANY thing about a Dem is exploited and given legs and wildly speculated on for days ad nauseum. It is why dry facts are thrown overboard while the media chases hype and hyperbole. Keep us confused, distracted, squabbling.

And that is why every Republican foible, every inconvenient fact, drunk driving, wife beating, gay lover....is buried by the media.
It is also why we are living thru the Corporate Gutting of America without a single MSM newsreport of the gutting. If it were homeless folks, or plumbers, or a union, or mozzlims, or welfare moms GUTTING america...it would be front page all the time.

I don't know much about corporate finance and systems of govt, but I didn't need Mr Galbraith to tell me we are a predator culture....where corporations feed on the captive population. We have always been a fenced in herd, and the govt. has always regulated how many wolves were let in amongst us. Now it is basically unregulated. All the wolves are running full-tilt devouring as they go.

But I don't need to know much about geopolitics or high finance to know we are on a 50 yr roll of being propagandized by Corporate America thru TV. And the pace, and intensity, and frankly DESPERATION on the part of the Corporatists, have pushed us all to a new and unbelievable breaking point. Reason and Rational and Reality are in their death throes. Can they shake free?

This is going to be utter slavery to corporations, or a toppling of this whole system. We always break out for a while, before being reined/herded back into submission. I do not believe we can awaken a mezmerized/product addicted population to throw off our oppressors - so barring natural catastrophes and geologic tumult - slavery is looking pretty likely.

At Home Boy,
That's not what I meant at all. I meant he was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate who hates America. But thanks for sticking up for Me, either you are quite foolish or you think others are. Good work!

Oh yes, there's certainly a double standard and numerous daily sins of omission and commission. Tuesday's piece in WarPo by Alec MacGillis about Obama's failure to connect with older voters (base on ONE voter) is a prime example. I wrote the ombudsman.

Ms. Howell:
What connection is there between teens at the mall and Obama the candidate? That's the lede in MacGillis' piece.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081102203_pf.html

MacGillis (with some help from selective use of polling data), finds ONE man with a drink in his hand at the Elks Club and makes a wildly overstated case that a candidate has a big problem with older voters. The man has doubts about youth in general and Obama in particular, he being merely 47 (Loretta Lynn was a grandma at 32).
The reporter neglected to talk to Myrtle Strong Enemy, 101, in Montana. I've got a photo of her, the oldest woman in the Crow Nation, holding an "Obama for Change" sign. MacGillis also missed out on Katherine Damon, Madison, Wis., who died at 83 in late July. Her obituary said this:
"One of the few regrets in her well-lived life is that she would be unable to cast one last vote against the Republicans in November and would not be around next January to celebrate the day when our incumbent President finally leaves office."
Here's a real stretch from the reporter: "But Clinton fared well with older voters because of the strong support for programs such as Social Security among the seniors who predominated in the 1990s, many of whom grew up during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal."
And now, all those seniors are gone? Support for Social Security has evaporated? Tell that to the Republicans who keep trying to privatize it and are met with huge opposition.
Or this laugher: "If (Obama) shares anything with the America of yore, it is that he likes to smoke cigarettes."
Pathetic. That's really ALL he shares with older voters? MacGillis is certainly allowed to have opinions, but they should be labeled as such. A "news" story? I think not. A trend story? It seems one or two people do not make a trend. This is from a commenter on the story:
Osego wrote:
"Ok you have told us how Senator Obama has an age problem with the elderly, who will rather vote for McCain as he is as old as them and they share the same values.
Now conversely do a three-page expose showing how McCain has a serious age problem with young people because he is too old and they do not share his values but rather share the same values with Senator Obama who is nearer their age.
I will be waiting..."
And from your own column comparing photos of the candidates:
"But these kinds of discrepancies feed distrust on the part of readers, especially conservative ones, who already complain that The Post is all for Obama. Next week, I will examine the stories."
I really don't get how constant readers detect Obamamania at WaPo. That's definitely not the case.
(I noticed that the column, however, focused only on the Milbank flap.)

Mr. MacGillis:
I read with interest your piece on older voters' doubts about Senator Obama.
I have been reading fairly regularly stories online that make the point that veterans groups are not particularly enamored with Senator McCain. Retired veterans seem particularly disaffected, and these are people you'd assume would be his natural constituency. So why aren't they?
I know there would be a story for you there, if you can get your editors to agree. I certainly hope so. For a starter, here's a link to a recent story.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/aug/10/mccains-attacks-rival-fall-flat-vets-group/#comments

The comments are very telling to me. Thank you.
I'm not very hopeful but I do what I can to make a chink in their beltway armor. It really is the media.

OF course the so called 'librul media' won't call McCain out on anything. They are too chickenshit, because they are afraid of what Rush Limpballs and Drudge will say about them, and they love bringing McCain his coffee and donuts just the way he likes them. Kiss kiss, gush gush, fawn fawn. Sigh, he's so dreamy, that McCain. Such a maverick.

They love getting invited to one of his 10 homes for BBQ, it makes them feel special and important.

I think the media pulls punches with McCain not only because of his service record, but also because it perceives this lack of scrutiny to be a kind of corrective or counterbalance to the attention Obama gets from the media for being a telegenic, charismatic figure. The thing is, the two things are inherently different. The failure to call McCain on his flip-flops, distortions, and ethically challenged campaign conduct is a substantive failure and an abdication of journalistic responsibility, while the fawning over Obama (I admit it, and I'm an Obama supporter to the hilt) is a superficial matter remarkable for its quantity. The latter has not prevented the media from entertaining (and failing to investigate) the spurious rumors, allegations and innuendo concerning Obama.

I think this might be Obama campaigns reaction to the race event. They DON'T want to be having a conversation about if Obama is patriotic enough so they don't go into an uproar about this. However, they should make an exception for this one and make it TEN TIMES WORSE than what they did to clark. It was the McCain camp that pushed that agenda and the Obama camp has to do the same.

A reason Obama is an easy target is that he "born of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya" is plainly not a full-blooded American and consequently his identification with and commitment to America are valid issues to explore.

This isn't racism, it'd be true if his father had been English, German, Irish or Mongolian.

Obama's "Cling to" speech proved he's hostile toward or at least uncomfortable with small town America, the principal repository of basic American values & traditions.

I a WIA Viet-Nam veteran damned well do question his nationalism & patriotism. I deeply distrust him and question his love for America. Anyone with so thin a resume as he isn't qualified to be president, in the first place.

Here's how this works. Check out Al Franken's research into what happened after the Paul Wellstone memorial in "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them", pp 177-204.

Based on 30 seconds of a 4 and a half hour event, Repubs made up the story up that "the funeral was turned into a campaign rally" and sold it successfully to the MSM, which headlined it. Al's chat with Repub talking heads is worth the price of the book by itself.

So don't expect a lot of MSM evaluation of talking point blather this year.

Then remember that going back 40 years, it has been the national Republican strategy to divide and conquer, particularly to use black people to scare white people using "coded" messages (Law 'n Order, States Rights, Willie Horton, that crap Bush pulled against McCain in South Carolina in 2000.)

This strategy was perfected by Lee Atwater, the evil architect of the Southern Strategy (and campaign manager for both Reagan and Bush 41), which you really should read about here

particularly where architect Atwater describes the evolution of coded Republican anti-black messqages (he recanted on his death bed, by the way, but the genie was out of the bottle.)

Atwater taught Rove who taught Steve ("the bullet") Schmidt, the current architect of the McCain campaign.

Are Repubs still using the same divisive strategy they've used successfully for 40 years, against an actual black Democrat? What are the odds?

I'm not in the McCain campaign and I'm not even in the GOP.

But I'll tell you what bothers me about Obama. And it bothers me a lot.

It's not Obama's race or ethnicity, because Obama's youthful supporters bother me just as much as he does and many of them are white. It's an attitude.

It's this combination of youthful arrogance and transnationalist "One Worldism," that rejects the notion of America as "the last, best hope of Earth," as Lincoln once put it.

It's not my attitude. Culturally and emotionally, it's not me.

My grandparents came to America early in the 20th century. They came to America to GET AWAY FROM the Europe that the liberal sophisticates of New York and Hyde Park seem to admire so much. It's a good thing they did, because if they had not, they would likely have been killed and I would not exist today.

And they taught me that America is BETTER than Europe, better than anyplace else, and how glad they were to be here and not anyplace else. And never to forget that.

Somehow, I just don't think Obama and his supporters feel that way in their heart and their guts about the country. Yeah, there are some things about America they like, but they have a much more breezy dismissal of its significance and unique role to play in the world. "Good in some ways, bad in many other ways" seems to be their view.

It's an attitude that has come from growing up in the age of the Internet, the most transnationalist experience ever, in which you leap from website to website without worrying about national boundaries or sovereignty or cultural differences. And it's an attitude that comes from the arrogance and impetuousness of youth, the idea that you're going to remake the world if only all those old superannuated fuddy-duddies like me will get out of your way. Or if we'll do the right thing and die of old age and stop bothering you.

That's not my attitude. I wasn't even like that when I was your age in college. I grew up to have a deep abiding love for the country AND for the older generation that built it. Today's coddled, selfish, soft youngsters, plugged into Lord knows what with their iPods and their iPhones, couldn't care less.

I wouldn't vote for Obama on a bet. He'll have to win over my dead body and the dead bodies of older folks like me.

I think Airhead and Sinz are the same poster.

Airborn

McCain's daddy got him into the academy, his wife's money got him into the senate, and his lobbyist buddies will help him into an early retirement.

What exactly did McCain's career entail?

Daddy got him into West Point, where he graduated 5th from the bottom in a class with almost 900 people. Daddy also made sure Jr got to fly aeroplanes before he was actually competent to do so, which is why he got shot down because he didn't know what he was doing.

So McCain gets beat up for 5 years as a POW then comes back to the US, where he dumps his wife for some young rich slut who helps finance his first congressional run.

Such an accomplished man.

Give me a break, athomeboy_2000!! Lieberman has been slamming Obama nonstop for the past year and a half!! Just admit that bigot Joe believes that unless someone is a full-throated cheerleader for the jingoistic practices that pass for patriotism these days, that person is un-American, someone who doesn't "put country first." Please tell me how it is putting country first when you think it's fine to spend $12 BILLION a month on a war that was built on lies, when you do your damnedest to ruin the country's coastline and last remaining wild places by drilling for oil, and when you have no qualms about lying repeatedly to the people you profess to respect and hope to lead??? Go home, McSame, or should I say Go homes, since you have so many of them!! And I'm sure your lapdog Joe will gladly wag his behind and follow you anywhere. Wake up, athomeboy_2000!! Maybe you should get out more!

Selfish Baby-san,

I don't think I'm bitter about anything, merely disguieted at the self-centered corruption of spoiled & pampered children who fail to appreciate how soft they have things and seem unwilling to get mud on their loafers assisting people who're less fortunate.

Good for your Mom. My Mom also was an excellent cook & I missed her cooking when abroad. It was a good thing my African hostess, when I lived & worked in West Africa, also was a good cook & frequently fed me, else I may have come close to starving.

But in Viet-Nam I grew to actually like C rations, to prefer them to mess hall cooking. I'd still like them, if they were available, but they're not. They were phased out some years ago.

Huff & poof? Don't think I've the wind or the energy to do that. But while I could, should, have done more & better than I did, I made a stab at serving America in uniform & another while a civilian at helping some folks in tropical Africa, an experience that made me appreciate America all the more. In comparison to West Africa, we really do have it made.

Idealism isn't dead in America. For one thing, the Peace Corps still exists and Volunteers are serving in many countries abroad. Of course, American G.I.s are serving in many countries abroad also, in 66 countries, the last I read.

Contrary to Leftist propaganda, our G.I.s are far more reflective, representative, of our society as a whole than most other institutions.

In fact, that was so during the Viet-Nam War. Frequently the ignorant will say the army which fought in Viet-Nam was composed of draftees. That's incorrect. 76% to 75% of us who actually served in-country were volunteers.

Even the Hollywood movie director Oliver Stone, was a volunteer. When the Viet-Nam War heated up, he was already in Viet-Nam, working as a school teacher in a Catholic girl's high school in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon.

He returned to the States & volunteered to fight in 'Nam. He not only served a full year as a rifleman in the 25th Infantry Division, subsequent to being wounded he voluntarily extended his tour by 50%, or 6 months, to serve as cadre in the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division, which essentially was a helicopter borne division of infantry.

i'm sort of a lieberman democrat, so i'm not unsympathetic to repubican attacks on patriotism just because one disagrees with them--even on a war--and even on a war i'm at odds with most other democrats. things like the max cleland dissing make me want to throw up.

the quote here by lieberman is so very mild. parsing the sentence, lieberman did put obama in the camp of those not always putting their country first, but it was on the basis that he didn't reach across party lines. it's not a compliment, but it is mild political criticism and is not anywhere near or in any way the same thing as anne coulter going around calling everyone a traitor. politicians always go around saying if the other side really wanted to put the country first, they'd be in favor of this or that. it's no different from obama's camp saying that mccain is beholden to "lobbyists." what's that other than saying that mccain is putting special interests above national interests? yet, i don't see articles going crazy over obama's criticisms.

more troubling, perhaps, is that obama is cry-babying over this sort of stuff that really should just be boring us while at the same time democrats for at least 5 years have unloaded, "impeach, impeach, liar, liar, war criminal, war criminal" against the bush administration. hey, maybe those things are true, but if that's fair game, why isn't the 100 times more mild lieberman statements also fair.

and if bush had been impeached over the war, what would we have done with al gore, who in october, 2002, gave a prominent speech (a very good speech) AGAINST going to war, but one in which he assured us that we all KNOW that sadaam had wmds, including mobile biological weapons labs. was al, who was in a position to know, also lying to us?

really, now, if i were running for president, i'll bet i wouldn't go, "boo hoo" every time someone said i wasn't really putting the country first. why, i'll bet obama's FEELINGS are hurt. oh, my.

keevan d. morgan, chicago

"Democrats all too often do put up with these attacks," is how John Aravosis of AmericaBlog put it today. "And that's why far too many voters don't think we have what it takes to defend the country. Because we won't even defend ourselves."

That, boys and girls, is the money quote. And the Democratic Party has done a piss-poor job of standing up for its values since a bunch of us worked our asses off getting them back into power in 2006.

Words to live by. And if the Democratic Party doesn't, it will likely die by them.

The Logan Act makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States."

So writes the Wall Street Journal editorial page ... about Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) visiting abroad, not about John McCain (Republican) trying to influence the behavior of a foreign government.

More at FDL.

(What's with the trolls around here, anyway? There is a cost to having them around, in terms of lowering signal-to-noise.)

Let's see, so far McCain and his minions have questioned Obama's character, his multi-cultural background, his patriotism, called him an elitist, arrogant (which David Gergen pointed out is code for 'uppity')and hinted that he is the anti-Christ. And the MSM, with the exception of Gergen, hasn't seemed to notice.

So when does that campaign high road start, or did McCain miss the turnoff?

Listen up. Stop whining about the MSM and treat it like the dumb beast it is. Feedings and Beatings, that is all the MSM responds to, You feed it so it can fill up its wasteland with crap; then you beat it when it makes a mess on you. More to the point: McCain now sets the tempo -- he gives the MSM its morning feeding of anti-Obama pap and the MSM spends the day puking it back and insisting that Obama explain himself. Then, every time, the MSM calls McCain out for spewing garbage, McCain accuses the MSM of being pro-Obama. The MSM responds only to the fuel it needs to occupy time and criticisms that it is being unfair. The MSM has no discernible IQ. It is merely a dumb beast. Feed it and Beat it. Get it under control.