Commentary: In the past week, McCain has delivered “More of the same”

[Joanne98]

The McCain camp has sunk to old lows in recent weeks, distorting truths and just plain lying in order to paint Barack Obama as a tax and spend liberal whose cavalier attitude about family, drugs, sex and probably rock and roll will leave us all vulnerable to terrorist attack (ok, the terrorist attack part isn’t true, but the McCain camp is right there on the precipice). The distortions begin with an ad that claims Obama and Biden referred to Sarah Palin as “good looking” and said she is “…lying…” ”How disrespectful,” the ad concludes. I’m not keen on the racial undertones felt by much of America. I’m just not tuned that way, but it seems as if this ad is a) hinting that it’s disrespectful for a black man to say a white, good-looking woman is good looking and b) well, I can’t think of a b).

Here are some quick facts: Sarah Palin is good looking. You don’t win beauty contests without being good looking. Unless they’ve changed the rules of beauty contests in Alaska to do without the beauty part. And in the part about lying? The ad uses quoted text, “…lying…” and a portrait of Obama to suggest he said it. However, even Fox News defends Obama from the claim:

“I mean, you can’t just make stuff up,” Obama said of a new McCain ad that says Palin “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.” “You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.”

Obama wouldn’t go so far as to say McCain and Palin are lying, even when the audience tried to goad him into it, but he began showing an ad Monday that did.

“Politicians lying about their records?” an announcer asks over a shot of McCain and Palin boarding a plane. “You don’t call that maverick. You call it more of the same.”

What’s truly disrespectful are the outright fabrications coming from the McCain campaign. Here, I’m not talking about McCain and Palin painted as some kind of super hero duo set to fight crime in the halls of Washington. Since Palin opposed the “Bridge to Nowhere” once it began to garner unpopular national attention, I’ll let slide the ads and stump speeches suggesting she always opposed it. And as McCain is still fighting against troop drawdowns in Iraq, even after the Bush Administration has decided a timetable is a good idea, I’ll allow McCain his continued maverick credentials. But to claim Barack Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners? Deplorable.

Obama sponsored legislation that, among other things, empowered parents to remove their kids from sex education class if they so desired, held that existing sex education classes must be medically accurate, included language to require teaching abstinence, and mandated existing sex education classes “teach pupils to not make unwanted physical and verbal sexual advances and how to say no to unwanted sexual advances and shall include information about verbal, physical, and visual sexual harassment, including without limitation nonconsensual sexual advances, nonconsensual physical sexual contact, and rape by an acquaintance.” The legislation also stresses that all this must be taught in ways that are age-appropriate.

It’s beyond me why some old white man who left his first wife and seems to enjoy the company of young, beautiful women would decry legislation that seeks to warn people about unwanted sexual advances. But so it goes.

But perhaps the most egregious and misleading of the McCain claims is that Barack Obama will “raise your taxes.” It’s a claim that’s easily dismissed with data gathered by the Washington Post:

Continued>>>
http://independentreport.org/politics/commentary-in-the-past-week-mccain-has-delivered-more-of-the-same/

Chart of tax plans at link

[moose65]

1. That stuff about tax increases IS 'more of the same'

It's what the Republicans ALWAYS fall back on. It's their standard mantra: The "Democrat" party will raise your taxes/pass the largest tax increase in history/take away your hard earned dollars. Rinse and repeat, ad naseum.