The undeserved 'Maverick' reputation

So much has been written recently about how undeserved is Sen. McCain's reputation as an anti-partisan Maverick that it almost seems like beating a dead dog at this point. Indeed he is not conservative enough for the talk-radio circuit (although one wonders if anybody short of G. Gordon Liddy could be).

Here, though, is Factcheck (via Congressional Quarterly) with the actual numbers on 'Maverick-ism' or the lack thereof: McCain voted with the president's position 95 percent of the time in 2007, and in no year has voted with the president's position less than 77 percent of the time, as in 2005.

Sen. Obama voted with the president's position 40 percent of the time last year, and Sen. Reid of Nevada did so 39 percent of the time. Obama voted with the Democrats 97 percent of the time in 2007.

Hilarious

From the woman who also believes that the New Deal was a bad idea and that Joe McCarthy was a great American hero:

"I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible [For the record: Ms. Coulter is talking about President Bush] for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents."

Here is a survey of hundreds of professional historians (as opposed to professional bloviators, like Ms. Coulter) who disagree:

"Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations."

You probably don't want to go there...

A video/audio recording of Sen. Obama has been making the rounds (not surprisingly - at all - Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity ran with this non-story on the same day) recently purporting to reveal many 'gaffes' on the campaign trail, supposed to demonstrate something negative about the Senator, though I'm not sure what. He stutters a couple of times, incorrectly identifies a handful of cities, accidentally refers to an asthma inhaler a breathylizer, and loses his train of thought discussing the cost of a program.

The Senator is, of course, talking a great deal lately. And, as any human being would when asked to speak extemporaneously for several hours a day, he has missed a beat or two. Conservatives may not want to get into a discussion of silly-sounding politicians. Nor silly-sounding candidates.

All of these are non-issues. Obama knows what an inhaler is; Sen. McCain knows who Vladimir Putin is. Speech, unlike blogging, has no backspace button. Those hyping these events are trying to score lazy cheap shots.

Where the money goes

To subsidize struggling farmers David Letterman and the owners of the Utah Jazz, of course -

--------------

"Consider their latest masterpiece, the 2007 farm bill that Congress this week delivered, several months late, to George Bush. Congress and the farmers have conspired to make an already unjust agricultural policy—a system that has subsidised the “farming” activities of such paupers as David Letterman and David Rockefeller—even worse. Through a complicated and overlapping system of government-sponsored insurance, counter-cyclical assistance, disaster aid and legacy payments tied to nothing, the five-year, $307 billion bill lavishes cash on wealthy farm households, the main restriction on collecting it being a means test that applies to couples making more than $1.5m a year. And even that can be avoided by employing a reasonably competent accountant.

Shockingly, the bill's authors tied some future subsidy payments to today's record commodity prices, therefore guaranteeing already well-off farmers high incomes. Commercial farm households, which get most of the largesse, will have an average income of $229,920 in 2008, says the Agriculture Department. And it means, as the department points out, that the government could owe billions in subsidy payments to these big farmers if and when prices dip again."

-----------

Sen. Obama voted for this piece of junk. Sen. McCain, to his credit, did not. Also to President Bush's credit, he exercised a little fiscal prudence for once and vetoed the bill, though it was overridden.

Speaking to the enemy, or sleazy political gamesmanship

The Economist, on whether Sen. Obama intends to 'appease' the Iranians:

"In January 1991 in Geneva, for example, America's secretary of state talked face-to-face to Tariq Aziz, a nasty piece of work who was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and is currently on trial for murder. But nobody has ever been silly enough to accuse James Baker or the president who sent him (one George H. W. Bush) of appeasement. And that is because instead of letting Iraq keep Kuwait, which it had just invaded and annexed, Mr Baker told Mr Aziz that America would throw Iraq out by force if it did not leave. Hardly appeasement."

Later, in the same piece:

"Strange, then, that the very Mr Bush who admonished the appeasers from Israel's parliament has allowed Americans to negotiate with the North for years. If these talks ever make Kim Jong-Il give up his nukes, nobody in his right mind will hold Mr Bush's decision to talk against him. And if it's fine to speak to North Korea, why rule out talking, as Mr Obama says he would, to Iran?"

The cynic in me keeps screaming that cheap political points scored at the expense of skittish American voters may be somehow involved. I can't quite put my finger on how...