(and who knows if it is or not)

'Twas the night before Veepmas, when through Daily Kos
users were betting who Barack liked the most.

The diaries were screaming "pick this one or that!"
In hopes that Obama soon settles the spat;

Recently, a fair number of high-profile progressive bloggers have been, to put it mildly, flipping out about Barack Obama's campaign style and his chances in November.  Josh Marshall thinks there need to be consistent lines of attack against McCain.  John Aravosis thinks Team Obama is in a bubble and this is feeling like the Democratic campaigns of the past.  Matt Stoller thinks it's time for message testing to find the attack that'll work on McCain.

All of these are smart people who want Obama to win and see it slipping away.  But they are failing to totally account for the X factor of the election, which is going virtually unmentioned throughout the blogosphere - the historic ground effort that the Obama campaign is banking on to win.  It is not without peril, but it is a very new thing, and I think we have to understand it if we want to understand the twists and turns of this election.

Post partisan my ass! That MIGHT be a good theme as a campaign strategy. It MIGHT appeal to an electorate tired of the incompetent,  ineffectual and just plain stupid brand of government they have been getting for the last ten years....you know, since the incredibly partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton by the Republican Congress....

It might sound ... nice ...and evenhanded and reasonable and mature and responsible and all that. But it ignores the simple and undeniable fact that since the Republicans lied, cheated and smeared (including smearing their current champion when he was running against Bush) their way into having full unfettered dominance of the government.....just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and the country is in sad, sorry shape.

Because of the Republicans.

Everything the Republicans has touched in the last decade has turned to crap. From the micro (life saving stem cell research) to the macro (Climate Crisis) the Republicans have had full power to implement their vision, programs and policies....and have gotten it wrong every single time.

    Happy Now?
    The network will be formally announcing this tomorrow, but I am pleased to inform you in this fully authorized leak, that as of Monday, September 8, our mutual friend Ms. Maddow will become host of her own show, on MSNBC, at 9 PM Eastern Time.
    And, yes, we will be making another unofficial announcement of this on tonight's edition of Countdown. My guest to analyze the Rachel Maddow news will be Rachel Maddow.

Andrew Sullivan reminds us today of something that is missing in all this talk of crosses in the dirt.

More below the fold!

As impressive as his record is and as much as I love and respect him, I believe this is food for the opposition.

Over at military.com, Dr. Phillip Butler (USNA '61) has a very interesting article up.  Who is Dr. Butler?  He was a hall mate of John McCain's at the Naval Academy.  He was a Vietnam War light-attack carrier pilot.  He was a POW for 8 years in North Vietnam during the time that McCain was in captivity.  He has two Silver Stars, two Legion of Merits, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Heart medals.

And he's not voting for John McCain:

Senator John Sidney McCain, III is a remarkable man who has made enormous personal achievements. And he is a man that I am proud to call a fellow POW who "Returned With Honor." That's our POW motto. But since many of you keep asking what I think of him, I've decided to write it out. In short, I think John Sidney McCain, III is a good man, but not someone I will vote for in the upcoming election to be our President of the United States.

The good doctor runs through the reasons why being a POW isn't a qualification for being president (which obviously applies to himself) ...

Crusty, curmudgeonly commentator Jack Cafferty of CNN has tossed a spanner in the works of the MSM. In his most recent commentary piece, McCain's many shortcomings as commander in chief are laid bare:

http://www.cnn.com/...

More multiple point messaging like this please.  While Obama is vigorously going after McCain's deplorable patriotism attack, the DNC is just out with this in response to the Saddleback forum:

It was two years ago this week, eight years after Robin Hayes first took office, that Hayes told Fox News he'd made no mistakes in Congress.

Host Beth Troutman: "Is there anything from over the past few years that you would have done differently? That you are maybe the least proud of? If anything?"

Rep. Robin Hayes: "Hard, as I can't think of anything honestly, right off hand."

As we reminded him last cycle, the working families of North Carolina's 8th District may have some suggestions.

(h/t to Bob Sackamento for notifying us of this subject)

Barack Obama is speaking in front of the VFW right now in Orlando, and is hitting McCain very hard on his Achilles heel - the fundamental decision to go to war, and for the first time, brings up the fact that McCain pushed for war with Iraq right after 9/11:

Six years ago, I stood up at a time when it was politically difficult to oppose going to war in Iraq, and argued that our first priority had to be finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Senator McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that – as despicable as Saddam Hussein was – posed no imminent threat to the American people.

And he then pivots to the original decision to launch the war in Iraq:

I don't know that I am able to do this with a hell of a lot of grace, but I'm hoping the rule of thumb is, "Better to do it badly and honestly than not at all."

Do white men really travel to Indian reservations with the intent of raping Native American women?

Yes.

“(N)on-Native perpetrators often seek out a reservation place because they know they can inflict violence without much happening to them.”

From the Amnesty International report:Maze of injustice: The failure to protect indigenous women from violence page 34

Doesn't this diary title overstate the problem?

No.

Data gathered by the United States Department of Justice shows Native American women are more than 2.5x likely to be sexually assaulted/raped than other women in the United States. 86% of Native American survivors report that the perpetrator was white.Source pp. 3-4

Is there something I can do today - right now that will make a difference?

Yes. Keep reading.

August 29th was also the day that Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, while John McCain and George W. Bush was laughing it up on the airport tarmac with a huge birthday cake in front of them.

When I wrote the diary concerning the uncanny resemblance between John McCain's Christmas story and the story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet gulags, I had no idea about the response it would really generate.  I figured that people would see it as an interesting "gotcha" story, and that maybe people would be interested enough in it to place my diary on the rec list.  Well, I can honestly say that I GREATLY underestimated the interest and I underestimated the feedback, both positive and negative, that it has generated.

Thank you AP for giving us a good heartfelt chuckle this evening!  Fantastic.

His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.

I'm still at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana.  We're finishing up and getting ready to head back to Fort Bragg in the next few days.

Richard Nixon claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.  Of course, once he was elected, his secret plan was to escalate the war.  Senator McCain has taken a page from Nixon's playbook.  Last Saturday, he hinted at a secret plan to capture Osama Bin Laden.