The Obama-Biden Gaffeworks

While some people are feverishly working to prevent the next Great Depression, the campaign trail sounds like an episode of the Tonight Show's Jaywalking. The average aspiring entertainer on the streets of Los Angeles (or sometimes a teacher!) is asked "How many varieties of Heinz Ketchup are there?"

They promptly answer: 57.

"Now how many states are in the United States of America?"

Answer: "Um, 57…possibly 58." These people are hilarious.

Maybe Jay should be asking them if they are Democrats or Republicans, because this time it wasn't a topless dancer that showed she didn't know the first thing about the country she lives in, it was the Democrat's nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama.

One mistake like that is usually enough to seriously damage a presidential nominee if that nominee were either a Republican or Hillary Clinton. Case in point, when John McCain made the far more common mistake of mixing up shia and sunni, a CNN anchor opined that if Joe Lieberman were not there to correct him on the spot, it would have meant the end of McCain's campaign. No one was there to correct Obama's Are You Smarter Than a First Grader answer, and yet his mistake has never been cited by the mainstream media. Like Clinton, Joe Biden told a tale of being under imaginary sniper fire just days ago, claiming his plane was forced down in Afghanistan by an enemy President Bush has failed to fight. That enemy turned out to be weather. Unlike Clinton, Biden has a free pass with the media burying what would ordinarily be a blockbuster of a story.

Now it turns out that Obama believes that the president takes office on Election Day itself rather than in January. In the wake of Lou Dobbs calling for the candidates to suspend their campaigns and take a leadership role in resolving the financial crisis, and McCain's surprise announcement to do just that, Senator Obama responded that keeping to the debate schedule took precedence. He added, "The public needs to hear from the person who, in 40 days will be responsible for taking care of this problem." No, Senator, the current president will still be responsible.

The second most obvious problem with that statement is that the scheduled debate is not about economics. It is a foreign policy debate. So not only does Obama refuse to participate in the domestic legislation of the century, but he instead wants to take that irretrievable moment and throw over discussions of economics for foreign policy. I contend that if the questions are not changed, McCain should refuse to go regardless of whether or not the bailout has passed by then.

Obama's gaffe-of-all-gaffes is one of omission. He claims he wants to change Washington, but he is on a plane to Mississippi at the most critical time in our nation's financial history, refusing to do his job with the puffy claim that if anyone needs him, he will get on the telephone. What Obama has chosen to do is use the financial crisis to politically launder his nineteen-month heel-dragging on debates, hoping to alchemically turn himself into the candidate that insists on a debate even if this revelation comes at the expense of the country. What he won't turn himself into is a leader of his party.

And that takes us back to the walking gaffe machine Joe Biden. His response to the crisis was to find a new fault with President Bush, saying, "In 1929 when the stock market crashed, President Roosevelt got right on television to explain to the American people what was happening." I agree that's quite a contrast to Bush waiting a couple of days. Biden's role model was a real can-do kind of guy. Although one Roosevelt was dead and the next would not be president for years, one of them quickly invented television, distributed millions of sets, and gave that all-important address to the nation.

The person that Senator Biden so admires that was actually in office at the time was in fact Republican Herbert Hoover in the first year of his presidency. Rather than the quick action Biden ascribes to that commander-in-chief, Hoover rejected the idea of corrective legislation until he was running for president again several years later. It is not rare but typical for Joe Biden for fire off a multi-gaffe because his opinions are supported by lies and informed by his breathtaking ignorance.

At a time when John McCain has taken the responsible path as the leader of his party, this well-documented dumbest team to ever run for president wants to sit back and mince words. Dramatic confirmation that Obama does not want to take the risk of having his fingerprints on anything. Does he think he can do that as president?

To the Obama-Biden ticket I say: When do "just words" end, and "just actions" begin?

Whadda Ya Mean 'We,' Palin-Face?

This morning, CNN's so-called "AM Reality Check" tapped into their "enormous team of experts" to provide their daily dose of Obama-is-telling-the-truth-and-McCain-is-a-liar "research." The assigned reporter conveyed to the world that she was very excited with what she unearthed for today's segment.

"You've heard the claim from Obama that McCain voted with George Bush 90% of the time? Well, it's true," she crowed. While she paused to let that sink in, I waited for her to reveal that the remaining 10% of votes (if the figures are right at all) constituted 30 or 40 % of the major issues where McCain crossed over and co-sponsored bills with the Democrats.

Instead of revealing the significance of voting and bill sponsoring, the reporter went on to play a clip of McCain saying that Obama does not support nuclear energy. In response, her crack team dug as far back as a month ago to find a clip of Obama giving a speech where he says he does support nuclear energy. CNN's source for the revelation? Obama's website rather than his voting record. Why am I not surprised? She concludes for us viewers that McCain is not telling the truth before showing us just a few of the details that could cast doubt on that conclusion.

To sum it up, the reporter says, Obama is telling the truth, and McCain is not. "CNN is doing this," she explains, "to help undecided voters make a decision."

Funny that the detractors have gone back to McCain when they were supposed to have a gold mine of material for attacking Sarah Palin. Why, I wonder, is all that gold plummeting today, while the prospectors are found panning for silver. Normally gold goes up when the stock market goes down.

At first, some Democrats found themselves in paroxysms of ecstasy that the media had swallowed their Drop Palin Express theme hook, line, and sinker. As Alaskan fisherman know, that expression refers to a very big fish that doesn't know food from all the signs of a trap. Most of the mainstream media managed to express their opinion that the McCain camp did not vet Sarah Palin and would release her from the Republican ticket when a couple more revelations came to light (or chickens came home to roost?) The pundits smirkingly explained to us that previous instances of a candidate dropping and swapping their Veep always resulted in a loss for them.

All day, every day, the media hinted that the fatal issue might prove to be about Governor Palin illegally pressuring an official to fire a state trooper just because he was going through a divorce with Palin's sister. But the information they had and hid was that this trooper tasered a ten-year-old boy, and threatened to murder Palin's father. As some of this information began to leak, some left-wing commentators angrily asserted that only the allegations about Palin's actions matter, and that the underlying facts are irrelevant.

What I believe and suspect the American public will understand is that even if the allegations about Palin's office somehow turned out to be true, the real crime is not that an official felt pressured to fire a trooper, but that the organization had closed ranks to protect a criminal with a badge. I would hope that the governor's office of any state would intervene in an egregious case of this kind, and not see that action result in a witch hunt. The public does not have a lot of patience left for expensive, phony investigations, especially if they find out it was driven in part by corrupt members of her own party disgruntled by her reform efforts. So far the polls bear this out.

What the Obama-CNN team, (and Palin's Republican enemies) have done with the manufactured "Troopergate" and all the other fluff is the same thing the Hilary Clinton campaign unwittingly did early on for Obama: inoculate Sarah Palin from future negative attacks by launching early and unfair attacks that would never stick. The same core of people who so badly wanted us to vote for John Kerry and thought they could manipulate that vote with counterfeit documents on Bush's military service, have managed once again to influence us the other way.