After reading through this thread discussing how we can pool our resources here at DU to help research McCain, I decided to have a look around FactCheck.org to see what they had written lately about McCain's numerous recent gaffes and lies.

What I found was absolutely nothing. FactCheck.org hasn't written a story about McCain since January when he was battling Romney. In the meantime, they'd written about 20 stories on Obama and Clinton.

So that's 20 pieces factchecking the Democrats. And 0 pieces factchecking the Republican. And that's supposed to be nonpartisan?

It's really emblematic of a problem in the entire mainstream media, where they've been giving John McCain a free ride for years (though especially since he clinched the Republican nomination). If it doesn't stop, we're going to lose, no matter who our nominee is.

FactCheck.org is important because many journalists use it as a resource when writing similar pieces. I sent them an email (Editor@FactCheck.org ) to encourage them to give more scrutiny to John McCain.

With his appearance on and numerous lies about Obama and evasions on his tax policy, this is the perfect time to do it. For example, McCain's adviser has previously stated that "What Senator McCain has said repeatedly is that these candidates cannot be held accountable for all the views of people who endorse them or people who befriend them". And yet, there he was, attacking Obama for his association with Ayers and then repeatedly mischaracterizing what Obama said in the debates.

There's a post up right now claiming Obama has a "PRO-WAR RECORD" in the Senate:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

To make that claim, it cuts and pastes from a poorly-researched and misleading article from Paul Street of Zmag.org. It lists a bunch of funding and confirmation votes which supposedly show Obama to be "pro-war". The problem is that, by their definition, every single Senator has a "PRO-WAR RECORD".

You see, I went through the roll calls for all those funding votes and it turns out that they all (and I do mean ALL) passed unanimously among Democrats.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...

So unless you're ready to call the likes of Feingold, Boxer, and every other Senator who voted against the IWR "pro-war", you're barking up the wrong tree. The bottom line is that these Senators opposed the war from the beginning, but saw the need to support funding (until recently, when many like Obama changed course).

I'm really perplexed as to how a confirmation vote could be seen as a referendum on the war, especially when so many of those votes were also passed unanimously. Even those that had opposition were generally split among anti-war Senators. Obama has always had the position that Presidents should be able to pick who they want to work for them (this obviously doesn't apply to judicial nominees). When he's President, he wants to be able to pick the best people and not have them rejected because they're too liberal.

Has Obama's record been perfect since entering the Senate? No. He's made a number of mistakes in my opinion, including being a little late to wake up to the fact that our presence in Iraq was making things worse and we had no choice but to defund and set a date certain in order to withdraw. And maybe if he was running against Russ Feingold, there'd be a legitimate argument here.

But for Hillary Clinton supporters to be attacking Obama on this score makes me angry when I know that their candidate voted for the Iraq War resolution and has never apologized or even admitted she made a mistake on that vote. And especially when she has the same supposedly "PRO-WAR" record once the war started.

That quote is not a new one, but it's one that sheds quite a bit of light on one of the many differences between Clinton and Obama.

The Nation's Ari Berman had a good take on it here:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmat...


If you read Obama's writings, speeches, and interviews, you'll note that he never calls himself a "centrist". He was never a member of the centrist DLC and even told them to take his name off their website when they listed him on it.

Hillary, on the other hand, is very much a centrist and she intends to carry that agenda into the White House. She has close ties to the DLC. Not only is her husband a former chair and poster boy for the DLC, she herself has personally worked closely with them to implement their agenda, even when taking some heat for it from the left:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...
While other politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards have moved far away from the DLC and centrism, Hillary has stayed close.

The key concept here is the difference between centrism and bipartisanship.
Centrism is defined as "The political philosophy of avoiding the extremes of right and left by taking a moderate position. " It implies taking a position halfway between the two opposing parties.
Bipartisanship, on the other hand, simply means working with opposition to pass legislation that will be beneficial to the American people. It implies nothing about moving toward the center and can often be accomplished without moving very far at all from your original position.

The best denunciation of centrism comes from Obama himself in a speech at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Ceremony in 2005:
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/051116-rema... /


The rest of that speech is worth checking out as well. It's one of his better ones and a great tribute to Bobby. Don't be fooled by the media trying to distract us with petty nonsense. There are some fundamental differences here in the way Obama and Clinton would govern and that's what we need to focus on.

http://www.centredaily.com/business/story/...





I agree with him. I think in the end, the argument of this campaign is not experience vs. change, but experience vs. judgment. Personally, I come down strongly on the side of judgment. There are certainly additional arguments to consider such as their ability to bring about change, but I think judgment is paramount.

I'm sure some will accuse Kucinich of "politicizing" the tragedy, but the fact is that this was politicized from the very beginning. Hillary Clinton has complained about politicizing the Bhutto assassination, but what she's really complaining about is the criticism of her past judgment. Clinton had no problem politicizing the assassination in terms of it highlighting her experience. This was her initial response to the event:


Stephen Elliott had an interesting take on this at the Huffington Post.


There are parallels between this and what happened in 2004 where Bush and Cheney tried to get the American people to ignore his failure in Iraq by bringing up fears of terrorism. They told us we couldn't risk handing over power to people like Kerry and Edwards when the stakes were so high. Hopefully, we won't get fooled by that again.