Disclaimer: I’m going to issue a non-apology for all my political articles of late. If it makes you feel better, I’ve only been posting about a tenth of the political articles that I’ve started writing and I’ll soon return to my regular rare political rant blog after this cycle is over. I’m just wrapped up in what will certainly become the most important single political event of my generation. Remember that the singular reason I started blogging almost four years ago was because of politics. You may not agree with me, but realize the motto of this blog:

Write to create context for another to think.

Last Friday at work someone asked me why I seemed in uncommonly good spirits. I replied: “Because the electoral map finally looks like a disaster for McCain.” After a dalliance into spin and absurdity, I thought I had a right to be pleased that reality, as it were, was on the march. “The only problem,” I said, “was this means McCain’s campaign will be forced to get ugly fast.”

I was sick over the weekend and yesterday, so I didn’t realize I had been right until this morning. This bothers me because spite works in spite of the myth that Americans dislike negativity. I have a Pavlovian response bourne from experience that the Democrats will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once more by not addressing the negative campaigning with some negativity of their own or try to defeat the absurdity of the claims with logic. It seems every two years my co-workers can hear me yell randomly, “Fucking Democrats think that voters are Vulcans.”

That’s why I was happy to read that the Obama campaign was floating this website as a response. At first, I thought it was too weak. But what changed that was a friend found the website in a web search when I mentioned that Obama would be pushing the “<a href="Keating Five” in response and he had not heard of it.

That’s a pretty clever soft sell. You put it out there so the press will have some report to counterbalance every time they mention the Whack-Job from Wasilla’s attacks.

I’m not much one for subtlety, but I do appreciate the strategery in it.

Fighting the Five

A comment in one of the linked posts points out:

The Senate ethics committee, after an investigation, found McCain innocent of any wrongdoing in the Keating Five scandal. They did say that they thought McCain showed “poor judgement” when meeting with regulators, but he did not break any code or law.

…

I don’t see how there is any “gotcha” evidence against McCain in the matter, or am I missing something?

Given what most of us gave been brainwashed to think think of “Washington politics” when your only defense is that a bunch of Washington politicians said you only “exercised poor judgement”…

Well lets just say that’s not going to carry too well with the American people who are in danger of having their homes repossessed, their livelihoods destroyed, their jobs lost and their taxes raised because of just that sort of deregulatory “poor judgement” that man has exercised as a congressman, as a senator, and hopes to exercise as our president.

I find the defense wholly amusing: after spending the last three election cycles asking us to vote with “our gut” that they’re going to ask us to ignore what our gut tells us about this man’s moral and ethical character? 😀