With the win in North Carolina and the virtual tie in Indiana, Barack Obama appears finally to be in a position to look past Hillary Clinton , and refocus his campaign with an eye toward the general election (though I think Hillary is refusing delivery of that memo at the moment).
For those of you who missed his acceptance speech Tuesday night (It was pure buttah-excuse me I'm a bit vaclempt), Barack was at his inspirational best (as opposed to his sometimes stilted professor-speak) as he rallied the crowd and made clear who his primary target will be from this point forward:
This comes not a moment too soon, as faux maverick John McCain launched another of what I'm sure will be many pointed (if misleading) attacks against Obama over the weekend at a Denver rally. It was a lazy half truth intended to tap into the time-worn hyperbolic caricature of the tax and spend liberal (better than spend and spend Republicans) that the GOP has relied on for decades. But, who’s kidding who here, I suppose if the old pull my finger act worked before who can really blame the guy for letting it rip again (still stinks…and... on second thought...uh... yeah…I can blame him). McCain said:
"We can't afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush's third term, we need change in America. And that's why we will be united in November!"
".... Senator Obama and Senator Clinton have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in pork barrel earmark projects. One of them being the Woodstock Cultural Museum, in case you missed that one, $1 million of your tax dollars. Senator Obama got a bunch of money for the seed museum."
While the above quote makes for a great sound-bite , that seed museum (The Svalbard Global Seed Vault), described here in WIRED magazine, is actually a serious and worthwhile scientific endeavor to preserve the world's agricultural gene pool in the event of some unforeseen global catastrophe. Definitely not some bridge to nowhere or wasteful vanity library. Which brings me to...
Those in glass houses...
2003 -John McCain tucked $14.3 million (unrequested) dollars into a defense appropriations bill in order to prevent a BRAC closing of Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and an estimated loss of $1.6 billion in revenue per year for the state. The effort, now nearly complete and now totaling $20.4 million in cost, involves buying up land to create a buffer around the base, and thereby save it from the chopping block.
2006 - John McCain teams up with Jon Kyl to request $10 million on behalf of the University of Arizona to further their effort to build an academic center named after the late Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.
I understand that there are those who might dismiss the above as something other than true McCain earmarks. In a very narrow and technical interpretation of what one defines as an earmark, a case could be made I suppose (If you stand on your head and hold your breath until hypoxia sets in). But the truth is that those are not critical expenditures, and serve primarily to curry favor with McCain's Arizona constituents, and can rightly be labeled pork.
What America needs now is not a candidate/President who relies on some semantic contortion to sidestep his or her violation of the very beliefs, principles, and standards by which he or she suggests other should be judged. We've been there and done that. Time for real change.
Get you motors runnin' boys. Sphere: Related Content
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