Gotta love to bonus footage of him riding in the cart with Pappy Bush.

And now the McCain campaign has a new surrogate defending Pow Juan from the “he’s rich” smear:

Robin Leach.

I shit you not. Does that count as an epic fail?

(There’s a ton of potential in that: “Hard tack wishes and watery gruel dreams! This is ROBin LEACH with LIFEstyles of the not rich at all…and POWs!” )

Really, I think it IS also a subtle, easily deniable (subliminable?) dig at McSenile’s age and, er, cognitive issues. And I think that is JUST FUCKING GREAT! More please.

My dad’s older than McCain, and HE knows how many houses he has (one).
He’s also a middle-class,  lifelong republican who eats arugula and drinks orange juice, so there!

John McCain is out of touch because he has more houses than a sultan

John McCain has more palatial estates than you-know-who:

http://architecture.about.com/cs/greatbuildings/a/saddam.htm

I’ll worry about Obama’s very subtle digs at McCain’s age when anybody—anybody—in the vaunted Em-Ess-Em notices the very unsubtle racism in McCain’s ads.

Until then, sorry, if McCain’s going to keep chanting the N-word, at some point Obama’s green-lighted to note that McCain is older than the chocolate chip cookie. Two wrongs may not make a right, but three rights makes a left.

And two good lefts can lead for a killer right jab.  Keep punching, Senator Obama.  You’ve got ‘im on the ropes.

I have to admit that I’m especially enjoying the strains of Eno’s Music for Airports in the background of the Obama ad.

Consider that the price of oil might have something to do with the fall of the dollar which both might have something to do with THE WAR IN IRAQ.

Sheesh talk about the elephant in the room.

I caught the dig.  To say it isn’t there is doing the same “Racism?  What racism?” that the other side is engaging in on John McCain’s ads. Or the “Sexism, what sexism?” that everyone did in the anti-Hillary ads.

Either John McCain’s age is fair game or it isn’t.  We (as progressives) have to make the argument or stick to it, or we’re not doing too much better than them. 

Personally, I don’t think it is.  The fact that he’s ill-tempered is.

What Steve LaBonne said.  Also only in John Dickerson’s tiny brain is this “radioactive territory.”

This keeps happening, too: reporters looking for the “age card”, which actually says more about their desperation for it to happen than anything Obama’s actually doing.  If every time McCain can’t answer a question or answers a question incorrectly the “age card” is being played, every one of McCain’s screwups makes Obama an exponentially larger bigot.

The trouble there is, they savage Obama in the press if what he says sounds like a dig at McSame’s age - but if someone makes an openly racist comment and he responds, he’s accused of “playing the race card” and trying to “use race for political points”.

But remember, the media worships Obama like he was the second coming, right?

The Democrats start winning when they attack mercilessly without worrying about what the stupid fucking talking heads say. I’m tired of us being punching bags. Time to return the fire.

Yet, reading the NYT piece on “rural” Pennsylvania, my home state, I’m sure there are a heap of voters who pay less attention than we do who would view the above two ads in another way:  McCain names specific challenges that “real” Americans are facing, i.e. falling gas prices, the unemployment rate.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/us/politics/21penn.html?fta=y

I can imagine the heads nodding, during a commercial break on Wheel of Fortune, with each point, “Yeah, McCain knows.”  Hopefully McCain’s recent house count will slow the nodding heads.

The article quotes folks spewing all the McCain anti-Obama lies like, “I don’t know anything about him,” or “what is his economic plan?”.  McCain’s gang knows who its talking to and is just hoping and praying that the rest of us paying close attention are outnumbered by those who aren’t.

Yup, scary as hell.  When I need motivation to register everyone in my builing in Brooklyn to vote (deadline in NY is October 10, y’all!), I just read a couple letters to the editor from my hometown newspaper in PA.

Incidentally, I think local TV and newspapers have much more impact in these “rural” areas than anything virally or nationally reported.

Actually, I think the dig at McCain’s age is there and is absolutely appropriate. McCain is really fucking old; he’d be the oldest president ever elected in this country if he won. And age is not an irrelevant characteristic when assessing fitness for the presidency or for any other task. So yeah, McCain is too old to be president.

Did anyone else in the world view that as a dig at McCain’s age?

Yup, I did.

Although it’s not so much a dig at his age, but rather a dig at his mental faculties, which are to all appearances entering the still-there-yet-just-not-really-100%-reliable phase. It’s a fact of McCain’s life now, just as it’s a fact that there are 91-year-olds who are sharp as a tack and up to working 80-hour weeks. Too bad for McCain that his senescence started before he had a chance to be elected President. On the bright side, he may still have thirty delightful, mostly-there years ahead of him.

I mean, come on, we’ve been there before. Remember Reagan’s cabinet (the half of it that wasn’t under indictment) talking seriously about invoking the 25th Amendment because he couldn’t be bothered to show up at the Oval Office, and slept through briefings when he did?

It’s not funny, but it is real, and if Obama can make it an issue without generating backlash, good for him.

This age card thing is concern trolling. I don’t care, won’t care, and won’t hear it. Hit him on being befuddled. I think its worse than being rich.  America doesn’t mind the rich, because they believe in the lottery where they could be one too!

But hired help? That’s different. Paying more for household staff than most American’s make in a year doesn’t sit so well. Americans I don’t think get maids.

McCain not remembering how many houses he has reminded me of Michael Huffington’s infamous moment in California when a reporter asked him where his kids went to school and he said, “Saint ... Sacred ... ask my wife.”

It’s got nothing to do with age, just entitlement.  McCain doesn’t have to keep track of how many houses he has, so he doesn’t, the same way Huffington didn’t have to know where his kids went to school, because his wife was in charge of that.

Yeah, the age dig is subtle, but it’s definitely there. A poster on another blog suggested that the Obama campaign go with a series of ads with the following tag line: “What else can’t McCain remember?”