presidential election – Page 44

So much for leadership

I’ll let the headline of John Nichols’ blogpost on The Nation stand without comment:

“Shame on Clinton, Obama, Dodd & Biden for Skipping AG Vote”

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Columnists and bloggers around the country are asking the same thing: Why is it that Rudy Giuliani’s factually deficient recounting of his own brush with the healthcare system has not called his character into question?

Eugene Robinson in The Washingont Post
Paul Krugman in The New York Times
Joe Conason in Salon
Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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UFOs are irrelevant

The headline in Dick Feagler’s column in The Cleveland Plain-Dealer says it all: “So Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO; what’s the big deal?”

As he says,

If true, this sounds no worse than the illusions that instructed the Bush administration.

They smelled something or felt something or heard something that sent us into Iraq. Are they cuckoo, too?

Well, yes, they are, but that’s another issue. Kucinich may be quirky, but on the issues that matter — getting out of Iraq, a national single-payer healthcare system — he is the sanest man in the race.

More from Feagler:

I don’t know what, if anything, Dennis said to Shirley MacLaine about a spaceship sighting. But I do know, thanks to the Internet, what a lot of people say about Dennis. Not here, maybe, but around the country. A lot of people like him because they think he’s talking straight. And that’s rare. And a lot of his straight talk is what a lot of people want to hear.

The last congressional election was supposed to be all about ending the war in Iraq. That was a year ago.

If you’ve watched these beauty contests, aka presidential debates, you might have been surprised to see that Iraq has become a second-tier issue.

But not for Dennis. He still wants out, ASAP.

If they’re still on speaking terms, Eleanor Roosevelt might have told Hillary to say she was sorry for voting to help plunge this nation into a bottomless war.

But being in love with yourself means you never have to say you’re sorry. If you’re up in the polls, that helps, too. Millions in your war chest helps more. But what helps most is a campaign consultant who urges you not to say what you really think.

So Hillary’s version of her war vote goes like this. (It’s familiar because she plagiarized it.) “I did not have sex with that war.”

Make fun of Dennis all you want. He can’t win. But he says what he means. That’s enough in this dismal political morass called a campaign, to bring me a slight whiff of roses.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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More on Rotten Rudy

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reminds us that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was prepared to shred the city’s charter in the wake of 9/11 — and that there’s no reason to believe he won’t attempt to do the same to what’s left of the U.S. Constitution.

Mayors don’t have a lot of real power. Not over life and limb and upholding or violating constitutions. But it gives you a sense of the guy’s judgment, and his own sense of indispensability versus following rules the country has followed since its founding. With all that’s happened over the last seven years, does anyone trust this guy with the constitution?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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