Michigan Republican Freaks Out

""He's a general who left the battlefield in the middle of the fight."
"I'm disappointed in his behavior; he's thrown a lot of good Republican candidates under the bus."
"...our commander has raised the white flag..."

-L Brooks Patterson, Oakland County, MI Executive on John McCain's decision to cede Michigan to Barack Obama.

Patterson is afraid, and he should be. With McCain effectively dropping out in MI, many republicans will not vote. It is very possible that Joe Knollenberg or Tim Walberg will be defeated. Currently, Knollenberg is down by 4 pts in the polls, and with McCain dropping out its not going to get any better.

Bailout = McCain Finished?

The bailout fiasco is bad, really bad.  I'm not of the opinion that we need it yet, but the market was priced to expect the bailout so now the Dow has dropped 777 points.  I've lost several thousand recently.  Oh well, I have time to save.

I'm not going to get into economics tonight.  

My simple analysis is this: the failure of this bailout to pass just might sink John McCain for good.

Strike 1: McCain "suspended" his campaign to go to Washington and help build bipartisan support for the bailout bill.  He did not do much helping (by all accounts, he made a couple phone calls).  The bailout failed, mostly due to republicans.  This leads me to believe that McCain's own party does not respect him, particularly the Ron Paul Republicans who voted against it.

Strike 2: McCain said he was only participating in the debate because passage of the bailout bill was imminent.   Passage was not imminent.

Strike 3: Monday morning McCain claimed credit for the bill...  It didn't pass.

Obama didn't come up looking much better since he has backed the bailout bill (with strong reservations about its current form).  However, he did not pull stunts such as "suspending" his campaign or swinging wildly as McCain is doing today.  

Add to that a tie, at best, during the debate that was supposed to be John McCain's strength and you may very well be witnessing a major meltdown.

McCain Calls Terrorists Freedom Fighters

Something which I myself did not notice during the debate, but Radley Balko has pointed out is that during the debate, McCain made the following remark:

First of all, I won’t repeat the mistake that I regret enormously, and that is, after we were able to help the Afghan freedom fighters and drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, we basically washed our hands of the region.

And the result over time was the Taliban, Al Qaida, and a lot of the difficulties we are facing today. So we can’t ignore those lessons of history.

These "freedom fighters" included Osama and the Taliban.  While it is true that we left them hanging around with a lot of guns, and now we don't quite have peace in the region.  

It is also true that at the time they were fighting for their freedom, something that can be said of many groups that are also called terrorists.  I'm not here to pass judgment on where freedom fighters end and terrorists begin, but you can bet your ass if Barack Obama had made that comment Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly would be up in arms.

Obama-Palin?

Yesterday Palin basically endorsed Obama's stance on going into Pakistan, if necessary.

Today the McCain campaign retracted her comments.

Do I need to even state again how much of a complete disaster she is for the republican ticket?