Sarah Palin was conspicuously absent from the Sunday talk shows, the only no-show of the morning among the four nominees across both tickets. At least the campaign has booked her first interview as John McCain’s running mate for later this week with ABC News’ Charles Gibson. On Sunday, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis acted like interviews would only be done with strings attached, if at all, asking: “Why would we want to throw Sarah Palin into a cycle of piranhas called the news media that have nothing better to ask questions about than her personal life and her children? So until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment.” Media bashing plays well with Republicans, but it’s not too much to expect a would-be vice president to take questions, hard and soft, from reporters.
Democrat Jim Slattery, in a debate with Sen. Pat Roberts (in photo) at the Kansas State Fair Saturday, attacked Roberts on his role as then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the intel failures leading up to the Iraq war — a conflict that Slattery said had overstretched the military and played into Iran’s hands. “There has to be accountability when our political leaders make these kinds of terrible mistakes,” Slattery said.
Roberts gave a flippant response: Everyone was wrong about the intelligence, he said. (Not true — it’s just that the ones who raised questions and conflicting intel weren’t listened to.)
“Jim, you wouldn’t even know about this information unless the fact that I released it,” Roberts said of a long-delayed committee report on how intelligence was used to take America to war.
Slattery is right to demand a fuller accounting of Roberts’ central oversight role in this disastrous intelligence failure.
The Republican National Convention helped energize the GOP base, but it also was a bit surreal and confusing. President Bush was rarely mentioned. And the main theme was how bad it is in Washington, D.C., and how John McCain and Sarah Palin would bring needed reform. But the GOP has controlled the federal government for most of the past eight years. And many of the reforms that McCain has championed during his career have been opposed by the GOP base and most of his GOP colleagues in Congress. If voters want change, should they elect McCain and Palin or throw out the GOP?
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, was one of many Republican conventiongoers to take shots at Barack Obama’s comment that motorists could save gas by keeping their car tires properly inflated. The idea is endorsed by every energy expert in the world, but Republican leaders apparently can’t resist making jokes about it.
Tiahrt told a group at the GOP convention last week, “The price of gasoline hit $4 and we were told to inflate our tires.” But he later acknowledged that, yes, inflating tires works: “We can all conserve . . . and we can inflate our tires. That’s part of it, too.”
John McCain, too, was against tire inflation before he was for it.
Make up your minds, Republicans: Do you want Americans to keep their tires inflated or not?
Kansans are right to be concerned about the costly, endless job of renovating the Statehouse. And, true, $1.57 million sounds like a lot for a new computerized voting system in the Kansas House chamber — prompting the Kansas Taxpayers Network’s Karl Peterjohn to criticize as “excessive” the expenditure of “more than $12,000 to help each legislator throw a switch.” But even if the price seems high, the old system sounds like an embarrassment that clearly had to go: Installed in 1979 by a now-defunct company, it used vacuum tubes, broke down five times during last year’s legislative session and could only be repaired by one guy in South Dakota.
Sarah Palin was conspicuously absent from the Sunday talk shows, the only no-show of the morning among the four nominees across both tickets. At least the campaign has booked her first interview as John McCain’s running mate for later this week with ABC News’ Charles Gibson. On Sunday, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis acted like interviews would only be done with strings attached, if at all, asking: “Why would we want to throw Sarah Palin into a cycle of piranhas called the news media that have nothing better to ask questions about than her personal life and her children? So until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment.” Media bashing plays well with Republicans, but it’s not too much to expect a would-be vice president to take questions, hard and soft, from reporters.
