John McCain blamed Barack Obama and Democrats for the failure to pass a financial rescue plan Monday. Huh? Two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the plan, the group that McCain was trying to get on board. This is the same group that scuttled the bipartisan plan that was nearing finalization last week. And the claim that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame because of her partisan speech — as boneheaded and irresponsible as it was — makes the GOP look even worse. As Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official, wrote on the National Review blog: “On one of the most important votes they will ever cast, insisting ‘the speech made me do it’ is lame and adolescent.”
But there is plenty of blame to go around, including for President Bush, who doesn’t even have clout within his own party, to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who didn’t do a good job explaining the bailout, and to Democratic and Republican leaders who were unable to deliver as many votes as expected.
The only good news is that, so far, the market is up today based in part on the hope that Congress will get its act together.
Democrats have “so successfully mocked, derided and lowered expectations for Palin in Thursday night’s VP debate that if she doesn’t drool or speak in tongues, many millions still open to persuasion will be impressed,” wrote Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times. “Al Gore’s campaign made the exact same mistake going into the 2000 debates. So all Texas Gov. George W. Bush had to do was not lose. In that sense, Democrats may have played right into a PR cul-de-sac. Biden, for instance, described Palin as merely better-looking than him. A far better communications strategy would have been to insincerely portray Palin with superlatives as a superwoman, making it harder, not easier, for her to impress. Too late now.”
Though a number of polls said that Barack Obama was the winner of Friday’s debate, John McCain’s campaign didn’t waste time announcing that McCain won. In fact, the campaign goofed and placed two Internet ads declaring McCain the winner hours before the debate even occurred. One ad featured a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declaring: “McCain won the debate — hands down.”
As the elder on the Wichita City Council from 1997 to 2005, Phil Lambke sometimes couldn’t see past his southeast-side district toward a greater good for the city at large. But you had to admire the consistency of his conservatism and his low tolerance for nonsense, such as when he called city staff members’ travel spending “loose as a goose” and a consultant’s presentation a “bunch of mush.” When he left the bench, we offered this spoof headline: “Asked for parting statement, Phil Lambke says ‘no.’” Our thoughts and prayers are with Lambke’s family, in the wake of his death Friday at age 87.
John McCain blamed Barack Obama and Democrats for the failure to pass a financial rescue plan Monday. Huh? Two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the plan, the group that McCain was trying to get on board. This is the same group that scuttled the bipartisan plan that was nearing finalization last week. And the claim that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame because of her partisan speech — as boneheaded and irresponsible as it was — makes the GOP look even worse. As Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official, wrote on the National Review blog: “On one of the most important votes they will ever cast, insisting ‘the speech made me do it’ is lame and adolescent.”
