By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 08:22 PM
 Welp, good ol’ John “stupid friend with a wrench” McCain parachuted into Washington to, uh, ‘help’ the economic situation. You might remember that earlier today we were talking about how Congress reached an agreement? Surprise, now they’ve un-agreed.
Democrats complained of being “blindsided” by a new conservative alternative to the plan first put forward by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. And the outcome casts doubt on the ability of Congress to move quickly on the matter, even after leaders of House and Senate banking committees reached a bipartisan agreement Thursday on the framework for legislation authorizing the massive government intervention.
It was McCain who urged President Bush to call the White House meeting attended by House and Senate leaders as well as Obama, his Democratic rival. But the candidates left without commenting to reporters outside, and the whole sequence of events confirmed Treasury’s fears about inserting presidential politics into what were already difficult negotiations.
…
“McCain and the House Republicans are undercutting the Paulson plan, talking about a wholly different approach,” Frank said prior to the meeting. “This is the presidential campaign of John McCain undermining what Hank Paulson tells us is essential for the country.”
To summarize: Congress nears deal, saying they can put it to a vote early next week. McCain drops in, suddenly there’s friction. McCain proposes something totally different from what was originally almost-agreed upon and starts dragging Republicans with him. Negotiations start crumbling and we’re moving back toward square one. Prior to the meeting, two GOP Senators had thought the deal was coming along just fine. Now there’s a roadblock.
What’s hilarious (meaning sad) is that McCain’s amazing talent to cock up what was originally a nice bipartisan agreement by injecting his presidential campaign into things could probably provide Obama with a hell of a lot of ammunition for the debate.
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 04:54 PM
 I’m tempted to make a section dedicated solely to Tucker Bounds. He provides such a wealth of stupid quotes I’m starting to wonder if we’re dealing with a really elaborate piece of performance art entitled “Worst Campaign Staffer Imaginable”.
Today’s piece is called “Tucker Bounds Claims Bailout Agreement is Thanks to McCain”:
Before John McCain suspended his campaign yesterday, the situation that we’re looking at today looked very different then. After he showed leadership and called for bipartisanship, for us to partisanship aside and tackle this solution head on, here we are. And we’re going into a debate, I think we’re going there strong.
Let me translate, because that statement is rather thickly coded in Asshole. What Bounds is claiming is simply by announcing that he’s taking charge, Congress was suddenly inspired to get things done. That’s some kinda bizarre version of clairvoyance that is, actually, really useful in a campaign. Bounds can read minds and knows exactly why Congress was able to reach an agreement.
Of course, I could be less charitable and say that Congress freaked out upon hearing that McCain was coming in to muck the whole thing up with photo ops and grandstanding, so they quickly patched everything together. Like when your retarded friend hears your car is busted and comes over to help, you hurry to fix it before he gets there and makes it worse.
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 04:46 PM
So I missed this one, but on Tuesday McCain said he hadn’t had a chance to read Paulson’s plan.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnsNOEgp-_o
Here’s the thing, though. Paulson’s plan is so goddamn short McCain could have read it while sitting on the crapper, and it was published on the 20th. He could have had someone read it to him over the phone, one page per day, and had a full day to think it over before the interview on Tuesday.
If McCain can’t be bothered in three days to read a two page plan, how well can he possibly lead?
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 02:35 PM
 One of the hallmarks of McCain’s campaign thus far (and equally so Bush’s two campaigns in 2000 and 2004) was that they prey on the uninformed. When a poll comes out showing that 53% of Americans think they fall into the 1% that will get higher taxes under Obama’s plan, McCain doesn’t correct them.
That’s really the only way I can explain his latest “plan”. There’s a rumor going around that “top Democrats” are “concerned” that McCain’s going to fly to Washington for the sole purpose of voting against the bailout package.
On its surface, it seems like a shrewd plan. What’s more maverick-y than voting against both parties and the president? After all, if the polls are to believed, somewhere around 150% of America hates the bailout and wants to set Paulson on fire or something, so he’d be voting with the people and distancing himself from a severely unpopular Washington establishment.
Problem: this is the guy who put such emphasis on delaying the debates and suspending the campaign is now going to be voting against a bipartisan bill. The plan, if in fact it’s any more than hearsay, seems grounded in hoping that people have a memory that blots out after two or three days.
But that’s just business as usual.
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 02:05 PM
On the $700bil figure for the bailout.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 01:55 PM
 This is, just like Gustav, one of those awesomely rare moments in being a liberal jerk. I get to be doubly happy because not only is a crisis being managed, but because that means a Republican has thrown himself up shit creek without a paddle.
I mentioned yesterday that the Dems were on the road to agreeing on a bailout deal, without McCain’s help. Well, they went ahead and did it finally.
Leading Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd said they had reached “fundamental agreement” on the package though he did not reveal details.
He said Congress could act in the next few days to pass a bill on the subject.
All without saviour McCain’s help. It looks like the debates can go on without any trouble, right? Or is he going to cry technicality and say “well it didn’t pass yet, so no debates!”?
By the way, more evidence on this. In the 110th Congress, Barack Obama has introduced five Banking bills, 130 total. McCain has introduced 38 bills, none of them related to banking.
By Will, on September 25th, 2008 at 10:47 AM
 Back when the Wright “scandal” was still the top story in the campaign, I remember thinking that they wouldn’t be have accused him of being crazy if he was a white preacher. Well, I was wrong.
They wouldn’t have accused him of being crazy if he was a black preacher with history with a white candidate.
Bishop Thomas Muthee is a priest and a witch hunter. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean he actually fucking hunts witches. He claims that witchcraft was the cause of “spiritual oppression” in the Kenyan town of Kiambu, and led 200 fanatics to exile an accused witch from the town
He also believes that we need God in the schools, to prevent children from worshipping Buddha and Muhammed. Again, I’m not making this up. He actually fucking said:
“We need God taking over our education system. If we have God in our schools, we will not have our kids being taught how to worship Buddha, how to worship Muhammad. We will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery.” He also preaches, “The other area is the media. We need believers in the media. We need God taking over the media in our lives.
He didn’t say this in Kenya. He didn’t say this in some crackpot church in Montana. He said this when visiting the Wasilla Assembly of God, Sarah Palin’s church. And not only was she in the audience (unlike Obama at the time of Wright’s “evil racist crazy bad man” statements), she was called up to the stage for Muthee to lead everyone to pray for her political career.
Read More ->
Back when the Wright “scandal” was still the top story in the campaign, I remember thinking that they wouldn’t be have accused him of being crazy if he was a white preacher. Well, I was wrong.
They wouldn’t have accused him of being crazy if he was a black preacher with history with a white candidate.
Bishop Thomas Muthee is a priest and a witch hunter. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean he actually fucking hunts witches. He claims that witchcraft was the cause of “spiritual oppression” in the Kenyan town of Kiambu, and led 200 fanatics to exile an accused witch from the town
He also believes that we need God in the schools, to prevent children from worshipping Buddha and Muhammed. Again, I’m not making this up. He actually fucking said:
“We need God taking over our education system. If we have God in our schools, we will not have our kids being taught how to worship Buddha, how to worship Muhammad. We will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery.” He also preaches, “The other area is the media. We need believers in the media. We need God taking over the media in our lives.
He didn’t say this in Kenya. He didn’t say this in some crackpot church in Montana. He said this when visiting the Wasilla Assembly of God, Sarah Palin’s church. And not only was she in the audience (unlike Obama at the time of Wright’s “evil racist crazy bad man” statements), she was called up to the stage for Muthee to lead everyone to pray for her political career.
Read More ->
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 07:33 AM
 Joe Klein over at TIME is calling McCain’s transparent political stunt a “gimmick”, likening it to his selection of Sarah Palin. He’s wrong, though. The Palin choice may have been a last-minute decision made in the hopes of boosting his polling numbers that turned out to be blatantly political and blew up in his face, but there’s a way better analogy here:
Hurricane Gustav.
Maybe everyone forgot about this because it happened in the B.P. (Before Palin) era, but once upon a time there was another harbinger of doom on our horizon, this one environmental instead of economic. The warnings were out and about, Gustav was going to cause havoc that would make Katrina look like a mild shower. Inconveniently enough, it was coming right before the RNC Convention.
Mighty McCain’s response? First off, delay the upcoming event. Then, fly to the scene of the disaster to “help”. As soon as the news came down the wire that a storm was coming, suddenly it was President McCain throwing politics to the wind, scrapping campaign events and dropping everything so he could get right to ground zero and solve everyone’s problem.
The gambit was the exact same. Take advantage of disaster to grandstand; announce that you’re not going to be “playing politics” while the country is in dire need; denounce the opponent for anything that sounds vaguely political; hop on a plane and slow down the process via photo ops instead of actually getting anything done.
Gustav hit land, weakly, causing some floods but nothing of the magnitude of Katrina or the GOP seemed to be preparing for. All of his politicking yielded nothing, his disaster came and went before he could really exploit it.
Now we’ve got Congressional Democrats saying that they’ve hit a breakthrough in passing the bailout deal, all without McCain’s help. Bernie Sanders even took a potshot at McCain, criticizing the photo-op that’s to come when he arrives in Washington as stagecraft that distracts from achieving any progress. It’s the same… damn… thing.
Twice in less than a month, McCain’s attempted to show he’s “above politics” by exploiting a catastrophe. Twice in less than a month, it’s blown up in his face. What we’re seeing is a John McCain that reacts frantically to a situation, shouting “batten down the hatches!!” whenever a situation comes around and announcing that Everything Else Must Be Dropped Now.
We’ve got two ways to interpret this. Either McCain is cravenly political, or we are to believe that he is incapable of juggling two issues at the same time. In the former case, you can just imagine his Cabinet and Court nominees. In the latter, how does he expect us to believe he can manage two wars, let alone the third in Iran he wants to start up?
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 07:03 AM
Since Sarah Palin is hiding from the media, has nothing to contribute to the bailout deal, and apparently can’t take over campaigning while McCain is busy… why don’t we just switch the debates and have her and Biden go on Friday? Biden won’t object, and it’s not like Palin has anything else she’s doing.
By Hanlon, on September 25th, 2008 at 12:47 AM
McCain staffer Tom Kise, on realizing he emailed talking points to the media by accident:
Fuck, tell me I didn’t send it to the wrong list.
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