TV Gasbag Makes Sense!
I feel faint . . .
UPDATE III: Exit polls project that Obama will win Georgia by a landslide; on the GOP side, McCain narrowly leading Huckabee, with Romney third.
Hillary Rodham Clinton comes up dry in Georgia, while Barack Obama swims in votes.
UPDATE II: McCain scurrilously attacked Romney for the latter's comment about not wanting a letter of recommendation from Bob Dole. Thanks to Brett for bringing this to my attention. I thought Romney's comment was ungracious and unwarranted. But McCain exceeded that, by implying that Romney's attack on Dole, a World War II hero, was somehow a worse insult because of Dole's military record:
"Governor Romney's attack on Bob Dole is disgraceful, and Governor Romney should apologize. Bob Dole is a war hero who has spent his life in service to this nation and nobody has worked harder to build the Republican Party. Bob Dole deserves the respect of every American and certainly every Republican."
As I said, the attack on Dole was "ungracious". But it wasn't disgraceful. McCain's refuting criticism by wrapping himself in the flag is disgraceful.
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UPDATE: Unexpectedly, Mike Huckabee wins all 18 of West Virginia's 30 delegates at stake today. Expectedly, Romney supporter Hugh Hewitt is whining.
Today's the day we've been fixating on. It's Super Duper Tuesday, when 28 kajillion states hold their primaries to select presidential candidates. Most of the drama appears to be on the Democratic side, where Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are close to even in polls.
As the candidates made a last-minute push, a CNN?Opinion Research Corp. poll out Monday showed Obama erasing Clinton's lead among Democrats nationally. The two were in a virtual tie, with Obama at 49 percent and Clinton at 46 percent, the poll found
With a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points, that margin is too close to say which Democrat is leading.
On the GOP side, John McCain holds a strong but not insurmountable lead over Mitt Romney, and is slightly behind McCain in California. In a desperate attempt to stop McCain, Romney has been campaigning non-stop, sleeping on the floor of a plane as he made one last appearance in California. But cruelly for Romney, even a narrow win in California wouldn't help much, because delegates are now awarded proportionately. In many of the other states Romney appears likely to lose, delegates are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. And as of this date, delegates begin to speak more loudly than polls.
Romney has been getting testy lately, comparing McCain's tactics to that of Nixon's, and responding to Bob Dole's defense of McCain in a letter to Rush Limbaugh by saying Dole was the last person he'd want to write a letter on his behalf.
As for McCain, his reputation for "straight talk" has been taking a beating of late, as Matt Welch's book on McCain has gotten more notice. An article by Welch in LA Weekly says McCain's image is largely a myth.
Newspaper endorsements — many featuring errors of fact — are gaining momentum: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Daily News, The Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, and on and on.
As a direct result of his long media honeymoon, much of what we think we know about McCain is wrong. Exit-poll numbers out of the early states showed that McCain was doing especially well among primary voters who were antiwar. The numbers say something disturbing about our capacity to believe that independent antiwar voters are seriously considering a man who championed pre-emptive war three years before it ever occurred to George W. Bush, who personally told me that the U.S. share of defense spending — more than one-half of the world's total — was much too small, and who has demonstrated repeatedly these past weeks that he doesn't understand why any American would question the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq 100 years from now. After more than seven years of increasingly unpopular war, Americans look poised to nominate the most explicitly pro-interventionist presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Don't say you weren't warned.
Newspapers printing errors of fact about politicians? Say it ain't so, Matt! Unfortunately, doughty blogger Patterico has just documented another one, a bald-faced lie about President Bush that the Los Angeles Times is refusing to correct.
The L.A. Times is refusing to correct a blatant error — again.
Regular readers will remember that, on January 1, I wrote about an L.A. Times end-of-the-year political quiz that resurrected a viciously false canard: that George W. Bush “[e]rroneously said Nelson Mandela was dead.” . . .
. . . I finally heard from the Readers’ Representative today. As for my prediction, I’ll say only this: damn, I’m good. Here is her e-mail:I’m sorry, I thought I’d already responded a while ago with this note: Editors in the opinion section did not believe that the point warranted correction. They say (and I agree) that the piece was a parody, and so that reference was within the bounds of that sort of opinion piece.
Jamie Gold
Readers’ Representative
You get that? It’s a parody!
I sure did, Patterico. Jamie Gold is a parody of a Readers' Representative and the LA Times is a parody of honest journalism. Nothing we didn't already know, but it's good to see the evidence keep piling up.
Paging Sam Zell! Stop cursing and start firing the lying journalists at the LA Times. Talk to Patterico, who has been taking names.Click here to comment on this entry.
