Hat tip to Nicole Belle at http://crooksandliars.com/
I don't know if the McCain campaign is being unintentionally ironic or if they're just completely tone deaf to symbolism, but John McCain has agreed to be Tom Brokaw's guest for the entire hour of Meet the Press. However, McCain opted not to leave the campaign trail to do it, so he'll be speaking to Brokaw from Iowa...Waterloo, Iowa. Really? The namesake of the battle location that ended Napoleon's reign in Europe? What are his campaign advisers thinking?
A treat after the jump.
In case you needed another reminder of the character difference between the two men running for the highest office in the land:
From Rollingstone's article "Make-Believe Maverick" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
From the Guardian article "Obama as We Knew Him - Man and Boy" http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
From Margot Mifflin a friend of Obama at Occidental College, LA. in 1980. Now a journalism professor. "We'd hang out and talk about what was happening in class and who was dating whom. He goofed around with the rest of us. He was engaging and perhaps even charismatic, but I wasn't aware of him being a playboy. He was friends with women who were impressive feminists as well as people who were more socially focused. He straddled groups: the arts/literary crowd, which tended to stick together, and the political activist crowd, likewise. He belonged to both."
Rolling Stone on McCain:
Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. "If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print," says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an "immature and unprofessional reaction to slights" that is "little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy."
The Guardian on Obama:
From Rully Dasaad - a former classmate of Obama's - now a commercial photographer - at Basuki Primary School in Indonesia in 1969. "One time, there was a naughty young boy who missed Barry with the ball so he took a small stone from the playing field and threw it and hit Barry's head, which started bleeding. I remember Barry just went quiet - his mum had taught him not to fight. He was one of those kids you could tell was brought up with a lot of love and affection and so he was never angry or nasty."
Rolling Stone on McCain:
He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun.
The Guardian on Obama:
From Sen. Larry Tink a friend of Obama since they played poker and golf together at the Capitol, Springfield, Illinois in the 1990s. "If his style of poker is like how he'll run the White House I'll sleep well at night. He is very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he'd stay in the game; if he thought not he'd fold straight away. He read and played the field very well. He was serious at it."
Rolling Stone on McCain:
The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on reporters who questioned his wife's financial ties to Keating — calling them "liars" and "idiots." Predictably, the press coverage was merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. "I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied," he later wrote. "It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day." Mr. Straight Talk was born.
The Guardian on Obama:
From Larry Tribe a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, who taught Obama in 1989, and for whom Obama worked as a research assistant. "He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I've always been left with more than any other is authenticity. There isn't a fibre of phoniness about this guy."
Nuff said. Now GOTV!!!!