by Todd Beeton, Wed Oct 15, 2008 at 08:24:04 PM EDT
Bye bye women. Hell, by the end of the debate, even my Republican mother emailed me to mock him.
This is a moment, as many have said before, that John McCain will come to regret.
Tags: John McCain, presidential debate (all tags)
Yes, let's us hear from those who say Roe isn't important in this election...
I think it just got important...
That was just so callous and unbelievably dismissive.
To say that the scare-quoted "'health' of the mother" had "been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything'" and then go on to equate it with extremism ... I can't remember the last time something that one of these heavily prepped Republicans said made me so angry. They're usually briefed on how to at least hide their contempt for women and our well-being.
"Health of the mother"..."all retarded kids are the same"
Let me tell ya, mother's of special needs children are NOT going to be happy with his "Sarah Palin knows more about Autism than most" remark. Not only is that in itself insulting, her child has Downs Syndrome--having a nephew with Autism does not make one an "expert."
The woman is just a vessel, the baby is the point...
Kind of a 9th century view, but they are still stuck in it...
That's going to kill McCain, when we remember the moments, its
I'm not Bush
Joe the Plumber..
And considering the life of the mother is an extremist view...
Any woman that votes for McCain hates her gender.
They think Joe the plumber is going to be a winning strategy. These guys are a joke.
McCain couldn't have given a worse answer to the abortion segment; he sounded like an evasive evangelical.
I was hoping Obama would pounce on McCain's "Joe, I want you to keep your wealth, you spread it around" line to segue over to the economy. Something along the lines of "neither Joe nor anyone else will have any wealth to spread around if the economy continues on its present course"...
Strangely, the focus group "squiggles" didn't go below the neutral point during that.
In journalism, we call them "sneer quotes." McCain's wiggles were a good example of a sneer quote.
Air quotes.
He used air quotes. Jesus Christ, he makes Bob Dole look like JFK.
btw, has anyone else noticed how BEAUTIFULLY troll free things have been lately?
That the "health of the mother" exception has been stretched some. That being said, there is a way to make that point without taking a hot, steaming dump all over good people with valid concerns.
I'll take a little risk and say his underlying point, through a legislative lens, wasn't entirely bankrupt (as a criticism, not as a cure!). He just managed to mangle that criticism and maul himself in the process. It'll cost him.
And it should. Dangerous and inflammatory points should not be made flippantly and off the cuff. That remark will play well with their base and precisely NOBODY else.
I think most people would rather the "health" of the mother be incorrectly applied in some cases than have women die because McCain and Palin value future Christian warriors more than current mothers.
This is about how I saw it too. I see the stretching too. But, regardless of however valid the point was, he did a horrible job of expressing it. He should've agreed with "health of the mother" first, and clearly -- then chiseled out a bit of ground where he thought things were stretched.
Instead he managed to pretty much say that, because it's been stretched, we should just give up on it entirely and to heck with the health of the mother.
It's even going to tank with part of the base. They won't suddenly vote for Obama, but even part of the base, even the ones who won't go for the rape and incest exception, still care about the health of the mother.
Anyone pick up McCain's 3rd-base coach signal when he uttered the phrase "tragedy at Dallas"?
For McCain, the significance of the Kennedy assassination was that it prevented what would have been the great Kennedy-Goldwater townhalls.
As the Maverick was blaming his own negative ads and terroristic crowds on Obama's failure to engage in a series of townhalls, McCain brought up Kennedy and Goldwater's fabled agreement to tour the country (yay!) and have townhall debates in the run-up to the '64 election (Kennedy would probably have left Goldwater hanging, IMO).
When he got to the phrase, "tragedy at Dallas," McCain looked down, raised his hand to his face, pinched his nose, then lowered his hand. It was as if he was telegraphing that "tragedy at Dallas" was an empty phrase. I wish I had the video, but I don't. It was creepy.
Eh. I think McCain's just an increasingly poor speaker (seriously, he's gotten less lucid just during this campaign -- not an age slam, I think he's just tired).
There's a lot of bad things to say about McCain; I think he'd be a worse President than Bush, which six months ago I thought was ridiculous. But I don't think he was intentionally making light of the assassination, nor saying that the tragedy was just the loss of the townhalls. It just came out poorly.
Campaigning, as Bush might say, is hard work, and even a much younger person might get a bit worn out over time.
But by all accounts, the Presidency isn't much easier. Whether it's the toll of the Presidential campaign that has made him less lucid, or other health factors that have done so (and I agree that he IS distinctly less clear and lucid than he was two years ago), then he's just not healthy enough to be President.
And putting a ditzy, sexy babe in the Oval Office might be a funny movie premise, but it would be pretty awful in real life.
Barack Obama won by being smooth jazz - boring but soothing. http://womenartmoney.blogspot.com/2008/1 0/barack-obama-is-smooth-jazz-boring-but .html
Yeh right - (liberal) women are getting pregnant just so they can have the pleasure of an abortion. Do McCain et al ever frame any issue honestly? Are they for any women's rights?
Obama has discussed the complexities of the issue in detail many times, and very few people dispute that we have to be careful what we define as "health of the woman," but McCain, because he really doesn't like women all that much, has so little credibility or interest talking about the subject that he comes across as an arrogant prick.
Interestingly enough, he is, in fact, an arrogant prick. So it works out.
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myDD - skin
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