No silver-tongued devil is John McCain

TPMtv: McCain Leaves Fox Speechless



Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo writes:

If you were awful enough to delight in John McCain's prebuttal speech trainwreck last night, feast your eyes on the Fox News commentators trying to decide if it was just bad or downright terrible ... (Speaking personally, this episode is one you simply do not want to miss.)

This TPM edit of Fox News coverage is ham-fisted, but then again, it was a speech even the slickest Republican spin doctors couldn't save.



James Carville has the best line (as is so often the case).







I almost felt sorry for the guy, with his weak, dyspeptic smile.



According to the pundits on Fox, one of McCain's problems are as much technological as oratorical. Somehow, despite many campaigns, McCain never got proficient with the teleprompter, that deus-ex-machina which made Ronald Reagan "the great communicator."



In re: McCain and the technology of politics, this week McCain did an about-face on warrantless wiretapping.



According to Ryan Singel at Wired, McCain, in an interview with the Boston Globe just 6 months ago, was "implicitly critical (of) Bush's five-year secret end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."



But this past Monday, according to Wired, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin "cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's." Eakin says:

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]



We do not know what lies ahead in our nation's fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States...

Those darn trial lawyers at the ACLU! According to McCain's people, they wouldn't know a Constitutional right if one bit them on the ass.