http://www.slate.com/id/1004633/

The conclusion:

“The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990, and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett’s recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican.

In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than “poor judgment,” the committee said, and declared his actions were not “improper nor attended with gross negligence.” McCain considered the committee’s judgment to be “full exoneration,” and he contributed $112,000 (the amount raised for him by Keating) to the U.S. Treasury.”

I’d argue that the Bill Ayers associaton matters for Obama (well,it matters to me, at any rate) because it displays a fundamental facet of Obama’s character. Bill Ayers declared war on this country (in his own words) and has NEVER apologized for it or changed his views. He should have, for his activities during the 60’s/70’s and because of his refusal to apologize for them, been shunned from decent society forever. He has not been.

Obama’s working on the board of an education reform effort with him, or holding a fundraiser at his home, or even just “being a guy in the same neighborhood” with him, is, to me, EXACTLY the same as if McCain held a fundraiser at Tim McVeigh’s home, or worked on the board of an organization with the Unabomber, or talked of Eric Rudolph as “just a guy in the neighborhood”. Those things would all be unacceptable to me (and, I’d guess) to you as well.

I don’t think Obama is a terrorist because he’s worked on a board with Bill Ayers or becamse friends with him because their kids go to the same school. I DO think it’s hugely damning that Obama apparently sees nothing wrong with associating with a man like Ayers who’s never renounced his terrorist, treasonous (literally; declaring war against your own country pretty fits the definition, if anything does) past.

One thing that it made me realize is that I have a lot of trouble disconnecting rhetoric from reality; and holding conflicting ideas in my head simultaneously. I never could understand how two candidates could call each other (warmongers, nazis, terrorists, racists, etc) and claim that the other’s policies would, possibly deliberately (bankrupt the country, lead to the death of thousands of fellow citizens, surrender our freedoms to the communists/terrorists/whomever, etc)…and then the say after the election congratulate them and wish them well and promise to work with them.

I guess in that way I’m immature, because I can’t get my mind around it. I don’t understand how, on November 6, John McCain congratulates a dangerously naive, America-hating, terrorist-loving radical and works with him from his seat in the Senate; or, how Barack Obama goes back to his Senate seat and gives his congratulations to an out-of-touch, racist, erratic, slanderous old man and his unqualified, ignorant sidekick.

Words mean things. I feel like, you can’t just say these kind of things and then smile and shake hands at the end of the day. I guess that’s my problem, though.

I wish that more people had you attitude of: “Why should you hate someone who disagrees with you? And why would someone hate you for disagreeing with them?”

I really do wish that was more prevalent. But I don’t feel that it is. Maybe you had the right idea with taking a break and tuning out of politics as much as possible.

I’m also a sucker for the vendors who, as you say, make things by hand. I try whenever I can to buy things made by actual humans.

And the shows are fun, too. I hope to get there before it closes in two weeks.

I think our country is utterly fucked.

It really is like we’re living in parallel worlds. I listen to the podcast and contribute and generally have pretty similar tastes and opinions as you. But in politics, we don’t just have different views or opinions - we clearly see entirely different sets of facts, to a degree I have trouble wrapping my mind around.

Just as, I’m sure, you look at Sarah Palin and can’t imagine how anyone could honestly want her as Vice President or tihnk her in any way acceptable for the job, I look at and listen to Joe Biden and I cannot comprehend how anyone can take him seriously, or accept anything he says at face value, or honestly want him in anything resembling a leadership position.

You watch Keith Olbermann and see a voice of truth, saying things that need to be said, someone trying to save the country he loves; I see a voice of hatred and lies, far more biased than Fox News could ever imagine being, someone who, honestly, I consider to be an evil and destructive human being who despises his country (or at least any part of it that’s to the right of him).

And we’re both intelligent, educated people, who have similar tastes and interests in other spheres of life.

It scares the hell out of me. There’s so much anger and hatred on both sides, and it’s getting worse and more poisonous each day. I don’t want to lose friends, or be afraid to speak up for fear of losing them. I don’t want to hate any of my fellow citizens, or have them hate me because I have the temerity to not vote the way they do.

I think that no matter how the election turns out, things will get worse, and we will see violence. Things will get progressively uglier.

I realize there wasn’t ever some mythical happy non-partisan past where everyone got along, but in the past we didn’t have the Internet and multiple news channels feeding the partisanship 24/7, poising everyone and damaging our country every single day.

I don’t think our society can survive for much longer, and I wish I believed there was any hope. But I don’t.

At least you weren’t watching, say, “Dexter” or “Silence of the Lambs” or something when it happened - you probably wouldn’t be sleeping for a month in that case.

On a less serious note, I was over at a friend’s place one night and we were watching “The Ring” (the very creepy Japanese original, not the still creepy-but-less-so American version), and right after the teenaged girl gets the phone call telling her she’s going to die, the phone rings. We all jumped, and then just stared at the phone. Nobody had the nerve to answer it…

All elections are about narratives. This is not unique to Republicans, or to Americans generally.

The candidate who presents a better/more appealing narrative that seems to more voters to coincide both with their lives and beliefs as they see them, and the world as they’d like it to be, will win.

Obama and the Democrats do this just as surely as McCain and the Republicans do.

Just as you are frustrated and angered that more people don’t see through the McCain campaign and recognize the failures of the Republicans and the problems our nation faces, I’m frustrated that so many people don’t see through Obama and (what I see as) his lies and distortions and troublesome history.

You said it in a previous post, about partisanship. Progressives and Hard-code conservatives want a VERY different country and society from each other, and both sides are so sure of their truth and their good intentions that it’s difficult/impossible to imagine that the other side could have a point - or even that there can be an honest and decent other side in the first place.

And she never wasted $110 million in taxpayer money on a failed education “reform” project masterminded by an unrepentant terrorist whose only regret was that he didn’t set off more bombs back in the 70’s.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

In all seriousness, I don’t think the attacks on Palin are going to stick. The Democratic narrative, I think, is that (aside from the actual truth or relevance of any of the allegations/attacks) (1) with so many attacks, SOMETHING is bound to stick to her, and (2) forcing her to defend herself (and McCain to defend her) takes them off message and makes them look weak, evasive, defensive, etc.

The Republican narrative is that an out-of-control press that’s already in the tank for Obama is on an insane feeding frenzy, and they’re trying to destroy a popular, hard-working, admirable mother of five.

I honestly think that the Republican narrative is going to resonate better with voters than the Democratic one is. The press, in general, is not popular these days.

I think it’s interesting also that, besides the usual Republican complaining about media bias, all the complaining done by Hillary Clinton about sexism during the campaign, and that the press favored Obama over her, may be coming into play as well. She laid the foundation for the things that McCain and Palin are saying now to counter Obama’s attacks and the media’s questioning of Palin.

It’s kind of ironic.

I’d argue strongly against the idea that right-wing talk radio, Fox News et all killed non-partisan media. I’d argue that they themselves were a response to a mainstream media which, while it might have claimed to be nonpartisan, was anything but. From my perspective, the major networks and the big national newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post) have been to the left, and have promoted Democratic Party issues, narratives and candidates all along. I’d also say that it continues to this very day (the lack of coverage of John Edwards’ scandal, when “everyone” in the Washington circuit knew/suspected it, and while he was still running for President, and the fact that it only came out after he was out of the race - and the National Enquirer shamed the mainstream press into covering it…compared to the glee with which the press has torn into every aspect of Sarah Palin’s life as well as that of her underage children, treating every rumor and allegation and utterance by her political foes as something worthy of fornt page news).

I imagine you’d disagree.

Your larger point about partisanship troubles me in one sense; I don’t think it’s a good thing, at least not the degree and vitriol of it. You’re correct that we have blocs of society that want the country to be run radically differently, or even more, they want radically different countries altogether. We’re not disagreeing over whether the tax rate should be 25% or 31%.

These blocs see events differently to the point that they share almost no common reference point; and I can’t see how that’s good, or sustainable in the long run.

We don’t have a common culture, really. We don’t have a common history, or ethnicity or religion. We barely have a common language. And after the Cold War, we no longer have an external threat against which we could all (to varying degrees) unite against.

Thanks to the Internet and cable/satellite and Ipods (not that I want to get rid of any of these things, obviously), we don’t have to share ANYTHING.

If we can’t even agree on basic facts about the world around us (forget interpertation, I’m talking about the existence of the facts in the first place), we don’t have a sociaty that’s sustainable.

I think that’s a very bad thing. I’m not saying I want to go back to some mythical 1950’s that never actually existed where we all got along and thought the same and everything was perfect (except for the bad things which we pretended didn’t exist). But we’re in a really frightening place, in terms of what kind of society and country we are, and in terms of how we relate to our fellow citizens.

You see a “slight pro-Obama tilt”; I see a network that’s completely in the tank for Obama, with unabashed cheerleading and contempt and utter loathing for anything and anyone Republican (or even Democrat, if they dare to question Obama in any way). I see a network that’s every bit as ruthless as you see Fox News as.