Cornerite Charlotte Hays, last seen here two days ago, striving for absolute stupid, comes a little closer to her goal today. Brushing off news that the McCain camp has systematically lied about the reasons for Obama’s cancellation of his visit to Landsthal Hospital, our plucky little numbskull opines:

“McCain’s Charge against Obama Lacks Evidence” is the headline in today’s Washington Post story on Obama’s not visiting wounded soldiers in Germany. It is interesting reading: Obama’s inconsistent reasons for not going are as lacking in supporting evidence as McCain’s assertion. One thing is certain — he did cancel the trip. We don’t need any evidence of that and it is damning in and of itself. Whatever the rationale.

Because, you see, if you’re an idiot it makes no difference whether the visit was cancelled to avoid using wounded soldiers as props for a political campaign, or whether the visit was cancelled because it wasn’t possible to intentionally use wounded vets as photo props for a political compaign.

In the same sense that if you shove somebody, it doesn’t matter whether you shove him down onto the tracks in front of an onrushing subway train, or if you shove him out of the path of an oncoming big rig. The important thing is you shoved him, whatever the rationale.

Via Sadly, No! we learn that Dan Riehl is wondering if the very slight possibility one of his ancestors may have spent a portion of his life as an indentured servant doesn’t equate to the same harm done to generations of african slaves whose progeny toiled in institutional and absolute slavery before, after emancipation, enduring another century of systematic legal discrimination and social obloquy.

The first “American” slaves weren’t black, they were white and usually from Europe. Shouldn’t we be given special credit for being first and all that?

The answer, of course, is no. And if Dan’s putative ancestor had the kind of intellectual deficits Dan himself exhibits with regularity, perhaps the reason he was freed from his indenture is because he was too fucking stupid to of any use.

Glenn Greenwald reports, you decide.

“McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence” = “John McCain is Lying his ass off”

McCain’s latest attack ad accuses Obama of trying to turn a visit to troops into a media circus — despite the fact that Obama planned to visit troops in Germany unaccompanied by reporters, cameras, or campaign staff. So how does the press report the untruthfulness of McCain’s scurrilous attacks?

McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence

For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.

The essence of McCain’s allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. “I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers,” McCain said Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.

“Absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in an e-mail after McCain’s comments to Larry King.

There’s plenty of evidence, however — the problem is the evidence all points to the fact that McCain is lying and — like his honorless predecessor — is using the troops as political pawns. Even after the “lack of evidence” to support the allegation, i.e., the falsity of McCain’s attack, has become clear, the word from the McCain camp is:

McCain’s advisers said they do not intend to back down from the charge, believing it an effective way to create a “narrative” about what they say is Obama’s indifference toward the military.

Got that? Johnny McStraightalk’s campaign believes that lying to the American People is an effective way to create a narrative.

At least the New York Times is starting to notice:

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain confuses opposition to an unnecessary war with a lack of spine and an unwillingness to use force when the nation is truly in danger. Obviously, Mr. Obama is untested as a commander in chief and his trip was intended to reassure voters. But Mr. McCain is as untested in this area as Mr. Obama, and it is hard to imagine a worse role model than the one Mr. McCain seems to be adopting: President Bush.

Many voters are wondering whether a McCain presidency would be an extension of Mr. Bush’s two disastrous terms. If the way Mr. McCain is running his campaign these days is an indication, Americans don’t have to wait until next January for the answer to that one.

Though early in the campaign, McCain is reaching the very lows Bush strived for, in terms of loathesomeness and dishonesty. I wonder how McCain’s illegitimate mulatto love child feels about that?

My huge mastiffs didn’t eat their breakfasts this morning, which usually means that either they’ve devoured an intruder who strayed into my gated mountaintop fortress, or something else spooked them out of their appetite.

Then the earthquake. One dog is still hiding under the table. And the other still hasn’t touched his breakfast. Perhaps it was the fore and after shocks.

Cornerite Charlotte Hays siezes upon a variant of the flypaper theory, as if it were some kind of brilliant new insight instead of a pathetic and long-discredited excuse.

Even Rudyard Kipling thought Afghanistan was a hellish place to fight. So why is Obama itching to fight al-Qaeda there rather than Iraq? Yes, we did draw the bloody monsters to Iraq, but, as it turns out, it was a better place to fight them. But the Left dogmatically insists that it is better to confront al-Qaeda in Afghanistan’s fastness, a terrain that gives al-Qaeda a huge advantage. Such is their antipathy to George Bush and (as is now more certain than ever after Obama’s Berlin rally) the use of American power.

It’s not antipathy to Bush as this simpleton suggests, but rather the fact that our presence in Iraq has enabled al Qaeda to recruit more and different sources and recruit native Iraqis to fight in Iraq without impairing in the slightest their ability to recruit from their untouched bases in Afghanistan. Iraq is more accessible than Afghanistan or Waziristan to potential jihadist recruits, and as our national intelligence estimates stated, the occupation of Iraq has provided al Qaeda affiliated groups with a cause and motivation for jihadist recruits. A larger recruiting bases and more fodder for al Qaeda recruiters is not a good thing.

An analogy would be a patient with an infected lung deliberately causing another infection in his arm, so he could fight the infection there since it is, after all, easier to reach. Just like Iraq.

Shorter Verbatim Bill Kristol:

Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.

Kristol engages is a classic logical fallacy: False Dilemma.

A false dilemma occurs when a limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options.

Here, Kristol implicitly postulates between the options of disappointment or surprises. With characteristic obtuseness, our neocon twit fails to account for a third obvious possiblity — an outcome that is both a surprise and a disappointment.

Like, say, finding out that the notion that Shia may have difficulty coexisting Sunnis in Iraq and violent sectarian struggle could break out in that country is not merely “pop sociology.” Presumably, even to an immoral asshole like Kristol that would be both a disappointment and a surprise — even if the disappointment, from Kristol’s standpoint, stems more from the fact he was made to look like a fucking imbecile than the tens of thousands of lives wiped out by his and his fellow neoconservatives’ miscalculation.

Especially poignant because deconstructing Kristol, he’s referring to an Obama victory as the “disappointment” and a McCain win as a “surprise.”

The ever-stupendous Confederate Yankee (shorter version):

Even though the murderer called himself a “confederate” and wrote a four page letter saying he was motivated by his hatred of liberals and gays, since the killing was in a church we can still pretend the murder has nothing to do with the intolerance and prejudice I and other Rightwing nutjobs embrace. And, btw, if any of you are harboring similar thoughts, make sure your shotgun’s magazine is filled to capacity.

I just don’t know how Gomer missed the fact that killer had an arrest in California, and avoided the inevitable conclusion that he was some kind of atheist liberal communist.

Sorry, a punchline too obvious to ignore.

BOSTON - Syndicated columnist and former “Crossfire” host Robert Novak has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and is suspending his journalistic work.

Novak issued a statement Monday saying the tumor was found Sunday after he had been rushed to Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital from Cape Cod, where he was visiting his daughter.

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist says he is suspending his journalistic work for an indefinite, “but God willing, not too lengthy period.” His statement did not say if the tumor was malignant.

I’m not burning with sympathy for Mr. Novak, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, so I’ll forego the schadenfreude. I had a friend who died from a brain tumor, and he did a lot of real crazy shit for several years before he was diagnosed. Who knows?

Hat-wearing, pants-wetting Trainwreck Media Mogul Roger El, never one to shy away from offering truly stupid opinions:

Meanwhile, Barack Obama seems to adopting a foreign policy best described as “McCain lite.”

You mean like saying his opponent’s long-announced 16 month timetable for withdrawing from Iraq sounds like “a pretty good timetable.” That is, before denying saying the word “timetable” at all, and then admitting he said it but explaining he meant something entirely different than the way it sounded. . .