4 posts tagged “hypocrisy”

You know...I really can't wait until election season is over. I'm at a point now where I am so sick of it all that I don't even want to vote.

In any case, having drunk deeply of the Obama Koolaid, my good friend E over at Eclectablog has been doing a bang up job of chronicaling every single possible mistep of the McCain campaign and all it's "lies," so in the interests of equal reporting, I thought I'd mention some of the Obama inconsistencies that the faithful seem to miss.

Now...Obama, much like any other candidate, hates to be behind is opponent in anything. Recently, it seems he's been concerned about being behind McCain in the number of ads that are completely bullshit about his opponent, so he's upped his game and he's in the process of catching up to him. I guess he was jealous of the amount of airplay McCain was getting on Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show for his less than accurate ads.

For instance, in several up for grab states, Obama ads have erroneously suggested (my buddy would call this a lie, heh) that Mr. McCain “has stood in the way of” federal financing for stem cell research. Now while it's true that McCain did once oppose such federally supported research, he broke with the President after that one time, and has consistently supported it since in 2001.

In another commercial running in NYC on Thursday highlighting McCain’s votes against incentives for alternative energy incorrectly asserted that he supports tax breaks for “one source of energy...oil companies.”  McCain’s corporate tax proposal would cover all companies...including those developing energy generation techniques.

In yet another tv spot playing all over Florida, and other states with high concentrations of retirees, reminds everyone that McCain supported the adminstrations failed plan of Social Security privitazation, accounts misleadingly clamed that McCain supported “cutting benefits in half..." a claim that doesn't hold up too well once an analysis of  Bush’s plan is done, which shows that such a cut would have applied only to upper-income Americans retiring in the year 2075. Good scare tactic though...sounds like something the GOP would do in their campaign ads.

Then of course there's the Spanish language ad that's been running for the last few weeks, and is still running, that links the McCain's support of Bush's rather sweeping immigration overhaul, to those of Rush Limbaugh. The ad implies Limbaugh is a close “Republican friend,”  of McCain, and goes on to quote Limbaugh calling Mexicans “stupid and unqualified.” The truth is that the quote was cherry-picked from a completely different context, and as much of a tool Mr. Limbaugh is, he never said it in the way it's been implied.The truth of it is that Limbaugh is a harsh critic of the Bush plan and, frequently, of McCain in general...and they don't get along very well.

The NYT, of all places, wrote a piece on this penchant for less than accurate campaign ads yesterday in the political section. From that piece:

In all, Mr. Obama has released at least five commercials that have been criticized as misleading or untruthful against Mr. McCain’s positions in the past two weeks. Mr. Obama drew complaints from many of the independent fact-checking groups and editorial writers who just two weeks ago were criticizing Mr. McCain for producing a large share of this year’s untruthful spots (“Pants on Fire,” the fact-checking Web site PolitiFact.com wrote of Mr. Obama’s advertisement invoking Mr. Limbaugh; “False!” FactCheck.org said of his commercial on Social Security.)

Never let it be said that Obama wasn't good at playing catch up ;)

peace,
Aielman 

So...I'm sure everyone's seen the cute little ads by Apple in the "I'm a PC" series with Justin Long of movie fame playing the Mac. They're pretty good copy.  Good enough that they've helped seriously propel Mac sales enough to keep the company more than just floating just above insolvency.

Now Apple makes a nice product. They're fairly innocuous and are just fine for the home user who doesn't want to have to use their brain to compute, doesn't need to use the same productivity software most of the rest of the world uses and doesn't have a need for much networking. In the business world, however, Macs are pretty much a disaster outside of small design shops. They suck at networking in large environments...they don't interact well with the Active Directory used by Windows, or other LDAP based directory services that between the two of them are in use by almost every medium to large scale business. They require a different infrastructure for software and patch delivery and different anti-virus, as well as proprietary networking equipment for wireless connectivity. And they don't use business aps well unless you use parallels, and even then they can be iffy. Apple doesn't make a server worth a damn, and doesn't have a directory service so you can't make an all Apple shop to keep cost and complexity down.

All in all, they're a nice toy that can emulate a PC, but don't really do what a PC does.

Which is kind of the annoying thing about the ads by Apple, especially for an IT profession like myself who works with tens of thousands of computers on a daily basis. Because they imply that the Mac does replace the PC, and infact they infer that the PC doesn't work as well as the apple. That it's just a substandard device...which is patently ridiculous.

In any case...the cute little ads have run unopposed for a couple of years now. But that is about to change.

Microsoft has decided it's time to "tear down the walls for a better view", as they put it...and they've devised a series of their own cute ads to highlight the PC and Microsoft's products. There have been a couple of new ones with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates recently...and now there's a new one which will be out this week.

Check it out...

Not bad for the not so hip kids from Redmond.

peace,
Aielman 

Ok...so let me get this right. Accusations about Dr Wright and Reverend Pfleger, and Obama's relationship with those men or the Trinity church were pointless and ridiculous. There was no link either men's beliefs or their churches, and that of Obama. It was just smoke and mirrors personal attacks, and after 20 years of attending the church and praising the pastor as his personal mentor, none of Wright's behavior tainted Obama. Nor did the large earmarks and donations that Obama arranged for Pfleger. This is the position of the left after much broohaha during the primaries, is it not?

So if that's true, then how hypocritical is it for the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan to do an articles about Palin's church and it's influence on her? I know, I know...as my friend E would say, "but they're not mainstream media!"

Ok...you got me...they're not. They're more like the off broadway of mainstream media. Quasi mainstream. They are both featured in mainstream stories and quoted often enough to qualify.

And granted...as Sullivan says, there's some karmic turnabout going on here. But what else would you call it if you do the very same thing that your enemy does, after you cry foul when he does it?

I guess I could dig out the thesaurus and look up a word...but what's the point. It will still mean the same thing as Hypocrisy.

Police arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures, on a public sidewalk, of senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit.

Earlier, Police used pepper spray and batons on peaceful protestors.

Those bastard jackbooted republican thugs.

This kind of thing would never happen at the DNC. All those peace loving democrats, who are going to change the world with Obama at the helm, would never seek to encroach on freedom of speach or freedom of the press right? I mean, this kind of thing only happens at Republican events, surely. 

peace,
Aielman