The IOKIYAR Rule Strikes Again

If it hadn't been for John McCain's remark yesterday that it just wasn't important how many troops we keep in Iraq for how long, the media would have been out there beating the drum all day about how Obama's bad judgment made him unfit to be president because Jim Johnson got a below-market-rate loan from Countrywide Mortgage.

The McCain camp wasted no time before the loans were discovered in extrapolating an overall lack of judgment as a disqualifier -- if the candidate is a Democrat: "Jim Johnson's resignation raises serious questions about Barack Obama's judgment," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. (Tucker Bounds? TUCKER FUCKING BOUNDS??? Where do Republicans FIND guys with names like this?)

But since Barack Obama is no John Kerry, his camp fired right back: Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton fired back, saying:

"We don't need any lectures from a campaign that waited fifteen months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a 'perception problem. It's too bad their campaign is still rife with lobbyist influence and doesn't see a similar 'perception problem' with the man currently running their own vice presidential selection process, a prominent DC lobbyist whose firm has represented Exxon and a top Enron executive, or their campaign chair and John McCain's top economic adviser Carly Fiorina, who presided over thousands of layoffs at Hewlett Packard while receiving a $21 million severance package and $650,000 in mortgage assistance," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Does McCain really want to have a campaign based on judgment about associates?

Where IS Vicki Iseman, anyway?

McCain's VP Search head is Arthur Culvahouse -- yup, you guessed it: a lobbyist.

Do you REALLY want to go there, Senator McCain? All right, then, let's go there:

How about the 134 lobbyists currently active in or raising money for you?

Want to talk about Charles Black, Senator? You know, the guy paid by Angolan dictator Jonas Savimbi?

Should I go on? Or shall we just distill your own bag man connections nicely into an easy-to-understand video?

Before Johnson resigned from the search time, Barack Obama said that he doesn't vet his people's mortgages. But it's clear he has to, because the media rule of "It's OK If You're A Republican" still holds. We know this because nothing about McCain's many, many sweetheart relationships with lobbyists (where IS Vicki Iseman, anyway?) was even mentioned yesterday. Perhaps the media can't hold two ideas about a candidate at once, let alone draw a possible conclusion that it's in the interests of his lobbyist friends and contributors to keep over a hundred thousand troops in Iraq indefinitely.