Mccain

Re "The job she should want," Opinion, Aug. 22 Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has strongly endorsed President Bush's Iraq policy. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has advocated increasing U.S. troops in Iraq. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has said that setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops would be a mistake. A majority of respondents in recent polls have consistently said that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, that they oppose continuing the war and that they support a timetable for the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Nobody loves the Olympics like cartoonists. John Trever nailed the compulsories, mocking the meddlesome host government on the medal stand. Steve Kelley scored some belittling laughs wondering about the wunderkind. And Rob Rogers skillfully skewered the Soviets, er ... Russians, for back-stabbing a former satellite. Sarcasm, criticism and scorn -- that's the spirit, guys! Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do: McCain is lip-syncing Dubya's war strategy, Obama just missed another slam-dunk and the housing market and consumer confidence are performing some spectacular synchronized plunging.

Re "Three wrongs don't make a right," Opinion, Oct. 19 Although John McCain is probably not a racist, his campaign has clearly utilized negative racial imagery to impugn Barack Obama's character. A McCain TV ad features images of Obama and Franklin Raines -- an African American who retired four years ago as an executive at Fannie Mae -- followed by a picture of an elderly white female "victim" of a mortgage scam. The fact that Raines, who is not an Obama advisor, was chosen for the ad instead of Jim Johnson, a white Fannie Mae executive who is closely associated with Obama, indicates a choice to depict black people as unethical and white people as their victims.

Re "McCain energy record is on/off," July 1 This year's political campaign seems to be turning a major newspaper into an Agitprop organ. Recent front-page stories in The Times offer prime examples. If the Democratic candidate reverses himself over a period of days, he is "moving to the center." If the Republican candidate changes his position over a period of years, he is "flip-flopping." What kind of journalism is this? From another perspective, Obama comes across as glib and ignorant, spouting whatever today's speechwriter gives him. And McCain comes across as reasonable, responding to changing conditions by altering his view.

Re "Fighting for an ideal," editorial, Oct. 7 Thank you for supporting Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) amendment prohibiting inhumane treatment of "enemy combatants" and prisoners of war. We need to understand that the only way to fight terrorism is to maintain our humanity and appeal to the humanity of the terrorists. Torture dehumanizes the prisoner and the interrogator. McCain's amendment recognizes this principle. FRANCES ROUSE Sierra Madre I have now read the most inane statement ever to appear in a Times editorial.

Re "Primary toll," editorial, April 24 Conventional wisdom suggests that it is going to take a united Democratic front to defeat GOP Sen. John McCain in November. If true, then let me say it: Democratic Party unity is a matter of national security. How else can you explain it when the presumptive Republican nominee says the United States may need to remain in Iraq for 100 years, or that his solution to the nation's economic meltdown is to take a wait-and-see approach? McCain's positions promote national insecurity.

Re "One Vietnam Vet Who's Glad He Went," April 27: It gives me a good feeling to read Jerry Hicks' column about his good experience in Vietnam. He made friends there instead of the usual bad experience involving killings. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese don't have this experience. Because of the presence of Americans, more bombs were dropped onto their land than in World War II and more than 1 million of their dear ones are dead or missing. U.S. Sen. John McCain finds "closure" of his Vietnam experience.

Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday morning that American national security wouldn't be as strong if Republican Mitt Romney were president, based on his recent assertion that Russia is the country's “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” “If that's his prism through which he views our national security interests, I would say it would not be as strong,” Biden told David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” The vice president also questioned whether Romney would have authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden -- not because Romney wouldn't have acted the same way on the intelligence about the terrorist's location, he said, but because he wouldn't have gotten the intelligence in the first place.

Showing confidence in his rising poll numbers here in Florida, Mitt Romney hammered President Obama for proposing military spending cuts to address the spiraling budget deficit. Campaigning near the Naval Air Station Pensacola in a state with one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the country, Romney got a hand from his onetime foe Arizona Sen. John McCain, a former navy pilot who was awarded his wings in Pensacola and joked to the crowd that he did his “best to help the economy here” - devoting his entire paycheck “to cultural institutions here.” McCain struck a more serious tone when he criticized the recent budget blueprint released by the Defense Department, which would slash projected military spending by nearly half a trillion dollars.

WASHINGTON -- Both sides in Washington's budget stalemate took to the airwaves Sunday, with Republican Sen. John McCain calling on President Obama to convene a summit meeting to work out an agreement. Democrats fanned out on the TV talk shows with renewed warnings of severe economic damage from spending cuts due to begin on Friday. Republicans, meantime, maintained that the president needs to show more leadership in breaking the deadlock. “I won't put all the blame on the president of the United States, but the president leads,” McCain, who lost the 2008 election to Obama, said on CNN's “State of the Union.” “The president should be calling us over somewhere - Camp David, the White House, somewhere - and sitting us down and trying to avert these cuts.” Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire noted that Obama had assured the country, during a presidential debate last fall, that the cuts “will not happen.”  She said on CBS's “Face the Nation” that “it's time for him to lead this effort as the commander in chief of this country.” Administration officials reject the idea that Obama hasn't reached out to Republican lawmakers, pointing out that he spoke by phone with GOP leaders last week.