Blustery rows between potential White House foes senators John McCain and Barack Obama, more typical of an election’s frenzied last days than its opening shots, may augur a rancorous slog through to November.
Despite both pledging to elevate the tone of US politics, the senators are trading pithy personal jibes, as suspense ebbs from Obama’s marathon Democratic race with Senator Hillary Clinton and eyes turn towards a general election.
McCain is painting Obama as naive, weak and dangerous, arguing he is an opportunist whose poetic rhetoric masks inexperience.
PHOTO: AFP
Obama’s offensive so far is encapsulated by one of his new attack lines: “John McCain has decided to run for [President] George [W.] Bush’s third term.”
While there is mutual respect between Washington veterans Clinton and McCain, it is equally clear there is already festering antipathy between McCain and Obama.
The 46-year-old Illinois lawmaker seems to get under the 71-year-old Republican’s skin.
“For a young man with very little experience, he has done very well,” McCain sarcastically told supporters in Florida last week.
The Arizona senator is already attacking Obama and his ideas, including his offer to talk to the leaders of US foes, as a dangerous risk in a world thick with threats.
In one recent swipe, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responded to Obama’s idea for an easing of restrictions on contacts between Americans and Cubans as “weak” and “reckless.”
Stressing Obama’s inexperience is also a veiled way for McCain, 72, to defuse the age question.
McCain is also taking potshots at Obama’s character and ridiculing his brand of “new” politics.
He hammered Obama this week after the Illinois senator criticized his stand on a veterans benefits bill.
“It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of,” McCain said.
Obama’s strikes have been less personal but still mocking.
He jokes that McCain’s signature bus, the Straight Talk Express, has taken a diversion — and has provoked McCain by painting him as a neophyte on economics.
Obama has also sought to tie McCain to Bush in foreign policy, saying his fellow senator would be happy to wage a 100-year war in Iraq.
The attack is no less effective for being a selective use of McCain’s words. When he made the infamous remark, McCain seemed to be talking about a long-term peacekeeping mission, not a war.
Obama has also subtly referred to his age, talking about how admiring he is of the Arizona’s senator’s “half-century” of service to the US.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS