[Peace-discuss] Fear McCain…

[E. Wayne Johnson]

This dilemma -
which of the two mainstream candidates
for head warmonger is the more abominable
or which one the more macabre,
is a bit like the plight of the
unfortunate fellow submerged to his chin
in a vat of some awful and smelly semifluid
forced to decide whether or not to duck
if a bucketful of something different
but similarly vile is flung at him.



Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> Paul Street's commentary on McCain and implicitly those (among us) who 
> discount the important differences between him and Obama. I think Paul 
> Street, no admirer of Obama, hits the nail on the head.
>
> *Fear McCain*
>
> Oct 12, 2008 By *Paul Street*
>
> The thought of [John McCain] being president sends a cold chill down 
> my spine.
>
> ---United States Senator Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi)
>
>
> According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, some voters in 
> the critical political battleground state of Pennsylvania are leaning 
> towards Barack Obama because economic matters are trumping candidate 
> "character" in determining their choices in the presidential election.
>
> If "the economy" hadn't become the overwhelming issue, the Tribune 
> reports, these voters would be going with John McCain because of his 
> supposed superior personal qualities.
>
> The voters are worried about Obama's moral fiber because of his past 
> connections to such supposed moral monsters as the black pastor 
> Jeremiah Wright and the former SDS Weatherman-turned education 
> professor and charter school advocate Bill Ayers.
>
> The Tribune story is titled "Character Counts; Economy Counts More" 
> (J. Tankersley and C. Parsons, Chicago Tribune, October 9, 2008, 
> sec.1, p. 13). 
>
> While I am no particular fan of Obama's personality and neoliberal 
> politics, I find the Tribune article's angle and title distressing.  I 
> do not expect mainstream voters or reporters to follow me (a left 
> Marxist since age 18) in feeling little shock at the crimes of Ayers 
> (decades ago) and in having little problem with the rhetoric of 
> Wright. I get it that most Americans are in no position --- morally, 
> ideologically, or in terms of information received --- to share my 
> understandings of why Ayers briefly became a (rather hapless) 
> ultra-left "terrorist" and why Rev. Wright is angry at U.S. policies 
> (and crimes) past and present. 
>
> What is more difficult for me to swallow is that anybody could 
> identify John McCain with anything remotely connected to positive 
> moral character.  The candidate atop the current malicious Republican 
> presidential campaign --- increasingly reduced to the preposterous 
> claim that Obama is some sort of "far left" enemy of "American" values 
> and institutions (my recently released book "Barack Obama and the 
> Future of American Politics" is an antidote to that charge) --- is a 
> characterological catastrophe. 
>
> As Tim Dickinson notes in a recent Rolling Stone profile of McCain, 
> the Republican presidential contender has demonstrated a shocking lack 
> of principle with his recent policy contortions.  McCain's campaign 
> positions have shifted drastically to the hard right on the Bush tax 
> cuts (for the rich), court appointments, oil drilling, the religious 
> right, and torture.  Having once found it politically useful to oppose 
> all of these things, McCain now embraces them. 
>
> The supposed centrist "maverick's" swing to the far right has found 
> grotesque expression in his running-mate selection --- a viciously 
> stupid evangelical hit lady whose only qualification for office is her 
> ability to energize the GOP's white-nationalist messianic-militarist 
> and  pseudo-Christian base.    
>
> "Straight Talk" McCain has recently undertaken politically calculated 
> rightward leaps on immigration/border policy, gay marriage, lobbyist 
> power, and "talking to our enemies."  He has shifted positions on 
> financial regulation and the AIG nationalization in response to 
> financial capitalism's deepening crisis.
>
> In detailing McCain's recent wild and rightward policy swings, 
> Dickinson quotes numerous Republicans who told him that the 
> candidate's only real concern is personal advancement.  Former 
> Republican U.S. Senator Lincoln Chaffee and McCain were once the only 
> two Republicans to vote against Bush's tax cuts.  He joined with a 
> differently calculating McCain in opposition to oil drilling in the 
> Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to George W. Bush's most 
> reactionary court appointments. Now Chaffee says that "John has made a 
> pact with the devil."
>
> Besides being monumentally inconsistent and unprincipled, McCain is a 
> loose cannon who would pose grave risks on the global stage if he were 
> to reach the White House.  By Dickinson's account:
>
> "At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say 
> that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in 
> chief.  Bob Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said 
> that McCain's 'temperament would place this country at risk in 
> international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger.  In my mind, 
> it should disqualify him.' Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he 
> doesn't 'want this guy anywhere near a trigger.' And Sen. Thad Cochran 
> of Mississippi weighed in that 'the thought of his being president 
> sends a cold chill down my spine.  He is erratic.  He is hotheaded'" 
> (T. Dickinson, "Make-Believe Maverick," Rolling Stone, October 16, 
> 2008, p. 70).
>
> Along with being perceived as dangerously selfish and reckless by a 
> number of leading Republicans, McCain appears to be something of a 
> vicious bastard.  He cussed his wife out in the vilest terms 
> imaginable in front of three reporters in 1992. 
>
> He joked at a 1998 GOP fundraiser about the "ugliness" of Chelsea 
> Clinton, attributing her physical appearance to the fact that the 
> lesbian Attorney General Janet Reno was "her father."
>
>  In April of 2007, McCain responded to a voter's foreign policy 
> question by singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" to the tune of 
> the old Beach Boy's tune "Barbara Anne."
>
> It's all very consistent, Dickinson shows, with McCain's pampered 
> youth as the legendarily irresponsible, boorish, and stupid son and 
> grandson of four star admirals in the U.S. Navy. After graduating 
> 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy, McCain became a 
> notorious party-boy who repeatedly crashed Navy planes.  Any flier 
> without McCain's would have lost his wings.
>
> McCain was able to achieve notoriety and build a political career 
> around the claim to be a "war hero" because he managed to get shot 
> down while bombing the civilian infrastructure of North Vietnam.  
> Contrary to his carefully cultivated myth of special and holy 
> "sacrifice for country," McCain received favorable treatment by 
> informing his Vietnamese captors the he was the son of a top U.S. 
> military official (Admiral McCain head of the U.S. assault on Vietnam 
> by the early 1970s). He divulged military information (the name of his 
> ship of origin and the target of his assault) other American POW's 
> refused to release under torture.
>
> McCain's subsequent career and highlights include:
>
> * The vicious abandonment and divorce of his first wife after she 
> suffered a crippling car accident and the 42-year-old McCain became 
> smitten with his future wife - the 24-year-old former USC cheerleader 
> Cindy Hensley, a wealthy Budweiser heiress.
>
> * Using his position as the Navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate to 
> secretly negotiate (against the wishes of the Secretary of the Navy) 
> an egregious pork project - the replacement of the aging aircraft 
> carrier "The Midway."
>
> * Voting in the U.S. Senate against the Martin Luther King holiday.
>
> * Voting to confirm the arch-rightist Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme 
> Court.
>
> * Calling for the abolition of the U.S. Departments of Energy and 
> Education.
>
> * Championing a bill that eliminated catastrophic health insurance for 
> senior citizens.
>
> * Intervening along with four other senators in 1987 to prevent 
> federal regulators from investigating Lincoln Savings and Loan, a 
> corrupt institution owned by McCain's leading contributor and friend 
> Charlie Keating.  The S&L collapsed two years later under the weight 
> of Keating's corrupt real estate dealings, costing U.S. taxpayers $3.4 
> billion and defrauding 20,000 holders of Keating's junk bonds.
>
> In the late 1990s, Dickinson shows, McCain dropped his initial 
> post-Vietnam reluctance to support aggressive U.S. wars and underwent 
> a dramatic "neocon makeover."  McCain's arch-militaristic conversion 
> was consistent with his initial claims that "the liberal media" had 
> undermined the "national will" and therefore cost noble America a "war 
> it should have won" in Vietnam. 
>
> McCain turned into such a "bellicose hawk" that he went beyond Dick 
> Cheney in "spreading bogus intelligence" in advance support of George 
> W. Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq. 
>
> McCain's hyper-militarism combines with the sense that he is a loose 
> cannon to prevent top Republican generals like Brent Scowcroft and 
> Colin Powell from endorsing his candidacy.
>
> For whatever reason, Dickinson does not mention McCain's likely strong 
> connection to recent reckless U.S.-imperial provocations of resurgent 
> and nuclear-armed Russia.  Dickinson might also have mentioned the 
> Arizona senator's inflammatory call for the formation of a U.S-led 
> "League of Democracies" to (presumably) replace the United Nations - a 
> body from which McCain would ban Russia and China.
>  
> It is common among left commentators - the present writer included - 
> to criticize dominant U.S. political culture's tendency to privilege 
> candidate character and "qualities" over substantive matters of policy 
> and ideology. America's quadrennial candidate-centered 
> corporate-crafted  "electoral extravaganzas" (Noam Chomsky's term) 
> tend to cloak the fundamental corporate and imperial consensus between 
> reigning parties and politicians, focusing voters on superficial 
> differences of candidate style instead of the fact that both of the 
> nation's dominant political parties are well to the right of the 
> populace on numerous key issues.  The current election year is no 
> exception.
>
> Still, "character counts" when it comes to who is going to hold what 
> is still the most powerful single office on Earth - the U.S. 
> presidency.  The vicious, stupid, unprincipled, and reckless John 
> McCain is morally, mentally, and physically ill-suited for that job in 
> ways that must be made abundantly clear to as many voters as possible 
> over the next three weeks.  It should be emphasized that the 
> 72-year-old cancer (Melanoma)-patient McCain - the infamously 
> "hotheaded" son of a father and grandfather who both died from sudden 
> heart attacks (at ages 62 and 71 respectively) - could very well keel 
> over dead the day of his possible inauguration, bringing us to the 
> unthinkable brink of a Palin administration. 
>
> If you live in a contested state, I suggest that you smell with 
> supreme fear what McCain and Palin are cooking and vote accordingly. 
> This ain't just Democratic Coke versus Republican Pepsi, comrade: it's 
> Coke versus Crack.
>
>
> Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com <mailto:paulstreet99 at yahoo.com>), 
> a writer and speaker based in Iowa City, IA, His latest book is Barack 
> Obama and the Future of American Politics, order at 
> www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987 
> <http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987>
>
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>
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