Climate Progress reports that McCain will be opening the Clinton Global Initiative session on Water, Food and Energy.
Will CGI also have Senator Inhofe keynote on climate science, Karl Rove on ethics, and President Bush on openness in government?
CGI explains:
"C.G.I. isn’t about politics," said Matt McKenna, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton. "It’s about improving lives and solving some of the world’s most pressing problems."
Didn't one of those Nobel Prize winners on the CGI VIP list once say something about the role of functioning democracies in improving people's lives and solving problems?
(Econ Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen is famous for the claim that functioning democracies do not experience famines.)
It's hard to think of something more intimately connected to improving people's lives and solving some of the world's most pressing problems than establishing and maintaining functioning democracies.
But what is a functioning democracy? A functioning democracy depends on the public--the citizens--being informed, not misinformed, not disinformed.
John McCain is currently engaged in a war on democracy--a mis- and disinformation campaign that poses a clear and present danger to our democracy. And, needless to say, all failures in US democracy have global ramifications.
By offering McCain a platform, by lending him credibility, the Clinton Global Initiative becomes a willing ally in this war on democracy.
President Clinton, you have demonstrated you can do plenty of good outside government, outside politics. But surely your point is not that democratic government is altogether dispensable?
Lending credibility to McCain is not only a political act (although it is about politics); it's a direct attack on the American democratic process, a process strikingly close to a catastrophic tipping point.