Yeah, I know this is 'how many houses' week. But once the smoke settles from McCain's multiple chimneys and the McMSM tires, says their yeah, but's, and returns to the CW of war mongering as an indispensable characteristic of a commander-in-chief, I just wanted to bring Georgia back up. This is my first. evar. diary. And, just to be sure I don't run afoul of the DMCA, I'll be cut & pasting from myself, from an article published in the Carolina Independent Weekly.
After a brief critique of the role of the media in the operation of our democracy...
...the corporate media, fulfilling their function like so many gulls who predigest the news before regurgitating it down the throats of the warbling masses.
To the gulls, I appeal. If a large segment of the populace can only be fed in small chunks, and if they trust the media solely for intellectual sustenance, then a huge amount of responsibility rests with the fourth estate. What they are currently feeding us, under the guise of "conventional wisdom," is a tainted and poisonous fiction.
... I go on to make some observations about McCain's only ostensible strength, his military (POW!!!!) experience, and how this implicitly makes him the safe choice in scary times. Going to the heart of the matter, I ignore McWar's views on Iraq and Afghanistan and focus, instead, on the evolving Georgian conflict. CLEARLY, if there is any area in which we can expect Senator McCain to be on sure footing, its in the area of throwback foreign policy and Cold War redux:
Sen. McCain, however, had no such compunctions, promptly denouncing Russia's retaliation well before they had escalated from "smackdown" to "shock and awe" status. Lost in most of the subsequent mass media chronicling of the return of the Evil Empire was some critical subtext:
1. Georgia had been forewarned via a face to face meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on July 9 not to respond to any real or perceived Russian provocations in the area.
2. The United States had been giving Georgia military aid and training as part of a quid pro quo for their participation as one of the painfully few nations among the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, including joint exercises July 15 at the Vaziani military base, near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
3. The United States provided such military aid and training knowing full well that Georgia had designs on forcible reincorporation of two separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which contained both Russian "peacekeepers" and holders of dual-citizenship with the Russian Federation.
4. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was very recently a paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia, and the firm he partly owns signed a $200,000 contract in April of this year to continue providing such services.
oops... I forgot another CW attribute of Senator McCain's -- his integrity and ethics. Wait, no I didn't...
If Randy Scheunemann's Georgian connections provide even a scintilla of influence over a potential President McCain's decision on whether we go to war on that country's behalf, that is the very antithesis of democracy. And yet how many Americans are aware of any of this, as the news gulls continue regurgitating the myth of McCain as the strong and forthright policy expert—and stay close-mouthed on the man who can't tell Sunni from Shia, nor keep straight the current names of ex-Eastern Bloc nations that don't have a lobbyist on his payroll? That's not neutrality. That's complicity on a catastrophic scale.
I'm sure all of you on kos know this stuff, already. But please feel free to disseminate to whatever small percentage of McCain backers and leaners who are devotees of Conventional Wisdom, and who actually think he is bringing something to the table in the realms of foreign policy or ethics.
Its critical that we don't concede ANY ground to McCain during this election cycle. He is an unacceptable candidate in every conceivable way. I say this as one who used to be mildly favorable toward McCain, or, at the very least, neutral, until I started really paying attention.
peace,
- dj.