My image of John McCain keeps metamorphosing – from Fred Mertz to Elmer Fudd, and now to that of a semi-somnolent bullfrog on a lily pad – this latter incarnation nourished by the fact that the advisors with whom he surrounds himself are all denizens of the same pond scum.
Gunk.
When someone keeps talking jabberwocky, eventually he’ll be surrounded by slithy toves.
McCain’s chief financial guru, Phil Gramm, is the author of the Enron loophole, perpetrator of subprime mortgages, and the pompous hypocrite who pronounced today’s floundering economy a "mental recession" and its victims a "a nation of whiners." Gunk.
His principal foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, who helped to instigate McCain’s quixotic sabre-rattling over the Russian invasion of Georgia, is or was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, which has lavished at least $800,000 on Scheunemann and his partner since 2004. Gunk.
His spiritual advisor, John Hagee, wants to bomb Iran, thinks 9/11 and Katrina were God’s punishment for U.S. tolerance of gays, and is prophesying that the anti-Christ will head the European Union. Gunk.
(Investment note: short the Euro before the Second Coming.)
And now the architect of McCain’s healthcare program has said we don’t really need a healthcare program because if you don’t have insurance, you can just go to the emergency room. Gunk.
His name is John Gordon, and he’s been identified as president of the National Center for Policy Analysis – no doubt a misprint referring to the Center for Anal Paralysis.
Gordon says that, actually, there are no uninsured people in America because hospitals are barred by law from denying treatment to anyone in need of immediate care. And who determines if they need immediate care? The hospital. When is that determination made? After a wait, of course, and the wait grows longer. In the ten years to 2006, the number of emergency room visits grew by 29 million while the number of emergency rooms shrunk by 300.
Finally, it’s your turn, but you’re dead.
If you do manage to get treatment at an ER, they will subsequently send you a bill. How large a bill? I spent two days in the hospital and ran up charges of $32,000. That was insured, but last year 1,850,000 Americans were bankrupted by uninsured medical bills.
Gordon dismisses all such figures as "worthless statistics that people fling around in vacuous editorials and pointless debates." Gunk.
Among those "worthless statistics," 22,000 people died unnecessarily in 2006 for lack of insurance, according to the Urban Institute. The perpetrators are careful not to leave fingerprints, so Gordon and his ilk can’t be brought up on murder charges, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be. By the Bush/Cheney logic of fighting terror, they should be tortured or blown to bits. Or both:
Not even terrorists are killing 22,000 Americans a year.
Back to the McCain team, the above-named suspects are just a specimen bacterial culture. Two of his top-level staffers had to quit when they were outed as agents for Myanmar’s nightmarish military junta. Energy policy advisor Eric Burgeson was exposed as a lobbyist for energy companies, so McCain’s energy policy was formulated using the Cheney method.
Tom Loeffler, the campaign’s finance co-chairman, has been lobbying for Saudi Arabia and arranged a meeting for the Saudis with Senator McCain. Loeffler’s firm also shills for Airbus, which with McCain’s help beat out American rival Boeing for a huge defense department contract.
Top McCain lieutenants Rick Davis and Charlie Black (and Black’s wife) are "former" lobbyists who claim to have kicked the habit. Black and others insist they do not actively lobby the candidate or his staff while they’re working on the campaign – but while they’re working on the campaign, they ARE his staff. Gunk.
Now we all know John McCain is a nice man. Yet he has managed to assemble an entire government-in-waiting that can match the Bush/Cheney menagerie crook for crook, lie for lie, fraud for fraud, able to leap tall stories in a single bound, and fully prepared to consume the entire national budget without ever doing anything constructive for anyone but themselves.
Sleep well, America.
John McCain is ready to hit the ground wallowing.