John McCain and the Wrecking Crew...
Thu Jul 31, 2008 at 10:42:00 PM PDT
John McCain is a Corruptionist. He is a politician who has protected and upheld corrupt practices throughout his political career. The recent trust of his lobbyist laden and Rovian directed campaign is just the latest example from a career that has always been more hype than action, more spin than substance.
John McCain is an empty old man chosen to lead the parade in this cycle when years of lies, corruption and divisive politics are finally catching up with the Republican Party and the conservative movement. McCain got the nod because he has always been trusted to create the illusion of action, while actually doing nothing. When examined, his legislative "accomplishments" are thin and shallow—like McCain himself.
McCain and his fellow corruptionists have one path to victory. They must run the dirtiest campaign in American history. It is ugly and it will get worse. Get ready, because McCain is surrounded by the architects of the Conservative Wrecking Crew destroying our Nation and he is one of them.
To the jump...
John McCain is a unique character in American politics.
He cultivates the image of the maverick, the honest man and the decent, humble public servant. If you’ve paid any attention to his career and his record you know that his image is a carefully constructed lie.
McCain is just another Conservative warrior in service and thrall to his corporate patrons and masters. He is a bought man waiting for instructions from his patrons on where to jump, when and how high. His flip-flop on off shore drilling and the quick pay-off is a recent example of how McCain has operated all his political life.
And his lack of control over his political life is the central issue of his Campaign for the White House. A year ago he was dead man campaigning. Then he sold his campaign to K Street. Later, Rove & Company bought some shares of McCain as did members of the old Abramoff Gang like Grover Norquist. At this point, McCain is the malleable old man chosen to front their corruption and enable them to continue looting the National treasury, diminishing our Nation’s honor and the shredding of our Constitutional rights.
It is not a surprise that McCain has been revealed as a grumpy old man who is happy to help these crooks. It is what he has always done.
This campaign was always going to get dirty because that is who John McCain is.
McCain has fully embraced the worst actors in our politics over the last forty years. Rove and his acolytes run the same appeal to sleaze for McCain that they’ve always run. And pulling strings behind the curtain of the McCain campaign is Charlie Black, a man who taught Lee Atwater dirty tricks and was the force behind the endlessly sleazy campaign tactics of Jesse Helms.
Those willing to look behind the curtain will find a John McCain that has always surrounded himself with the most corrupt players on the political stage and kept himself one step ahead of exposure. His Abramoff investigation cover-up is a case in point (for details see this Diary).
As I’ve said before, John McCain is a grifter and a scoundrel. He has fully embraced the conservative movement and the Wrecking Crew it has unleashed on our Nation and the world.
It is important to focus on that Wrecking Crew because that will help us turn the 2008 Election into what it should be: a referendum on conservatism itself.
The modern conservative movement embraced by McCain, his patrons, his Party and their sycophants in the media is a scam, a lie and a failure.
We need to make the 2008 Election a Referendum on the Right—a Referendum on the effectiveness of conservatives controlling the levers of power. We need to call them out as the vile Corruptionist Party that they are.
Only by exposing the myths, lies and intentional graft of the conservative movement can we deliver a well-deserved knock-out blow. The modern conservative movement is a failure and has earned a spot on the ash heap of history next to the other failed forms of tyranny.
It is time to take the fight to these bastards and force them to explain their corruption, their failure and the wide gap between the rhetoric and reality of their policies.
Some years ago, Thomas Frank wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas, a book that helped Democrats re-learn how to compete in those Red States and more than that, it exposed the blatant hypocrisy and lies of the modern Conservative movement. It has been effective in framing the political discussion and it still drives conservatives to distraction. For example, the American Spectator just published an essay by Peter Ferrara that is still trying to push back on the ideas from that book. I can just imagine what Ferrara will do when Frank’s next book goes on sale August 5:
It is called "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" and it helps to explain why there is so much failure and corruption when Republicans are in charge—it is part of their plan. The book exposes the corruption laden history of the conservative movement. The August issue of Harper’s Magazine has an essay adapted from the book and Frank begins his argument by using the example of the Abramoff scandal to frame the problem (emphasis added):
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has clung reliably to the "bad apple" thesis, in which the lobbyist's sins are carefully separated from the movement of which he was once a prominent part. What Abramoff represented, we read, was "greed gone wild." He "went native." He was "sui generis," a one-of-a-kind con man, "engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of."
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff is in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and undreamed-of antics have ceased. But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption that has washed over the capital in recent years. It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is 'friendly to industry not just by force of campaign, contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. [snip]
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities-priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school: Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing topnotch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
The story of Abramoff and the Wrecking Crew will be familiar to Ferrara as he was part of Jack’s conservative echo chamber, he traveled on Abramoff's dime, he hyped the stories Abramoff wanted hyped and in return Abramoff promoted him for a position in the Bush Administration. Ferrara is just another conservative grifter, one of thousands who came to town with Reagan and have been destroying the Nation—and getting rich off of the spoils—ever since.
John McCain is another of these grifters, as are the army of lobbyists that run his campaign and have run his political career.
Despite the spin, this election is not a referendum on Barack Obama.
This election is a referendum on the way Conservatives run the country.
They will try and change the subject. They will try to keep the focus off of their record and their failed movement. They will get help in this effort by their many sycophants in the media—reporters, commentators, editors, etc who came of age in the conservative era and learn to never question the spin.
They will try, but something is changing. The old game plan will not work. We are changing the game. We have the power and it stuns them that we are uniting to forge a weapon of deliverance. It scares them that we may be the change that Upton Sinclair hoped for in 1927 as he surveyed the hold that the corruptions of his day had on the media:
... for by the that time every great magazine that stood for the public welfare had been either bought up or driven into bankruptcy, and there was no longer any way to reach the great mass of people; there has not been from that day to this, and there never will be again until the workers and farmers have united to forge themselves a weapon of deliverance.
The Conservative Corruptionist movement is terrified that we are taking action. They are desperate and they are lashing out. Expect new lows from them. They will come. And expect them to howl with rage and protest as the "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" is released and Thomas Frank hits the trail to promote it.
That will begin today on the Bill Moyers Journal. Tonight, Moyers will update his excellent 2006 program on the Abramoff Scandal, Capital Crimes. His Web site will also post an Bill Moyers interview with Thomas Frank about The Wrecking Crew. I’m making popcorn.
An audio sample of the book is already up on Frank’s Web Site. As are the weekly columns that he writes for the Wall Street Journal. Great stuff. I’m a big fan.
On next Tuesday, the book will be released and Frank will start the Wrecking Crew book tour in Washington, DC at Politics & Prose on Connecticut Ave., NW.
I plan to be there. Join me if you can, it should be fun.
I hope that this book will give more people the courage to challenge the foundation of lies that the conservative movement and the Republican Party have been built upon.
It is a movement that should be exposed and discredited.
If we make the 2008 Election a referendum on the way Conservatives run the country—they lose and America wins. They will howl. Bitch and moan. They will use racism, sexism, fear and appeals to the basest demons of our nature. It will be ugly. It will be painful. It will be vintage McCain and a clear example of the way conservatives play the game. We will need to brush it off and keep working.
So, it is time to get involved. It is time to be serious. It is time to use your power.
Step away from the keyboard and go register a few voters.
Organize.
Cowboy up. Cowgirl up.
Work harder. Work smarter.
Our time is now. Let’s do this thing.
Yes. We. Can.
Cheers
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