When one reads articles such as this one about John McCain, one has to wonder why the "liberal media" keep giving him a free pass.
Here’s the opening paragraph, which is followed later by a possibly snide reference to "McCain peer(ing) through a crystal ball":
The Republican presidential contender, in a mystical speech that also envisioned Osama bin Laden dead or captured, and Americans with the choice of paying a simple flat tax or following their standard 1040 form, said only a small number of troops would remain in Iraq by the end of a prospective first term because al-Qaida will have been defeated and Iraq’s government will be functioning on its own.
(More below the fold.)
Despite the tongue in cheek possible snark, the columnist, Glen Johnson, never once challenged McCain on how al Qaeda was going to be defeated, bin Laden captured or killed and Iraq wanded into a utopian land of milk and honey all, by coincidence, by the beginning of his re-election campaign in 2013.
And we can’t have that, can we? Because that would smell of gonzo journalism like the kind that made Hunter S. Thompson a legend in his own time.
So, in John McCain’s speculative, pulp fiction world, Jules will read a passage from the Bible before emptying his clip into bin Laden and Iraq will at last be pacified, orderly and democratic but still need to be babysat by American troops until 2108. The free market that served the residents of New Orleans so admirably after Hurricane Katrina will prevail and everyone will be as happy as Iraqis with democracy force-fed to them.
How is any of this grounded in even the topsoil of reality? And how can this criminally-negligent media, which still shapes all too many opinions, not feel it incumbent to ask this aging psychopath for at least a few broad strokes as to how these Candyland predictions will be effected?
Let’s take stock:
McCain finished 894th in a graduating class of 899 at Annapolis Naval Academy, a military institution for which he wouldn’t have even been seriously considered were it not for the fact that his father and grandfather were naval admirals, thereby making George W. Bush, a legacy "C" student and who handily beat him in presidential debates eight years ago, look like William F. Buckley by conspicuous relief.
While Senator McCain has taken some admirable positions regarding the environment, immigration, torture and campaign finance reform, he’s backtracked on every single one of these positions. He’s condemned Burma’s ruling military junta yet his GOP convention coordinator, Doug Goodyear, had to recently resign from the post when it was discovered that Goodyear’s consulting firm, DCI, made almost $350,000 representing the same junta that McCain’s lambasted. His wife, it more recently came out, divested herself of two million dollars of mutual funds in companies that do business in the genocide-stained nation of Sudan, even though McCain has also publicly deplored the conditions in Darfur.
Everytime McCain takes a stand on something, it quickly follows that there are people, including his spouse (who vows to never release her tax forms), that have profited handsomely off the same people and conditions that McCain denigrates.
His campaign is rife with more lobbyists than any other in American electoral history, making Hillary Clinton’s own lobbyist-lousy campaign look squeaky-clean by comparison. At last count, McCain had an astounding 112 lobbyists raising cash for him, thereby shredding his McCain-Feingold era reforms.
The Keating Five vs Tony Rezsko. You do the math.
After racking up an impressive environmental record, McCain (whose mother was an oil heiress) then became a big believer in private industry such as the petroleum cartels to be responsible stewards of the environment, claiming that it would be intrusive for the big, bad government to impose harsh clean air and water standards on them. Gas and oil companies have pumped $780,662 into McCain’s campaign to ensure his rock-solid confidence that they will prove to be responsible stewards of the environment.
McCain’s legendary quick-draw, hair trigger temper and bristling at any question that comes anywhere within sniffing distance of an actual question betrays that McCain’s attitude toward the presidency is the same as Bush’s: It’s an entitlement, not the highest public service position in the land answerable to the will of the people.
Like George W. Bush, McCain never regards the safety of the troops. April Fool’s Day 2007 proved that he sees no problem whatsoever in allocating valuable resources and endangering the lives of over 100 troops for a thirty minute-long photo op just to prove that Iraq is safe enough for Lindsey Graham to buy rugs for a buck a pop. And, once again, the criminally-negligent "liberal" media didn’t do its job by highlighting the fact that, just a half hour after McCain’s village roadshow left the market, another suicide bomb went off, killing 21 innocent Iraqis.
McCain, who’d recently admitted in public that economics wasn’t his strong suit, then advanced a completely insane plan to cut ten trillion dollars from the budget over five years. The last budget signed into law by George W. Bush was a record 3.1 trillion dollars. McCain’s plan would slash two trillion a year on average from that while promising no end to a war that’s costing us two and a half billion a week and even more tax cuts.
The press still breathlessly mentions the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and connecting him with Obama even though Obama took the coward’s way out and disassociated himself from his former pastor, thereby giving credence to the Republican meme that Obama should be held accountable for everything ever said by anybody that he may’ve met.
Meanwhile, not enough has been made of McCain, who actively sought out an endorsement from John Hagee, a bloated Texas psychopath who’s been steadily inveighing against the church of Rome. McCain, after actively soliciting Hagee’s endorsement, then pointedly refuses to divest himself of this ecumenical albatross because he’s afraid of alienating Crazy Base World.
Hagee’s two page-long "apology", it ought to be noted, was not written for or sent to the Pope, any American cardinal or specific archdiocese, but to Bill Donohue, another religious psychopath who runs the Catholic League. The mere fact that the Catholic League got the letter and Donohue his ego-gratifying apology, unmistakably proves what motivated Hagee to have the letter written: Pressure from the McCain campaign that nonetheless looks upon Hagee like some self destructive but helplessly addictive religious heroin.
McCain doesn’t seem to realize that at age 71, it’s both physically and politically impossible to straddle fences. At the same time that he’s trying to distance himself from Bush, he continues to remain in hailing distance of virtually every one of Bush’s most failed and murderously incompetent policies.
To put it simply, you’d have to be as crazy as John McCain in order to think he’d be an even better bet to get us back on track than any other Republican. Getting out-scholared, out-debated and out-foxed by a rube named George W. Bush, IMHO, isn’t quite what I’d call convincing credentials to replace said rube’s finger on that big red button.
JP
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