McCain Would Offer More Of The Same

The Nation: Ballots Cast For The Senator Are Votes For The Bush Administration

(The Nation)  This column was written by Frank J. Gaffney Jr..

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Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our President put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation's economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.

Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican President simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing - an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals - must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.

If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation's widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?

To be sure, as a senator, McCain has exhibited flashes of independence on behalf of taxpayers, as in his support of campaign-finance reform in which he partnered with Democrat Russ Feingold. McCain's investigations of the military-industrial complex's shameless exploitation of terrorism fears set a high standard, as in exposing the air-tanker scandal that dispatched a Boeing exec and a former Pentagon employee to prison. But his political ambition is showing. Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.

By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. President ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed that he had stood against in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election when he challenged George W. Bush, but to which he now has capitulated.

Too harsh? Then consider just how tight the space is between the rocks of our failed Mideast policy and the hard place of our impending financial disaster. The sudden out-of-control spike in the cost of oil - the key short-term market variable, the specter that stokes inflation fear and limits moves to avoid recession - is not a natural disaster or in any realistic way the result of inefficiency in the use of energy. What more than doubled the price of petroleum in the short run was not that too many of us bought Hummers, but rather that the political stability of the region that contains the bulk of that oil was deliberately and recklessly roiled.

In the name of fighting the 9/11 terrorists, the Bush Administration overthrew the one Arab government most adamantly opposed to the Saudi financiers of that son of their system, Osama bin Laden. Instead of confronting the royal leaders of a kingdom that supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, we invaded a nation that supplied not a single one. While Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein, who had no ties to the hijackers, he embraced the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the only three nations in the world that had diplomatically recognized and supported the Taliban sponsors of Al Qaeda.

Consider that historical marker at a time when the UAE and Saudi Arabia bankers are buying major positions in distressed US financial and other key corporate institutions. I know, it all sounds too conspiratorial, like imagining that we might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush's Vice President, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect.

There is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney's old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.

It's just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Senator McCain would have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.

[blackspirit3]

TONY PERKINS A MCCAIN SUPPORTER - Tony Perkins is President of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America''''s premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. SHOULD MCCAIN DISTANCE HIMSELF FROM MR PERKINS?

[johnstossel]

Amen!!!!

[ubrew12]

SteveSinCa said: "This article basically boils down to sayijng, ''if you dont vote our way, you are stupid''. "

Maybe its wrong for Scheer to say the US voter is stupid. Consider, however, that in response to the recent economic downturn, both Bush and McCain have offered significant TAX CUTS(i.e. debt expansion) as a band-aid. Thanks to Bush, we already owe $10 trillion in public debt, another $10 trillion in household debt, with baby boomers about to retire, impacting the SocSec network by another $20 trillion.

International finance no longer thinks the U.S. can pay its existing debt, which is why the dollar has fallen: financiers are trying to get out of Dodge. And Bush and McCain are offering MORE DEBT to help deal with this??? Honestly, Scheer may THINK you''re stupid, but for Bush and McCain to do that, they KNOW you''re stupid!! Thats the only way they could get away with doing that and expect the ''grateful'' American voter to respond by voting for them in November.

[ubrew12]

Our national debt is a war on Americans, prosecuted by necons. What you''re feeling now because of tightening international credit is nothing compared to what you''ll feel when it really hits. Cheney obviously has plans to be out of town (Dubai) when that happens. The current downturn must have been expected by BushCo (financed as they were by debt): but it was supposed to happen during the next administration, which was probably going to be Democratic, thereby tarring Democrats with the specter of ''economic failure''. Too bad for Bush it just started a year early.

Honestly, modern republicans that prefer expanded debt over pay-as-you-go aren''t, to me, actually republicans. They''re more like anarchists who are threatening to destroy this country if they dont get their way. ''Vote our way, America, or we''ll move all our assets, ala Halliburton, offshore and you''ll bleed to death''.

And you think Scheer sounds threatening!!

[ubrew12]

SteveSinCa said: "This article basically boils down to sayijng, ''if you dont vote our way, you are stupid''. People reject such concepts."

Admittedly, he doesn''t give the reasons people should vote democratic in the next election. He points out that McCains embrace of Bush identifies McCain with the most failed administration in our history, an admin for which Halliburton pretty much sums up its style of cronyism. US soldiers die, Cheney gets rich, US voters praise the Lord for ''elder statesman'' McCain.

Heres why I''m voting Dem:

Id rather have tax and spend liberals in office than borrow and spend ''conservatives''. Repubs have had 7 years to make good on their promise to be the ''party of small government''. What did they do?
1. Doubled the national debt, now an obscene $10 trillion.
2. INCREASED federal spending, including a 40% increase in defense spending, a Farm Bill that rewards corporate farmers over small farmers, the largest increase in entitlement spending in 30 years, etc, etc.
3. Encouraged loose lending by the Fed that hooked millions of Americans into vastly expanding their private debtload, making it ''appear'' like they had plenty of money when they were in fact broke (and, not coincidentally, helping Bush get reelected with the fiction that he ''did'' something about the economy).
4. Iraq (how bad must your administration be, if the Iraq War is the SECOND most disasterous thing you''ve done during your tenure - the first being the debt).

[tryhonesty]

The same OLD RepubliCONs from the same OLD Greedy OLD Party. This same OLD group of idiots has not had a new idea in over 100 years. America can not afford McSame, he is just too expensive. Hello, Hello, anybody out there? The redneck ignorant morons who put shrub in office, goose step over the next cliff, will ya..? Ha, ha, morons. This Fall we will kick you folks over to the third world where you all belong. The Greedy OLD Party, is but a party of one.
1/20/09

[ranger1948]

irliberal
There you go. I already stated i didn''t care that obama was black. I care that he is a racists againsty whites, associates with racists against whire, may have ties with terrorists, has a wife that they had to lock away somewhere to keep her from making racist remarks against whites, and is associated with a known criminal. Also that he used drugs, had *** with a man, and had the nerve to give Hillary the finger in public. These are not the actions of the man i want running this country. I have said before i wouold like to have seen Colin Powell run or any black candidate that is qualified and has the idea of gettig us oout of Iraq and addressing the problems here at home as one nation regardless of race.

[stevesinca]

If liberals want to know why moderates and undecideds keep going to the Right and costing the Dems the election, it''s because of articles like this. This article basically boils down to sayijng, ''if you don''t vote our way, you are stupid''. People reject such concepts.

With comments like ''how to explain..taken leave of their senses'', this article just portays the common voter as stupid.

[irliberal]

We gain nothing from the war in Iraq, but bush and his cronies sure got rich from it. I don''''t want to see McCain in office but i would vote for him before i would ever vote for obama.

Posted by ranger1948 at 06:25 AM

Then you are a huge fool. It''s ok, theres lots of them around. This kind of backwards thinking is what got us Bush twice in a row and is the REASON we are in Iraq in the first place - some people just don''t vote with their minds at all. They let things like race, *** and religion vote for them. Oh well. Land of the free, and home of a lot of idiots.

[xlib]

You''d probably find more pictures of mccain and ole teddy than with Bush. Seems to me, mccain sides more with the dems then his own supposed party. This story is a bunch of cr*p and cbs knows it.
Not too long ago your msm was supporting and even pushing mccain down Repbulicans throats. Now, they begin the tried and true vilifying the guy. He probably won''t win and we''ll get one of the socialists in office. Should make for an interesting 4 years.