Aug. 21, 2008
McCain's Warped Worldview
The Nation: Republican's Candidacy Is Irrational Mélange Of Patriotic Swagger And Blindness To Reality
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Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the Compassion Forum at the Saddleback Church, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008 in Lake Forest, Calif. (AP)
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In-Depth VP Hot Sheet: McCain CBSNews.com ranks the top contenders to be McCain's running mate.
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The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the ten French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the US government's imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for President, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?
The economy is in a downward spiral, the national debt is at an all-time high, the dollar is an international disgrace and inflation in July had the steepest rise in twenty-seven years, driven by oil prices fivefold higher than when George W. Bush invaded the nation with the world's second-largest petroleum reserves.
While the oil-rich Mideast nations we protect refuse to fully open the oil spigots as payback for our military efforts, McCain celebrates General David Petraeus as his number-one hero for "victory" in Iraq. Aside from the reality that victory there is now defined as returning to the level of stability provided by Saddam Hussein, who the Bush Administration admits had nothing to do with the bin Laden-led terrorists, even that goal requires the cooperation of our former sworn enemies, Iran's ayatollahs.
Presumably McCain envisions a more favorable outcome for Georgia, to which he would commit the unqualified support of the United States with his outrageously overreaching statement that "we are all Georgians." If Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had been in contact with the leader of a nation before and after that nation provoked a war, his campaign would be a shambles. Not so McCain, who is acting as if he is already the elected Commander in Chief ensconced in a reconstituted neoconservative-dominated White House. By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been reduced to a blustering bystander.
That military victory in Iraq and any other trouble spot is the key selling point of the McCain campaign is odd, because McCain's credentials derive from participation in a war that resulted in the most ignominious defeat in US history. How else to think of the loss of almost 59,000 Americans and 3.4 million Indochinese in a war that even McCain has long since not seriously tried to defend. Surely McCain accepted the notion that a Communist Party-run Vietnam was compatible with US security interests when he, along with Senator John Kerry, led the fight for US recognition of Vietnam.
Wouldn't it have been grand if McCain, who made his own pilgrimage of reconciliation to Hanoi, would have drawn the proper lesson from that sad chapter in American history--that victory isn't everything it's cracked up to be? Or, by extension, from the recent Olympic festivities in still-Red China, where Bush was photographed quite happily near portraits of the once-dreaded Chairman Mao, whom US propaganda had long described, quite erroneously, as chief sponsor of the Vietnamese communists.
We are reminded of how brilliant Republican Richard Nixon was in rejecting the neoconservative addiction to the cold war that McCain embraces when the late President traveled to Beijing to make peace with the man previously depicted as the bloodiest of communist dictators. It turns out that the various communist movements were nationalist above all else, and when we "lost" in Vietnam, the result was not attacks on the United States but a war between China and Vietnam.
The lesson McCain should have learned is that the world is a complex place, that today's enemies may be tomorrow's negotiating partners--as Obama has at times dared to suggest--and that the neoconservative idea of a Pax Americana is a dangerous fantasy. And a costly one at that, not only in lost lives and blowback from the regions we destabilize but also in the dollars that American taxpayers must waste.
Thanks to the absurdly misdirected "war on terrorism" that McCain so enthusiastically supports, we spend more annually in inflation-adjusted dollars on the military than at any time since World War II, even more than during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Vote for McCain and forget about funding to solve the Social Security, Medicare and subprime mortgage disasters or for anything else that truly would make America stronger.
By Robert Scheer
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 44 CommentsYou do time as a POW then come tell us about bravery.
To do a flip flop you have to take a stand first, obama hasn''t done so.
1. Social Security Privatization.
2. Raising - and Slashing - Defense Spending
3. First Term Balanced Budget Pledge.
4. The Media%u2019s Treatment of Hillary Clinton.
5. The Estate Tax
6. FISA, Domestic Surveillance and Telecom Immunity.
7. Restoring the Everglades.
8. Divestment from South Africa.
9. Fighting Job Losses in Michigan.
10. Opposing Hurricane Katrina Investigations.
11. Alternative minimum tax, was for repealing it, now wants to phase it out.
12. Litmus test for judicial appointees, was against it, now he''''''''s for it.
13. 1999: was against off-shore drilling, now he''''''''s for it.
14. 2001: "Cannot in good conscience support tax cuts"
15. 2005: McCain anti-torture amendment, 2008, voted against the ban.
16. 2006: McCain immigration bill, 2008 DID NOT vote for it!
17. 2000: Called Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberts "Agents of Intolerence"; 2006, pandered to Falwell and spoke at his college
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Posted by paris1969
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NOPE! They are a new breed of liberal Fascists.....
just more proof i live in a country half full of morons.
Remember Obama is the black robin hood. He wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. Wonder if he will take from himself and give to others, like Ayers, Rezco, Rev. Wright.
However he''s nothing but a COWARD because he refuses to get in touch with reality. He refuses to see the world as it is for regular working people WHO DON''T HAVE A RICH WIFE LIKE HE DOES.
I guess since McCorpse more houses and condos than he can keep track of, the economy must look pretty *** good to him, and all because his wife is rich.
He says that universal health care is too expensive, but he''s too stupid to understand that if we stopped the war in Iraq, there would be enough money to have unversal health care, Social Security would be fixed, and this country''s educational system could be fixed, too.
That''s a generic Republican campaign to win an election. Without real accomplishments, the Republicans must resort to massaging reality and convincing the electorate with a dog and pony show to keep them in power.
You must be as senile as McCain!
Then his preacher of 20 years ! He would throw anyone or anything under the buss after just a little pressure !
Obama is a wuss !
He is a wuss !
They are so sure he will win that they are already starting to take Europe !
John McCain = promoted, provoked war in Georgia for political gain. Coordinated with Saakashvili for invasion of South Ossetia by Georgian troops. As a result gets big bounce in polls. Payoff--Saakashvili will have sympathetic US president if McCain is elected.
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