Barackis Dukakis?
McCain Slings from the Sewer While Obama Says Little
By David Michael Green
02/08/08 "ICH" -- - John McCain is a scumbag.
I choose my words carefully, and in full recognition of past
sacrifices and contributions he has made.
But I am sick to death of seeing my country go down the toilet.
And I am sick to death of my country wrecking other parts of the
world. And I am sickest-at-heart of all that the people doing
this represent the sleaziest side of American politics.
These are the Karl Rove acolytes, who learned their craft from
the Lee Atwater team, who learned from the Nixon ratfucker
squad. From there it may go directly back to Satan, for all I
know, possibly with a stopover at Joe McCarthy’s desk.
There will always be people like this. Alleged humans who are
willing to do anything to win at politics. Fine, we can’t
control that. But it says everything about any candidate when he
or she puts people like this in charge of their campaign. And it
says everything about us as a society that we would ever let
those who do so win the highest offices in the land, let alone
frequently.
Hence, my comment about McCain. It has now become transparently
clear that this man will do anything to be president. Whatever
scraps of decency and uniqueness and detachment from his own
sick party he once had have now all been mortgaged against that
goal. The McCain who once knew Bush’s tax cuts were
irresponsible now favors them, despite eight years of direct
evidence turning informed speculation about potential
consequences into historical fact. The McCain who once
criticized the sex-obsessed theocrats running his party as
“agents of intolerance” now seeks their endorsement. The McCain
who once stood for a cleaner politics is now firmly ensconced in
the sewer, from whence he is reaching down and hurling great
gobs and handfuls of what flows all around him.
It was not enough that he mocked Obama for not going to Iraq,
only then to whine about how Obama was grandstanding when he
turned around and went, and everybody from General Petreaus to
Prime Minister Maliki to the entire public of Germany made
McCain look the fool. It’s not enough that he’s now desperately
trying to turn the very fact of Obama’s popularity against him
by running ads comparing the Illinois senator to Britney Spears
and Paris Hilton. And it’s still not even enough that McCain is
running ads – based on wholesale and proven lies – that Obama
skipped out of meeting with wounded American troops in order to
shoot some hoops.
No, what really proved that McCain is a scumbag is the one line
– now repeated multiple times – that Obama “would be willing to
lose a war in order to win a campaign”. Even if they weren’t
just finishing up living through the consequences of precisely
such politics for eight years now, Americans should be
apoplectic in anger that the same folks are back using the same
tricks again. Mostly, though, they should be horrified and
enraged that such language could be used in a presidential
campaign. They should be precisely as willing to elect any
person uttering such disgraceful epitaphs as they would a
Holocaust denier, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, or a serial
pedophile.
This is not a policy difference. This is not a disagreement over
issues. This is not even a personal critique of an opponent’s
professional or even character-related qualifications for
office. This is an outrageous smear of the most vile kind.
McCain has said – without a scrap of substantiating evidence to
back his claim – that Obama is willing to sacrifice the lives of
American soldiers and Iraqi citizens in order to advance his
personal career ambitions. How serious an assertion is this? I
would regard such alleged behavior as among the most heinous
crimes that a person can commit, not different from hiring out a
murder. Except, that is, that we’re talking about probably a
million murders. I have no doubt, and plenty of solid evidence,
that that’s exactly what the Bush people did when they launched
their Iraq war based on lies. I have little doubt, and some
evidence, that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and John Kerry
committed exactly this crime in voting for the invasion. I think
they are all deserving of the gravest punishments, not least
including, to start with, a complete banishment from the
corridors of power and prestige. These are war criminals, plain
and simple. McCain has long been one of them, as one of the
war’s most avid backers while surely fully cognizant of the lies
forming the pretext for invasion. Now he has doubled down by
politicizing yet again the gravest decision a country can ever
make.
The weight of ironies here – on top of boundless disgust – are
enough to keep a roaring Saturn V stuck on the launch pad. Start
with his nauseating new campaign slogan, “Country First”. I’ve
news for you, McCainiac. A candidate who really put country
first wouldn’t employ Rove-trained scum-slingers to hurl
baseless accusations against an opponent, all of which have the
effect of massively cheapening America’s political process. Many
people alive today don’t remember that there actually was a time
– before Rove, before Bush and his father, before Atwater,
before Nixon – when this sort of campaign ploy was considered
way beyond the pale of decency. There was a reason for that, and
we need to return to that ethos for precisely that reason.
Willingness to campaign in such a fashion is highly corrosive to
the fabrics of decency, respect and trust that are the necessary
foundations upon which democracy ultimately rests. Take those
away by legitimating and rewarding such vile tactics, and you’re
ultimately left with a tattered democracy, if any at all.
Country first? No, John – you’ve actually done just the
opposite. When you claim that your opponent is sacrificing
people’s lives and American national security to win a campaign
without having any evidence for that claim, you’ve put your own
desperation to be president well ahead of the country you claim
to love by undermining its democracy and by you, yourself, using
the war to score political points.
This is all the more ironic because McCain knows better than
anyone the consequences of politicizing war. He spent
six-and-a-half years being tortured under the ugliest kinds of
physical and mental duress. He has since become something of a
student of the conflict in which he made these great sacrifices,
the Vietnam War. If he were honest enough to allow himself to go
there, he would admit the truths of that war which are
undeniably supported by the documentary record, including the
government’s own secret history of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers.
What these reveal is that McCain – along with many other POWs
and MIA, 58,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands more gravely
wounded, and perhaps several million dead Vietnamese – was a
victim of precisely the same sort of politicking of war that he
and his president and his party have now brought to the lucky
people of Iraq.
We know that governments from Truman to Nixon and every one in
between lied to the American people about Vietnam, and not just
small lies either. And we know that Lyndon Johnson, the man more
responsible for the war than any other person, didn’t even
believe that it was a war that could be won, but fought it
anyhow, in large part because he believed that commie-baiting
Republicans would use the “loss” of Vietnam against him in
elections if he didn’t, just as they had earlier with China. Of
all people in the world, John McCain should never indulge in
this sort of gutter filth. He rotted away the better part of a
decade of his own life, mangled and traumatized, in the Hanoi
Hilton in order to help Johnson attain his personal prize of
another term as president (or so Johnson thought), and because
Republicans had politicized national security, also to win
elections. Is he okay with that? I’m sure not. I’m not okay for
him, nor for any of the John McCains of this world. Short of
genocide, what greater possible crime is there than launching a
war in order to advance one man’s career ambitions?
A third irony is that while he was bravely serving his country
and having his patriotism exploited by political hacks like
Johnson and the various mutant would-be humanoids of the GOP,
the very people who would later bring us the most recent version
of their sociopathic amorality were back then sitting by the
sides of swimming pools, sipping margaritas, and making career
plans to get rich by hook or crook. George Bush had his daddy
get him a free pass. Dick Cheney took five draft deferments.
John Ashcroft seven. And so on, and so on. Quick: name one
person on the Bush national security team in 2003 who actually
showed up for combat when it was his turn. There was only one –
Colin Powell – who, while hardly a sweetheart himself, was not
coincidentally the only one of all of them to oppose invading
Iraq. McCain has hitched his wagon to a whole barnyard full of
chickenhawks and their despicable war. The fact that Cheney
literally said “I had better things to do in the 60s than fight
in Vietnam” tells you something of what these guys must have
thought about patriotic patsies like John McCain, who risked
their lives in service to their country, just as David Kuo’s
insider revelations about how Rove and company secretly mocked
the religious right congregations they used as Republican shock
troops tells you more of the same.
But it gets a lot worse yet. In irony number four, McCain would
be savaged by these vicious thugs once again, and it was for the
same mistake of having once served his country. When it looked
like he was going to clobber Bush in the 2000 Republican
primaries, the serious money made sure that that wouldn’t
happen, and that their reliable kleptocrat, Little George, would
be ushered into the White House instead. The very same animals
who are now mauling Barack Obama on behalf of John McCain were
shredding the senator himself on behalf of Bush just eight years
ago, falsely accusing McCain in South Carolina of fathering a
love child with a black mistress, and of being off his rocker
from his POW days. Whatever happy news there is in the fact that
a movement this evil will inevitably wind up eating its young,
it remains a statement of the sad journey John McCain has taken
that he would employ the very same hitmen to now do the same to
someone else. Shame on you, John McShameless. Shame on you.
Fifth, it’s both outrageous and outrageously ironic for McCain
to level this charge against Obama, as opposed to, say, Clinton
or Edwards or Kerry. Of the four of them (and many more), only
Obama has always opposed the war. Only Obama had the guts to do
so at the beginning, when the Bush people had made that an
excruciatingly hard thing to do. True, he wasn’t then in the US
Senate, and he didn’t actually have to cast a vote on the issue.
Nevertheless, it was pretty widely understood at the time – not
least by Rove and the three Democratic would-be presidents
listed above – that going on record against the war was the kiss
of death for any presidential ambitions. Obama not only took
that risk, but he hit it just right, not opposing all wars (for
there are rare ones for which the alternative is even worse),
but opposing dumb wars, and labeling Iraq just such.
Lastly, the greatest irony of all is that nobody politicized
this war more than Republicans did. Bush admitted to an
interviewer in 1999 that he would use such a war for purposes of
insuring his domestic political power. Cheney literally had a
formula of “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is
justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade”. Moreover,
if there had ever been any question of why Bush went to Congress
for an Iraq war resolution just weeks before the congressional
elections of 2002 – thus cynically pinning Democrats between the
Scylla of a war they knew was based on lies and the Charybdis of
the GOP using national security as a sledgehammer in this first
post-9/11 election – it should have long prior been put to rest
by Rove’s congressional election briefing plan, which was
accidentally leaked, indicating that the party would be using
national security issues as its election strategy. Add to all of
that the commander-in-chief’s little aircraft carrier landing
stunt, the myriad times that the president wrapped himself in
the mantle of American soldiers (live and dead), the plastic
Thanksgiving turkey, the 2002 abomination against Max Cleland
and the 2004 version against John Kerry, and all the rest, and
you get a very, very politicized war. Not only should John
McCain not be adding to the pile of such disgusting tactics, he
should be on his knees begging the country for forgiveness of
his party.
But that country – the better country of my youth, frankly, for
all its faults – no longer exists. It appears that little can
tame the GOP’s taste for the jugular. And, in part, this is not
entirely unexpected, since it always freakin’ works. Then again,
so does genocide, but many of us have made the amazing moral
leap to recognize that not every prize is worth the price paid
to obtain it, even if you can manage to get other poor slobs to
do the paying. And so we refrain from genocide. Or launching
wars to advance our careers.
So, look, it’s now July. McCain has hired the known assassins,
and they’ve already begun their work, a fact which became
visibly obvious in the massively changed tenor of the McCain
campaign this last week or two. So, Barack Baby, do I have to
spell it out for you, my man? Can you not see the freight train
that is headed your way? Must we have yet another example of
Democratic roadkill, to join those of Dukakis, Gore, Cleland,
Kerry and the rest, before one of you guys learns to throw a
punch or two?
This is your swiftboat moment, dude. John Kerry waited three
weeks to respond to the crap they threw at him, after which he
might as well have gone off windsurfing and not bothered
responding at all. Why are you not shredding McCain for lying
about your Iraq trip and the canceled visit to wounded soldiers?
(Even the media is pointing that out, despite the fact that they
love McCain almost as much as they fear the GOP.) Why are you
not disemboweling McCain every day of the week, every week of
the month, for his outrageous allegation that you are
sacrificing lives in order to win an election?
And why aren’t you on the offensive? McCain has given you
openings you should be able to drive a Mack truck through, and
you need to be saturating the airwaves with these. Why isn’t
every other television commercial a viewer sees one of yours,
showing Phil Gramm calling Americans “whiners” for feeling
economic pain, showing McCain saying “Gramm doesn’t speak for
me”, then noting that Gramm in fact spoke on behalf of McCain to
the Wall Street Journal on that very same day? Why aren’t you
running ads turning McCain into George Bush’s long lost Siamese
twin? Why aren’t you hammering McCain at his point of greatest
strength, undercutting his so-called national security
credentials by showing clips of all his errors, including before
the war began when he said it would go easily, during the early
parts when he said it was going fine, his absurdly bogus Baghdad
market walk-through, and his myriad recent gaffes which suggest
his brain clicked off sometime in the 1980s?
Despite the fact that the candidate has now issued a semi-strong
rebuttal spot two weeks into this ugliness, I must say, I liked
the Barack Obama of the primary season better than the current
model. I liked his politics and his integrity more, but most of
all I liked his fighting spirit, and his immediate response to
scurrilous attacks.
Now that the attacks have gotten worse, I’m wondering what
happened to that guy?
Hey Barrackis: One Dukakis is per lifetime is more than enough.
McCain and his Gang of Rove have more than transcended the
threshold of decency these past weeks, and have done so
repeatedly.
It’s time for you to take him down.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at
Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive
readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net),
but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to
respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.
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