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John McCain Discovers America
By
David Michael Green
23/08/08 "ICH"
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Hey, have you heard? America is worse off than it was four years
ago!
Big shocker, eh? I mean, it’s not like the clues are all around
us or anything.
So how ‘bout that John McCain, eh? For an old geezer who hasn’t
yet tried out the Internets, he’s a pretty sharp feller, no? Not
only has he figured out that his country is worse off than it
was four years ago, he’s even running ads saying so.
At one level, that seems a bit odd. For the majority of the last
four years, his party and his ideology have controlled the
entirety of the federal government. Nor did that change much,
even after the other set of wankers supposedly got control of
Congress following the 2006 election. It ain’t exactly like
congressional Democrats have tried to do anything at all with
their gavels over the last eighteen months, but whenever they
accidentally did, Mitch McConnell and his band of merry
filibusterers made sure nothing ever actually happened. And for
the odd item that somehow did manage to escape Congress, there
was old what’s-his-name down on the other end of Pennsylvania
Avenue waving his veto pen. Say, remind me again, wouldya –
which party is he in?
Let’s be clear on this, shall we? As successful as Harry Reid
and Nancy Pelosi have been at doing absolutely nothing, it isn’t
doing nothing that got this country into its present
predicament. The Grand Old ‘Pocalypse will no doubt try to run
and hide from themselves a thousand times a day, but the truth
is nevertheless fully transparent: This is a Republican bummer,
through and through.
And let’s not play chronological hide-and-seek, either, if you
don’t mind. We’re not worse off than we were four years ago –
we’re worse off than we were eight years ago. A lot worse off.
Moreover, the worse parts of that worse off came during the
first four years of the BushCo nightmare, when Cheney was
absolutely running wild through the forest – rather than the
most recent four, when even the Neanderthals came to realize
that the Cro-Magnons were out of control and tried to reel it
back in a little.
And there’s one other small point worth noting as well. McCain,
who actually calls himself a “maverick” (if I never hear that
word again I may have to hurl) in his ads, would like you to
forget that he helped bring you this nightmare by avidly
campaigning for George Bush in both 2000 and 2004, telling us
what a great choice Lil’ W would be for president. He’d like you
to forget that he agrees completely with Bush on the issues
Americans are most unhappy about, including economic policy,
fiscal policy, energy policy, and the Iraq nightmare. He’d like
you to forget that he actually bragged in 2003 about having
voted with the president over 90 percent of the time. And he’d
also like you to forget – though die-hard Fox Snooze was so
angry at him for having the temerity to comment even
semi-honestly about the emperor’s new clothes that they
themselves reminded his campaign – that last year he voted with
Bush over 95 percent of the time. Some stray calf he is, eh?
So, um, ouch, Senator McShame. Why didn’t you just get it over
with and run an ad saying “America is incredibly worse off than
it was eight years ago, and I’m one of the nice folks who
brought you this disaster”? Maybe that kind of straight talk
would be just a bit too straight for a guy trying to become
president.
And let’s not kid ourselves, either. These years of regressive
rule have been disastrous for America, and for the world. As
lame a nothing-burger as Bill Clinton was, a comparison of 2008
to 2000 shows how far south the country has traversed. In 2000
the economy was booming, workers were starting to get a share of
rising GDP for the first time in a long time, gasoline was
cheap, the federal government had the largest budget surplus in
its history and was paying down the debt, America was respected
and well-liked, natural disasters were responded to rapidly and
efficiently, the Bill of Rights was still operative, we weren’t
at war, and we had a president who actually cared about
protecting the country from terrorism.
All of that has now been completely inverted by McCain, by his
party and ideology, by his voting record, and by the president
whom he insisted was the only right choice for America.
Our economy is in shambles, though the president insists that
the ‘fundamentals’ are just fine, and McCain’s former chief
economic advisor, Phil Gramm, told Americans that there was no
real recession going on and they should just stop whining about
it. Gasoline prices have hit the stratosphere, to the point
where many people can no longer even afford to get to work and
make the money necessary to fill their tanks. Wait ‘til they see
their home heating bills this winter. Too bad the election can’t
be in February, eh? Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans have
just been raking it in, hand over fist, these last years, while
middle class workers have been stuck, with stagnant wages, now
being eaten alive by rising inflation to boot.
The record surplus that Bush inherited was fast turned into a
record deficit. Piled high on each other, year after year, we
now have a national debt approaching $10 trillion. It’s worth
noting here that it took every single one of Bush’s 42
predecessors more than two centuries to run up half that bill.
Then he doubled all of them – combined – in one presidency, and
it will be even worse if his time-limited (so we wouldn’t know
the real impact) tax policies are renewed, as McGramm is now
advocating.
McCain is, of course, being absurdly disingenuous when he talks
about ending the deficit, which he says he can do in four years,
especially while keeping the Bush tax transfers in place and
continuing to spend a cool $10 billion per month in Iraq. In any
other country – or even this one at any other time – this
shameless deceit would also be considered so absurd as to be
laughed off the airwaves. But this is selfish America, where we
want it all, at any cost, even while we’re being served up
continually less each year. So we narcissists will continue to
believe that schools can be properly funded by the Lotto, that
infrastructure and other government expenses come for free, and
that people like John McCain aren’t treating us like complete
imbeciles when they say that spending can be radically cut by
trimming away the ‘waste and fraud’ in the federal government –
none of which, conveniently enough, ever quite seems to reside
in the Pentagon. Obama will have to go through the obligatory
ritual of demanding that McCain specify the cuts he’ll make,
with the Old Geezer then pretending to refuse to speculate about
an unknown future. If Obama has half a brain, he’ll then demand
that McCain show the cuts he would have made to the present
budget. Watch what happens as he squirms, thinking of all the
pork barrel votes that would be thrown to the wind if he did
that.
The country is also a helluva lot worse off today than it was
eight years ago foreign policy wise, and Obama needs to say
this. Not only because it is true, and because even hapless
Americans now recognize this, but also because he needs to steal
a page from Karl Rove’s playbook and dismantle McCain’s only
remotely plausible reason for claiming a nod from voters,
however dependent even that rationale is on the shop-worn notion
that only the most belligerent Americans can ever be trusted
with handling our foreign policy. What in the world is Obama
doing, letting this guy who has repeatedly shown the worst
imaginable judgement on these issues – and, worse, who is
running around questioning not only Obama’s judgement but even
his patriotism – what is Obama doing giving McCain a pass on
national security? Why is he not treating us to endless reels of
McCain doing his absurd Baghdad market tour? My god, that is his
Dukakis-in-the-tank moment. It should be in everyone’s face
every minute their television set is turned on! Obama should
also be driving home the notion, over and over, that every
allied soldier who isn’t fighting and/or dying next to an
American somewhere means another American soldier there instead,
and that therefore stupid and arrogant foreign policy choices
have very real consequences for very real and fragile American
GIs. And why don’t we hear endlessly about how Osama bin Laden
has still not been caught, and how Afghanistan is worse than
ever, with al Qaeda free to hatch new terrorist plans? America
is worse off? No kidding, McLame.
Well, at least that whole environmental thing has been looking
up since Bush and Cheney came to town, eh? Oops. Okay, never
mind on that. Sure, it’s true that we only have one planet to
live on, and yep, there’s some evidence that while we Americans
continue to exacerbate the problem, global warming may possibly
now have surpassed the tipping point from which no remedy is
even possible. But, hey, no worries there! If McCain really
wants to talk about the damage done to America and to the world
by his homies, he should start right here. And if Obama wants to
effectively challenge McCain’s absurd positioning of himself on
this issue as an environmentalist leader, he should push him to
get the GOP filibuster crowd in the Senate to promise they’ll
allow meaningful legislation to emerge. Good luck with that.
America is also so much the worse because of the coarse and
cheap politics that Karl Rove and his minions have perfected
these last decades. This was nothing new, but it did get uglier
and more sophisticated in its application. There were at least
two reactions it might have produced in John McCain, who was
himself among its earlier victims. One was to abhor such
practices and the damage done to the frail social fabric of
democracy. The other, which he instead adopted, is particularly
ironic given his Big Lie motto of “country first”. Instead of
being disgusted at Rovolitics, McCain recognized it as the way
to win his greatest prize – the presidency – and thus hired the
next generation of its practitioners. In doing so, he has
absolutely put country last. Just like when he traded
governmental favors for campaign support, or when he sold-out
black Americans on the confederate flag issue, or as he’s
politicized Iraq mercilessly – only worse this time – McCain has
a clash between personal ambition and the welfare of the country
to grapple with, and his choice of another round of Rovism is
intensely dishonorable.
There are so many other ways in which America is worse off than
it used to be since the Republicans rode into town, but surely
one of the worst of these is the degree to which the country has
been polarized, especially between rich and poor, as well as
politically. George W. Bush had the opportunity to unite America
and bring it together in the wake of Election 2000 and
especially 9/11. But he instead has taken every opportunity to
divide us and exploit our fears for the crassest purposes of
looting and wealth transfer. This has been unconscionable, and
McCain has hardly been standing in the doorway blocking the
looters, the lone voice of reason in his party.
We could go on and on here. The wreckage of the Bush years is as
wide as it is deep. I found Newsweek’s cover story last week on
“What Bush Got Right” unintentionally telling in this sense. I
was surprised to find inside the covers of the magazine that
Fareed Zakaria excoriated Bush’s devastation almost as
aggressively as I might have. Turns out that Zakaria’s answer to
his own title question is ’just about nothing’. He more or less
gives Bush credit only for abandoning some of his own insanely
destructive policies from the first term, and lamely shuffling
back to the center-right policies of his own party (and father)
and the so-hated Clintons. Me, I don’t call it “getting it
right” when you set the neighborhood on fire and then decide
that playing with matches ain’t such a great idea just before
the last house goes down.
So what’s up with the title of the article? No doubt that – even
now – wimpy centrist American media outlets can no longer just
come right out and say what everyone knows, themselves included
– that this administration, and more broadly, the regressive
ascension of the last decade (and two more behind that) has been
catastrophic.
McCain should be made to own this disaster fully.
Because he does.
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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