Stealin ur Megahurtz

For anyone not paying attention to the news, see here for the latest political headline. Even if McCain wasn’t screwing his own campaign up, the nutbags around him would be taking care of it for him. Here is a comment from Olbermann about the wonderful Ashley Todd story.

Can the GOP boat sink any faster? Really?

Filed under: politics by rfdeshon

Olbermann has always been one of the few redeeming factors of network TV. He isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. In honor of his show, I post two good clips about McCain and his current political meltdown.

Filed under: politics by rfdeshon

I make no claim to be the author of this. I’m simply trying to spread it as I agree with the message contained herein. I do not know who wrote this as I found it posted anonymously elsewhere. 

The Republican party returned to power at the beginning of this decade thanks to a brilliantly innovative political hybrid represented in its most advanced form by the Bush-Cheney ticket — a high-tech engine of ruthless neocon capitalism wedded to a half-literate aristocrat dunce hiding his alcoholism in born-again Christian platitudes. Add corporate money to fundamentalist-Christian demographics in a country as dumb and superstitious as America, and you can vaporize a century’s worth of Al Gores and John Kerrys.

But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.

It’s bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity. Once the victim of a classic racist smear job in backwoods South Carolina (where he was whipped in the 2000 primary after a Karl Rove whispering campaign suggested he had an illegitimate black daughter), McCain has now positioned himself on the business end of that same deal.

Like Hillary Clinton, an erstwhile vilified liberal who remade herself as a flag-waving, Sixties-bashing champion of “hardworking Americans, white Americans” once the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama forced her off her old turf, the one-time “insurgent” McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style.

Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator’s “liberal” record. But these days I’m hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were “God’s children too.” When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she’s supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: “I’m much more concerned about Obama.”

McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, “One of us! One of us!” all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he’s unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he’s given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against bills bearing his own name.

Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. His crude attempts to paint Obama with these brushes are more or less the whole of his argument for the presidency. Obama is terrorist-coddler because he is “ready to talk in person with tyrants” like Ahmadinejad, he hates soldiers because he refused to condemn MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad, and he’s a socialist because he favors health-care reform — despite the fact that the Obama plan isn’t “socialized” medicine any more than the universal requirement to buy private auto insurance is socialism.

John McCain, defying the expectations of almost everyone who watched him last summer — myself included — rose from the political dead to wrap up the GOP nomination. He’s survived because Onward to Victory is the last great illusion the Republican Party has left to sell in this country, even to its own followers. They can’t sell fiscal responsibility, they can’t sell “values,” they can’t sell competence, they can’t sell small government, they can’t even sell the economy. All they have left to offer is this sad, dwindling, knee-jerk patriotism, a promise to keep selling world politics as a McHale’s Navy rerun to a Middle America that wants nothing to do with realizing the world has changed since 1946.

The lesson of the McCain campaign is that one should never underestimate America’s capacity for self-delusion. Balls-deep in one of the biggest foreign-policy catastrophes of all time, an arrogant military misadventure destined to make us infamous for a generation across a dozen cultures, minivan-driving suburban America is still waiting for Bill Holden to make it right by blowing up the Bridge on the River Kwai — and returning, tanned and handsome, to get the girl with a mouth full of cool one-liners.

McCain’s entire career has been dedicated to the idea that America must always have the right to solve its problems by force. Throughout his political career, he has argued for increased use of force in virtually every military engagement the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam. He complained about Bill Clinton’s “excessively restricted air campaign” in Kosovo, campaigning strenuously for a ground invasion. During the 1994 flap over Pyongyang’s nuclear program, he called for “more forceful, coercive action.” Even before the latest Iraq War, McCain argued way back in 1999 that the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein was “to strike disproportionate to the provocation.”

The most frightening example of McCain’s fondness for force is on display in his own book, Faith of My Fathers, when he complains about the politicians who refused to allow pilots like him to attack, say, Soviet ships unloading arms in Vietnamese port cities. “We thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots,” he writes.

Bombing Soviet ships, of course, would probably have started World War III, but McCain’s vision, then and now, encompasses war as a way of life. There is significant evidence that McCain believes war is something righteous and necessary, a tonic for the national soul, intrinsically “noble” irrespective of context (he is still one of the only politicians to apply that word to the Iraq conflict). That is why it’s no joke when McCain says casually, “There’s gonna be other wars,” or when he sings, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” We have to assume that he will jump at the chance to expand this conflict and hit those politically sensitive targets his “complete idiot” civilian commanders once barred him from going after in Vietnam.

Back in 1999, McCain concluded a speech at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire by shouting, “Never again do we send our men and women to fight and die in foreign conflicts unless our goal is victory!” Which is interesting, because that is exactly — almost word for motherfucking word — how McCain ended his latest speeches on the campaign trail in Maryland and Virginia. In other words, John McCain knew his answer to the Iraq War mess before it even happened. For good measure, he insisted that “only military men like General Petraeus” have the right to say when soldiers will come home from Iraq — not, he added with a sneer, “some civilian running for president.” Nor, presumably, America’s civilian population, which is being asked to send its sons and daughters to kill and die in a faraway country.

No matter how moderate McCain seems on domestic issues, on the issue of war he’s stark raving mad. He’s a wounded, crusading Ahab, and civilian command and diplomatic restraint are his Great White Whale. If he gets put in charge of a Middle Eastern war that is easily widened, it’s whirlpool time for all of us.

Filed under: Rants, politics by rfdeshon