Perhaps some of you may have noticed that I have yet to make any quantitative remarks, negative or positive, about the presumptive GOP Presidential nominee John McCain this election year. And considering the penchant I have for blasting out my political opinions with reckless abandon, with special, uninhibited malice directed toward the modern-day GOP and their water carriers, that is no small feat for me.
The reason I haven't stated any personal opinions (up to this point) on McCain is twofold. One -- I actually have had a healthy, albeit begrudging, level of respect for John McCain over the years. That level of respect took into account McCain's honorable military service and Vietnam POW ordeal, his occasional warfare with his own party members in bucking some of their more pernicious legislative transgressions, and his seemingly thoughtful disinterest (until recently that is) in sucking up to the people who I believe have hijacked and thoroughly wrecked the Republican party - the fundamentalist religious right.
The second main reason I've been keeping my lip zipped about McCain is because he was the one guy back in 2000, within his own party, who saw the coming disaster that was George W. Bush and actually had the balls to openly and publicly state what he thought about the blue blood, fake Texas cowboy and corrupt oil man, which prompted him to cast his hat in the ring for the Presidency that year. Of course McCain's resultant punishment for that level of public honesty was a vicious political smear job by Bush's brain and hired hit man Karl Rove, which culminated in the horrific hatchet job they performed on the Arizona Senator in the run-up to the 2000 GOP South Carolina primary.
In the weeks prior to that pivotal 2000 South Carolina contest, KKKarl Rove and his foot soldiers blanketed the solidly conservative Republican state, gleefully spreading rumors about McCain and his wife that brought new meaning to the words cruel and slimy. Bush supporters circulated fliers at South Carolina churches labeling McCain as "the fag candidate," because McCain would not promise to ban the hiring of gays in his administration. They spread racist-tinged rumors that the McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually John McCain's out-of-wedlock black child (yeah I know -- but these people are so fucking stupid all they know is the kid had really dark skin). They spread more rumors that McCain was a closeted gay and cheated on his wife Cindy and that Cindy was a drug addict. And the coup de grace rumor was that McCain's 5 & 1/2 year stint as a tortured POW in Vietnam had left him mentally unstable, and therefore an untrustworthy Commander-In-Chief of the military (wink, wink, nudge, nudge -- nuclear weapons). One of the dirty trickster Rove operatives who spear-headed the savaging of McCain in South Carolina that year (Ted Sampley) later went on to be one of the Swift Boat liars who slandered milquetoast Dem John Kerry's honorable military record in 2004 -- but that's a whole other horror story.
Back to McCain though -- unfortunately, for McCain and the American people, the forces of fear mongering, hatefulness, divisiveness and dishonesty ruled the day in that 2000 South Carolina primary and it sent a bitter John McCain limping back to his senatorial post in Arizona with his presidential ambitions ruinously shattered for the foreseeable future.
Flash forward to 2008 and a back from the dead John McCain is furiously trying to plead his case to the American public in his latest quixotic bid for oval office glory. Bluntly stated, and sadly so though -- I propose to you this day that the honorable (arguably to some) John McCain, of pre-2000 South Carolina and prior, exists no more. And I state that to you unequivocally and with the utmost regard for his still meritorious military service.
McCain has flip flopped on important political subjects big and small, everything from his previous rejection of the Bush tax cuts to his now openly embracing and courting of the Jerry Falwell religious right -- the people he correctly labeled "agents of intolerance" in 2000. If John Kerry's convolutions in 2004 about "being for before being against" the Iraq war and subsequent funding bills earned him the flip flopper label, then McCain's list of flip flops is necessarily analogous to of one of my all-time favorite t.v. shows - Kung Fu. In that show the young Kwai Chang Caine was tutored by his blind mentor Master Po if you remember. Master Po was called master for a reason -- nobody was his equal. My analogy is this -- when it comes to the art of flip-flopping -- John McCain is Master Po to John Kerry's Kwai Chang Caine. Any fair analysis of the public record will bear that out.
There's a couple of other core reasons I am having a really difficult time seriously considering pulling the voting lever for McCain this year. He is surrounding himself on domestic and economic policy with a virtual who's who list of corporate lobbyists. In the past week alone the McCain campaign has seen the sudden resignations of (5) high level economic advisers due to corporate lobbying-related conflict of interest allegations. Bush and Cheney shamelessly sucked up to big industry (Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Adelphia, Exxon, etc.) and the defense industry back in 2000 -- and we all know the criminal fallout from those cozy relationships -- Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and Adelphia CEO's in prison, Exxon raping the American consumer at the gas pump and war profiteers gone wild in Iraq. It's long past time to diminish the amount of slop (tax payer dollars) in the public trough that the gluttonous corporate pigs have been engorging themselves on these past 8 years. It is damn well time to start investing that money back into America, America's infrastructure and security and the hard working American people who make this country the greatest Democracy in the world.
Secondly -- McCain has taken on as foreign policy advisers many of the same grossly incompetent, idiotic neo-con assholes that got this country embroiled in the Iraq fiasco to begin with and he has voiced unbridled support for Bush's disastrous Iraq policy. And for me what that boils down to is this -- whatever the foreign policy credibility level and boasts of experience which McCain has had by virtue of his military service and his stints in the Senate on the Armed Services Committee over the years is instantly negated and deflated when one reviews the lineup of his foreign policy advisers in 2008 and his position on the Iraq war policy overall. Quite frankly -- if McCain's foreign policy advisory team and his Iraq position were a movie it would be titled "Bush/Cheney - Fuck-Uppery, Part 2."
So -- in the end, and barring some last minute Billary shenanigans in the Dem race, it appears I will be pulling the voting lever for the Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, come November and I'm pretty fucking comfortable with that - thank you very much. Oh I know that is not a momentous shock to those of you who are familiar with my viewpoints, but here's something for you to contemplate -- if John McCain had maintained and strengthened half of the courage and conviction he displayed in his GOP nomination battle against George W. Bush back in 2000 my voting decision here in 2008 would have been alot more complicated and self-conflicting and would have been a decision requiring a much more intense level of thoughtful consideration on my part. As it is -- John McCain, by his own sell-out actions, has mercifully spared me the inner turmoil and that agonizing and gut wrenching decision which accompanies it.
----krazee
