HOW MUCH BETTER THAN BUSH IS JOHN McCAIN? NOT MUCH, NOT MUCH AT ALL

John McCain says he would like to be President of the United States. He's less than enthusiastic about campaigning for office however. And after the horribly vicious beating he took from Rove and BushCheney in 2000, who could blame him? But, as much as the media would like us to believe that McCain's whole problem is winning the Republican primary, that is only part of what would make it very difficult for McCain to ever get to live in the White House.

Largely because of Rove, the GOP base does distrust McCain. True, he's against torture and, at least compared to most Republican politicians, seems to favor democracy, but otherwise he pretty much is very much in sync with the agenda of the radical right. I mean this whole "McCain as moderate" is fantasy, partially driven by relativity (sure compare someone to Hitler, Mussolini, Cheney, Santorum or Pat Robertson and a case could be made that they're a moderate) and partially driven by wishful thinking-- a Republican who could, like Snowe, Collins, Chafee, vote with progressives to stop the extremist Bush onslaught or this or that. But, when push comes to shove, he pretty much always is right there with the extremists... onslaughting.

One of the furthest right of any legal organized hate group is Phyllis Schafly's Eagle Forum, the U.S. version of a nascent Nazi Party. They don't rate McCain's record at 90% or 95% or eve 99%. McCain gets a perfect 100% from the furthest right group of political nutcases in America.
Is he a religionist loon? I doubt it but he votes like one. He certainly says he favors teaching creationism in schools (which alone should disqualify him from consideration for anyone sane and serious).

Gays seem to like him for a moderate stance he once took and he does seem unlikely to favor putting gays in concentration camps any time soon but he's not only against gay marriage, he opposes civil unions (which, just seek to give gay couples some kind of common sense legal status).

He voted with the hard right minority to convict President Clinton of spurious, trumped up charges, concocted to distract him from making progressive changes in America. And when it comes to abortion, he's unequivocally anti-choice, as bad as any of the neo-Nazi loons sniffing around the GOP primary race-- like Brownback, Allen, Santorum or Frist. Like the Eagle Forum, NARAL Pro-Choice America gives him a perfect score too-- a perfect zero.

Tax cuts for the rich (aka- redistribution of wealth from the working and middle class to the corporations and multimillionaires)? These days, McCain is 100% there: today there's never a tax cut favoring the rich he didn't love and he never met an increase in the minimum wage he could support.

And as for Iraq-- he may be less incompetent and less corrupt that Bush-- we don't know-- but he certainly is as much an imperialistic piece of crap. In fact, like the gaggle of right wing Democrats seeking the presidency (from Hillary to Biden to Clark to Bayh), McCain favors sending in more troops to win what is unwinable, not ending the occupation.

Doesn't sound like a pretty record, does it? One you want to support? But conventional wisdom shows him moving even further right to burnish his bona fides with the radical right which still doesn't trust him (basically because Rove, Norquist and the Amen Choir, all of whom he is now courting, told them not to). Keep in mind, the GOP primaries are utterly controlled by the far far religionist right these days. To win the primaries, a Republican has to please a paranoid and savage-- some would say crazy base indeed. After years of Bush and all the catastrophes his regime has inflicted on America (and the world), can anyone overtly appealing to WingNutia not alienate mainstream voters? And McCain really is trying to run as an extension of Bush (minus torture). "I'm extremely popular," he told the NEW YORKER recently; "it's some of the party apparatchiks who still harbor bad feelings toward me. But it is a little hard for them to do that now, because of my strong support for Bush." Yeah... that and the fact that a- he may be the only Republican who could win a general election in 2008, and b- he's signing all the apparatachiks up he can for his own campaign.

Once McCain pleased moderates and normal Americans by accurately denouncing neo-fascist religionist Jerry Falwell as one of the "peddlers of intolerance" that afflicts the modern Republican Party. Now he's courting Falwell and seeking his support. Is Falwell less intolerant? Less reactionary? Less into peddling hatred and bigotry? No; in fact Falwell is much worse now than he was when McCain denounced him.

Well, at least he's not going to subvert democracy the way Bush did, rigging and stealing elections and undermining the rights to vote, or vote meaningfully, for huge segments of the population... right? Well, the McCain/Feingold Act has his name on it, true. But, at heart McCain is a highly partisan Republican who will support whatever it takes to for the political Right to win. Recently he endorsed Ohio Secretary of State/2004 vote-rigger Ken Blackwell in his quest to be an even worse governor than Bob Taft (currently rated as the worst governor of any state since polling was invented). And here in California we saw him stick his nose into the highly unpopular Schwarzenegger propositions, making tv ads to urge people to vote for all of Schwarzenegger's highly partisan, uber-reactionary proposals. They all lost-- BIG. And McCain's luster in the biggest state in the nation was considerably diminished.

McCain's express train is headlong into a campaign to court the worst fringe elements of the Far Right. Last week he weighed in for George Wallace, Jr in the Republican primary in Alabama (where Wallace, every bit as much a vicious, unreconstructed racist as his father, is running for Lieutenant Governor). I'm not saying that McCain accompanied Wallace to any Klan meetings, but that's not why Wallace brought him into the state. Wallace-- the darling of what they now call the CCC-- has the KKK vote nicely tied up. He wanted McCain to give him an aura of respectability among suburban Alabama Republicans who aren't White Citizens Council types. 5 years ago McCain chastised Bush for speaking at Bob Jones "University." Last week McCain was campaigning for the virtual grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Is this an honest and sincere man who progressives can feel good about? I don't think so.