IS JOHN MCCAIN FIT TO BE PRESIDENT? NOT UNLESS YOU WANT MORE FAR RIGHT POLITICAL BULLSHIT IN WASHINGTON

John McCain will do anything to become president. And many people think he would be a welcome respite after 8 years of a neo-fascist/neo-Con/neo lunacy Bush regime. Even progressives, and especially independents are laboring under the carefully cultivated delusion that McCain is something other than a hard right partisan hack. But even a cursory examination of his voting record, shows an extreme right-wing partisan, not a mainstream moderate or independent.

It is also somewhat ironic that McCain attached himself to Russ Feingold's campaign finance legislation (watering it down significantly even as he grabbed most of the credit in the dim mind of the public) since the need for real campaign finance legislation was shown viscerally by McCain's own brush with the law and the Senate Ethics Committee.

Back in 2000, Rove, as operative-in-chief for the Bush campaign, was running around reminding anyone who would listen, especially in South Carolina, that McCain is a crook. McCain himself acknowledged the problem, telling reporters that what became known as the Keating 5 Scandal "will probably be on my tombstone." This starts back in 1987 just after McCain won his first term in the Senate-- with the help of crooked Republican banker Frank Keating (who was eventually convicted of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and went to prison). When McCain, who facilitated Keating's criminal activities, was hauled before the Senate Ethics Committee he claimed he didn't do anything wrong (just like Cunningham and Ney and DeLay and all the other Republicrooks always claim) and said he intervened on Keating's behalf with bank regulators only because he was a constituent. He didn't mention they had been friends since 1981. He didn't mention Keating donated over $100,000 to his political campaigns. He didn't mention Keating used to pay for McCain and his family to vacation in the Bahamas. Oh, and he didn't mention that through his wife he had invested over $350,000 in one of Keating's shady real estate deals. Rove didn't press the scandal when the Bush Family reminded him that this would remind everyone about the candidate's crooked brother Neil the bankrobber Bush, who, like McCain and Keating, cost taxpayers billionsof dollars.

So now, with the public almost completely unaware of the very-much rewritten history of the Keating 5 Scandal (McCain "exonerated" for just "bad judgment" instead of bribery), McCain has been made to look like he is a champion of reform. It's a real laugh-- unless he becomes president; then it's be a real tragedy.

Now, back to his far right voting record. Interest groups rate all members of the Congress based on how often they support or oppose the issues most important to the special interest that group represents. The John Birch Society, for example gave Senator McCain a 90% rating in 2004. It is hard to stay within the bounds of the law and go further into right-wing extremism than the John Birchers. (These are the crew that accused President Eisenhower and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren of being "conscious agents of Communism." But they love McCain-- or at least the way he votes.) But they don't love him as much as Phyllis Schlafly's extremist hate group, the Eagle Forum does. For 2004 McCain got a 100% rating by these extremist kooks and vicious hate mongers. The theocratic Christian Coalition, whose fondest wish is to destroy all barriers between Church and State, rated McCain a nice healthy 83% in 2004. And the crazy anti-choice loons at Concerned Women For America have him a 100% rating for 2003-2004, as did the crackpot anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council. Predictably, progressive public interest groups don't rate him as highly as the right-wing hate groups do. The non-partisan U.S. Public Interest Research Group gave him a feeble 45% in 2004 and the progressive National Committee for an Effective Congress, founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, rated him a dismal 10%.

McCain is a right-wing bucket of partisan slime with a very good press office. He's probably the only Republican who could beat a Democrat in 2008. He shouldn't be looked at so benignly, especially because he hasn't learned any of the lessons he should have from the bribery and corruption scandal he got away with so easily. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies affected by the committee's work, and he has repeatedly been criticized for intervening with regulators-- which is what got him in trouble in the Keating affair-- on behalf of businesses which give him huge contributions. He isn't honest. He isn't a reformer. He isn't independent. He isn't moderate.

But he's better than Bush... right? It would be hard not to be. But, in a headlong attempt to curry favor with BushCo's extreme right base (the basest of the base), he is doing whatever it takes-- from endorsing and campaigning for extreme right-wing candidates (like Kenneth Blackwell, the corrupt Secretary of State of Ohio, now running for governor, who stole the 2004 election for Bush) to using his clout to defame an actual straight talker and actual fighting war hero, Jack Murtha, who wants to get us out of Iraq (unlike McCain who says we need to send in moretroops). Last Sunday he went on TV and attacked Murtha as being "too emotional." In the NEW REPUBLIC he dripped condescending viciousness: Jack Murtha is “a lovable guy,” but “he’s never been a big thinker; he’s an appropriator... “As we get older, we get more sentimental. And [Murtha] has been very, very affected by the funerals and the families. But you cannot let that affect the way you decide policy.” Not only is this crap not nice, it is patently false and misleading. Murtha has been preferred by every single U.S. president-- both Republican and Democrat-- over McCain for serious military advise, all of whom have seen McCain as an amiable buffoon at best and an unreliable loose cannon and nothing more than hot air.

(The art department did a bang-up job on the photo of McCain in the basement of the House with his pals. It's worth double-clicking on it so you don't miss any of the subtle parts.)


MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: McCAIN STRATEGY TO NEUTRALIZE GIULIANI

The right-wing news site, NEWSMAX ran a story today about a possible battle shaping up between McCain and Giuliani and how each is trying to out extremist-loon the other. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed Giuliani would win a primary battle, beating McCain, 34% to 31%. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 Republicans say they wouldn't vote for McCain under any circumstances. McCain is countering this by re-creating himself-- the way Madonna always does-- as the rightful heir to Bush's extreme right-wing mantle, and by pointing out Giuliani's mainstream positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control.