JOHN McCAIN'S EXTREMISM JUST COST HIM A VOTE IN RURAL GEORGIA. PEOPLE NEED TO FIND OUT WHAT McCAIN REALLY STANDS FOR
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My friend Jeremy is from rural Georgia where, til he was 22, he never knew any better than to automatically support Republicans. He got brung up that way and his news sources were Sean Hannity and Fox "News." I met him a few years ago when he moved to L.A. He seemed dazed and confused but still stood up for the far right doggerel that he had been thoroughly brainwashed with. Today Jeremy considers himself a moderate, leaning a bit, albeit with a healthy dose of skepticism, towards the Democrats. He has long abandoned Bush, of course, but still has... "certain tendencies."
Friday he launched into a less rabid that usual attack on Hillary Clinton-- still a childhood bugaboo-- and asked me which Democrats could win. Eventually he concluded the best choice for president was probably John McCain. He, like many Americans, is laboring under the carefully crafted delusion that McCain is a "moderate."
"At least he supports Roe v Wade," offered Jeremy when I started explaining that McCain is a far right partisan Republican and nothing less. Overall, McCain's voting record is simply atrocious. But when it comes to protecting women's right to choice, he has a perfect score: ZERO. On every single roll call vote that involved family planning (both in terms of abortion and even in terms of contraception), McCain is not any less extreme than Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback or any frothing-at-the-mouth far right maniac. McCain has just been more successful in hiding it from the general public-- although he has gone out of his way-- dog-whistlin' away-- to make sure the hard core anti-choice fanatics know he's one of them.
Jeremy was dismayed. I don't know if anything will get him to stop thinking Hillary Clinton is Satan but I do know his infatuation with McCain is less reflexive and definitely in question. You can take almost any issue-- aside from torture (which could only be partisan in a world where someone of the calibre of George Bush winds up in the White House)-- and you will find that the reality of McCain is far, far to the right of the image of McCain.
Bill Scher, the always perceptive editor of The Liberal Oasis did an important blog for HUFF PO last year making the case for why John McCain is the most dangerous man in America. Scher's well-thought out essay concludes that "on the biggest issue of them all, the overall direction of our foreign policy, which affects the safety and stability of America and the world, John McCain is as right-wing as they come." Similarly, McCain is anything but a moderate when it comes to the far right's most hated of all programs (and America's most popular): Social Security. He's a firm supporter of privatization (i.e.- slow destruction) of Social Security.
Pick an issue, any issue, and look into McCain's record. Except for his semi-decent (but far from perfect) record on campaign financing, he's significantly to the right of the American public on everything!
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 12:20 PM
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Paul Krugman has weighed in on this very subject in his NYT column today:
March 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Right's Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.
Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us."
But now — at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger — Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.
When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.
Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.
When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.
The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.
The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.
What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo. President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.
And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.
So here's what you need to know about John McCain.
He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.
He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.
And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.
It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W. Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
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