"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Monday, April 20, 2009
Republicans Have No Plans, No Policies, Nothing... Except Sniping And Obstructionism-- Even On Torture
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In the immortal words of anti-health care fanatic, Texas numbskull Michael Burgess, from the sprawling suburbs north of Dallas-Ft Worth, “Senator McCain, for all his faults, had a program a year ago. People became pretty comfortable with McCain carrying the load on that and when he wasn’t successful in November, it left a big void.” The big void Burgess was talking about was the fact that the GOP has no health care policy-- unless you consider obstructionism and saying "no" to anything that helps ordinary American working families a policy.
But he could just as well have been talking about the Republican Party's foray into the torture debate. If we've been harsh on Obama, it's because he refuses to prosecute the criminal masterminds behind the torture regime. There's little else one could expect from Rahm Emanuel; but we had a right to expect more from Barack Obama. But, according to Emanuel, Obama has decided-- illegally-- to let the torturers and those who ordered torture off scott free. Seems like a departure from the pre-election Obama or am I wrong on that? Anyway, can I get my vote back?
Not that I'd have given it to McCain, whose only point of contention with Obama is that he should have covered up the evidence, not let American citizens know what our government did in our name-- policies that even he admits-- strongly-- made us far less safe as a nation. McCain:
All 99 senators were polled by The Hill today to determine which senators were the easiest and most difficult to work with. The 4 worst were, predictably, right-wing extremists Jim Bunning (R-KY), David Vitter (R-LA), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC). One Democratic senator called them “a bunch of 4-year-olds.” Unless it's about baseball, people would rather not even talk with Bunning about anything.
The Unexplored Character Issue-- Is John McCain Fit For Public Office At All?
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It would be no news at all to DWT readers that even if McCain escaped doing hard prison time for his Keating Five corruption, he certainly should have been kicked out of the revolting Gentleman's Club known as the United States Senate for accepting massive bribes from bank swindler and close family friend Charles Keating. Someone just told The New Republic, which is trumpeting exclusive evidence you've never heard. A little late to do any good and probably less effective than the right's Aunt Zeitini Onyango smearorama, which started at Murdoch's London Times and then got picked up moments later by Murdoch's Fox News (thanks, Bill Clinton!) and the less and less relevant Drudge. Soon the GOP bottom feeders thought Xmas had come early. These kinds of last minute revelations don't do much, other than motivate the base a bit. That said, let's get back to figuring out why McCain was never punished for his role in the bank swindle that cost American taxpayers billions of dollars and is never held accountable for any of the crap that would have ended almost anyone else's political career-- or do you think Auntie Zeitini is more relevant to something?
The Keating Five Scandal is not just about McCain's "poor judgment" (as he likes to paint it) or about the unpleasantness of too much deregulation (as the media has painted it of late); it's about McCain, the crooked political hack who gets away with everything always-- and how he does it.
One day in early March 1986, John McCain, an Arizona congressman, sat down to write a letter. McCain had heard that a long-time friend and donor, Charles Keating, was upset for being listed as a member of McCain's campaign finance committee when a more prominent position would seem more appropriate. So McCain apologized. Needlessly it turned out, for "Charlie," as he signed his letter, would reply a few days later: "John, don't be silly. You can call me anything...I'm yours until death do us part."
Three years later, McCain and four other senators would be called to the carpet for this loyalty, which was accompanied by a total of $1.3 million in contributions from Keating. Senators Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, John McCain, and Donald Riegle were being investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee for helping Keating's company, Lincoln Savings and Loan, resist regulators. That lack of regulation precipitated Lincoln's collapse that year--part of the larger savings-and-loan collapse--at a cost of about $3 billion to the federal government.
The 14th month Senate Ethics Committee whitewash gave McCain a wrist slap. The committee has always been a bipartisan tool set up by senators to protect themselves. As far as the Ethics Committee is concerned, convicted felon Ted Stevens is a member in good standing and as worthy as... John McCain. But the whitewash was not the only investigation into McCain's bribery scandal.
There were two other probes at the time that got barely any public attention--both of which largely focused on McCain himself. These were probes into illicit leaks about the proceedings of the Ethics Committee--leaks that repeatedly benefited McCain and hurt his Keating Five colleagues. One of those senators described the leaks at the time as a "violation of ethical behavior at least as serious as anything of which we senators have been accused."
The leaks, if they were coming from a senator, were also illegal. All five senators--including McCain--had testified under oath and under the U.S. penal code that the leaks did not come from their camps. The leaks were also prohibited by rules of the Senate Ethics Committee; according to the rules of the Senate, anyone caught leaking such information could face expulsion from the body. These, then, were not the usual Washington disclosures: Discovered, they could have stopped the career of any Washington politician in his tracks.
The two investigations into the leaks suggested McCain's involvement but were officially inconclusive. New evidence, obtained in recent weeks, again points back to the McCain camp. The investigator of those leaks now says that he does not doubt that they came from McCain or his team. A reporter who possessed evidence in the Keating case now says he believes that McCain was the source and got away with it. Finally, a senator who has emerged as a key backer of McCain's presidential campaign turns out to have authored a letter stating flatly that McCain was the source of the damning leaks. Put together, a large record of evidence now points in the direction of Senator McCain. Far from McCain's reputation of putting "country first," these leaks depict a formidable politician willing to go through great lengths to maintain his standing. More than McCain's relationship with Keating, it is the story of the Keating investigation leaks that voters should know.
...Essentially, the leaks deflected public attention away from McCain and toward his colleagues. One leak, the week of DeConcini and Riegle's appearances before the Committee in October, 1990, described the probe against them as having "broadened," and accused Riegle, then Banking Committee chairman, of improper regulatory intervention. Neither part was true, yet the leak ricocheted in the press instantly. One headline from the Washington Post blared, "Panel Reveals Riegle-Keating Meetings; Senator Said to Have Maintained Contact After Start of S&L Probe," and another from the Los Angeles Times read, "Panel Action is Seen as Prelude to a Full-Scale Investigation of Sens. Cranston, DeConcini and Riegle." Meanwhile, approval ratings for Riegle and DeConcini began to tank in their home states. Later on, the leaks investigation would conclude that the leak "[could] only be described" as an attempt to "influence the deliberations on DeConcini and Riegle."
The "character issue" in this election hasn't even been seriously looked at. McCain's character was masterfully painted by his hype machine to leave out all the reams of unpleasantness and concentrate on the self-serving fairytale of his service in Vietnam. John McCain isn't fit to hold any public office, let alone the presidency.
That said... this might be worth paying a little attention to and retaining for the next couple of days-- just in case the Republicans plan to fly in the face of every indication of a massive landslide and actually steal another one:
The World Is Not 100% Behind Obama-- But Damn Close
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A friend of mine is running for Congress and his campaign has been doing weekly tracking polls. He told me that he has the support of 100% of African American voters in the district-- 100%. I never saw anyone get 100% in any election anywhere, not even in the fake elections they used to have in the Soviet Union or in Third World military dictatorships. So I've been really impressed with this never-changing tracking poll stat.
But a day or two ago I was listening to NPR and they mentioned that the Economist.com has an interact map that shows the polling data internationally on McCain and Obama. The map is fun and you should click the link and check it out. Most of it isn't surprising: basically the whole world, including the U.S. and every single country in North America and Europe is strongly in favor of Obama (except rump countrilettes Macedonia, which leans McCain, and Moldova and Slovakia which lean Obama in Europe and Cuba, also leaning McCain). As for their ancestral homes, McCain's Britain favors Obama (89-11%) and Obama's Kenya favors Obama (97-3%). Obama lived in Indonesia for a few years when he was a child and the folks there favor him 96-4%. McCain was born and raised in Panama and the people there favor Obama 79-21%). I was actually surprised to see that Israel strongly favors Obama (70-30%) and that Iraq is the only country in the world strongly favoring McCain (75-25%). Afghanistan goes 89-11% for Obama.
What I was looking for though was to see if there were any countries that replicated the 100% that my friend the soon-to-be-congressman was finding. And there are two! Haiti and Cameroon are 100% for Obama! The other stat I was looking for was Vietnam. After all, a huge part of the McCain myth was manufactured in and about Vietnam and they have his old flight uniform on display and he's handed out senatorial cuff links to his former captors and guards and to a woman who once claimed she once popped him with a hoe. She may be supporting his attempt to become president but most people in Nam, just like most people in every single Asian country except Iraq and Georgia (which leans McCain), is strongly for Obama, 85-15%. Today's Times, the one in London where they care about this far away little countries, carries a feature centered around Tran Trong Duyet, a pro-McCain guy who used to run the Hanoi Hilton (McCain's prison). The story confirms what most people who refused to take McCain's word for what actually happened there have long figured: he made the whole torture thing up as part of the myth building. McCain's lies, just accepted at face value, but never anything more than an excuse for signing a confession about war crimes:
“I was hauled into an empty room and kept there for four days. At intervals, the guards returned to administer beatings. One held me while the others pounded away. They cracked several of my ribs and broke a couple of teeth. Weakened by beatings and dysentery, with my right leg again almost useless, I found it impossible to stand.
“On the third night I lay in my blood and waste, so tired and hurt that I could not move. Three guards lifted me to my feet and gave me the worst beating yet. They left me on the floor moaning from the pain in my arm. Despairing of any relief from pain and further torture, I tried to take my life.”
After the election I'm flying to Dakar in Senegal and then going hiking in the Dogone country of Mali. Mali has no dog in this fight one way or the other and the Dogones have no electricity and no way of knowing who either McCain or Obama is but prosperous and Democratic little Senegal-- unlike savage hellholes like McCain-leaning Sudan and the Congo-- is strong for Obama (77-23%).
John McCain has a problem. Most people think it is because he is a cranky old man, but that is not the case. His behavior is now and always has been that of an adolescent male stuck in his teens, a time when young men decide in order to be men, they must claim they can do anything at anytime anywhere and do it better than you. John McCain is stuck in a developmental stage which is the one our sons go through where they know more than us. My sons went through that. I remember when every conversation with Dad became a debate instead of a conversation. There was no warning them. There was no cautioning them about important things such as vehicle maintenance, work ethic, and any number of issues. They knew best. How dare we question them? It was annoying at the least to hear the young men crow knowing they didn’t know squat and they had no perspective.
John McCain has a past much the same as George Bush. He was a careless partying flyboy. He was the son of an Admiral and was given special treatment. But, he was a POW you say? We will get to that. Let us just think for a few minutes about McCain and his MO throughout his life discounting the years he was a prisoner of war.
In his youth John was a handsome young man who dated models and beauties. He had a girl girls in every port it seems. When John came back from the war, he found out his model wife had been in an accident and was no longer the beauty he deserved to be associated with, no she was just a regular gal now sacrificing for the good of her prisoner husband by not wanting to burden him with her serious injuries. It gets worse. He then takes up with other women. No, Cindy was the not the first and only indiscretion of John during this time. He felt entitled, evidently, by his past habits of privilege? We don’t know for sure, but his upbringing in a family of power and privilege seems to be a determining factor in his attitude, not his stint as a POW. John was able to leave wife and family high and dry and, of course, his explanation now is that stint as a POW. He was entitled to be wild and free for a bit. No responsibility. He was owed!
Cindy McCain was no regular gal either. She herself was a beauty queen. See a pattern? There are speculations that John has not been faithful to Cindy McCain either. It is well known that John likes the pretty ones, the beauties. Consider Sarah Palin another beauty pageant reject. Yes, Sarah Palin is the side kick that a flyboy like John McCain loves to hang with. What kids doesn’t want to hang out with the cute girls.
That is personal, you say. That does not count. Ok. In McCain’s professional life as a “servant of the public” he has repeatedly lined his own pockets. The Keating Five scandal gives us insight into McCain’s standard operating procedure. John will do anything to make a buck and to acquire power. He is no stranger to strange bedfellows. He was not only involved the Keating Five scandal, but he has been linked to mafia figures in Arizona. McCain has not been forthright about his involvement in the hate group, the World Anti-Communist League that has been linked to death squads in Central America.
McCain feels no compunction to reveal his true self. He hides behind his “Maverick” (adolescent playboy, tough guy, immaturity?) image. His campaign has taken on a Pee Wee Herman air. “I know you are, but what am I?” It is painfully obvious that every accusation leveled by the McCain camp toward Obama is a fundamental truth about McCain himself. Cindy McCain says that Obama, “has run the dirtiest campaign in American history.” Really, Cindy? You mean all those talking heads have missed the point that Obama is being mean? The truth is that day after day they opine on how Obama needs to get tough, that he is too nice.
The McCain camp accuses Obama of being a terrorist or at least one who lacks judgment about his radical ties when it is McCain/Palin who have the radical ties. Not incidental ties, but purposeful ties and memberships in organizations full of hate and venom for this country and for it ideals. Sarah Palin’s husband belonged to the an Alaskan Secessionist group whose members claimed hatred for America. John McCain had a hand in the Iran Contra scandal which was clearly not legal or “American.” Yet, they accuse Barack Obama of terrorist friends.
Sarah and John have no problem bringing up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright while their connections with the clergy are every bit as dodgy if not more so. Consider Pastor Muthee who drove a woman from a village after accusing her of being a witch guilty of causing all kinds of evil that happened in the community. His special prayers, it is claimed by Sarah herself were in large part responsible for making her Governor of Alaska. Consider John’s connection with Pastor John Haggee, a religious right nutcase who engages in hate speech so regularly that if one were to document it all it would require the Library of Congress to hold it all. If Barack Obama is guilty by association, then McCain and Palin are doubly so for seeking out such associations. When they accuse Obama of being shadowy one must consider the despicable motivations of “end times” Christians embracing Israel while secretly hating Jews.
Now that there is an economic crisis, John McCain has abandoned his original critical error of claiming the GOP economy is fundamentally strong. He has adopted the more reasoned stance of Barack Obama, the one that embraces reality.
No, John McCain is not a cranky old man. No, he is not a serious man who has an issue with his temper. John McCain is a teenage son of privilege and entitlement in an old man’s body. And, not just any old man, an old man who has failed to reach his goals at the end of a long life he has squandered pandering to his own immature nature. John McCain has trouble understanding why we do not believe him when he claims “I know how to do it!” He cannot understand why we will not accept him as a reformed deregulator. He scowls. He throws his tantrum and will not look at his opponent. McCain is no Maverick. Mc Cain is an errant child who insists we give him adult status simply on the basis of his POW status, a status that did nothing to make him more considerate of others. No, if anything this experience seems to have frozen him forever in that stage of his development. Grow up, he did not. When he came home, he continued to think only of himself, not his family. When he “served” in the US Senate, he thought of lining his own pockets, not ours. No, John McCain has not changed, he is the same old spoiled brat who is now stomping his foot on the national stage insisting we honor his adolescent empty boastings.
No thanks, John. I would tell you what I told my sons struggling to reach adult credibility, that experience would be a great teacher, that they would have time to learn for real how to solve problems. I would tell you those things, but considering your age and your experience, I would say that ship has sailed. Sorry, John. I am going to vote for the adult, Barack Obama, who displaying much courage is running on real solutions and on real team work and real concern for Americans of all stripes.
In case you were wondering what mixed up, confused old McCain has on his mind all the time:
McCain Was A Worse Pilot Than Bush-- And, Yes, He'd Be A Worse President Too
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Holiday in Cambodia Turtle Island
Many Democrats and independents have been thinking how much better-- and more Mavericky-- McCain is than your run of the mill Republican and, buying into the well-greased multi-million dollar hype machine that has been at work 24/7 for decades, there is some thought that McCain is somehow "better," or at least less dangerous, than Republicans like Bush, Cheney, and the menagerie of political midgets he beat to win the primary. That would be faulty thinking. There is nothing that has come shooting out at us from the deep, dark bowels of the Republican Party as bad as John McCain.
Put aside for a moment the virtually lockstep rubber stamp voting record, craftily disguised to appear semi-independent on a rare much-ballyhooed occasion or two. And forget for a moment the staggering contempt he must feel for all of us to have, at 72 and gravely ill, named an utterly unqualified and inexperienced small town bigot from Alaska his political successor. (And if it isn't contempt, my friends, then it is surely judgment so egregiously bad as to disqualify him.) Instead let's look at the man who would be president.
Yesterday a Professor of Classic Literature & Arts, Mary-Kay Gamel, stepped forward and gave the kind of powerful personal account of a vacation she had spent with the McCains earlier in the decade. This is not a decent man. This is not a stable man. This is not what his hype machine presents to the American people. I recommend you read Professor Gamel's entire post. Some highlights:
I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: "Oh, that was Cindy's idea-- I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona.
No, it wasn't my idea at all."
I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, "If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson." Given McCain's personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view.
I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII-- but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan.
It was courageous of Professor Gamel to come forward and testify about the Real McCain. I hope it isn't too late and I hope it won't get lost in the shuffle and hype. Tim Dickinson's revelations about McCain, the make-believe Maverick in the latest issue of Rolling Stone may not have the emotional content of Professor Gamel's story, but it is something every American heading for the polling both in November ought to read and consider carefully. Dickinson makes a powerful effort to unmask the real John McCain, "the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather."
In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
...In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."
As more and more people start to grapple with who exactly the real McCain is, his poll ratings plummet. Today polls in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania show him trailing Obama so significantly that people are starting to use the word "landslide" again.
Even when a member of the elite media insiders who McCain has cultivated so assiduously over the years, Maureen Dowd, slipped up and let a bit of the cat out of the bag about what kind of a man McCain really is ("a long-tailed rat" who has continued to shamelessly flash "the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated") an enraged and out of control McCain kicked her off his plane in Pittsburgh and told her to walk home, crowing about her humiliation as a way of showing how independent he is of the very media he used to build his fake reputation. Many members of the media are sorry now that they've been part of the McCain hype machine and have helped cover up the real man and create a myth than many Americans have bought into. This isn't part of the myth:
A (mc)cranky thought for the day: Say, didja hear that Young Johnny McC was once a POW?
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Just kidding. Of course you've heard about Johnny "A Noun, a Verb, and POW" McCranky having been a POW. If for no other reason than that he mentions it roughly every time he opens his mouth. Apparently even as skilled a liar as the Crankyman can't make up enough whoppers fast enough to fill all that time when his gums are flapping.
What's more, the jackals and hyenas who mastermind and promote his campaign usually manage to work it into every sentence. As Frank Rich pointed out a few weeks ago, McCranky's POW-dom is the one thing Americans know about him which is actually more or less true.
Now, no one will tell you more often or at greater length than the Crankyman himself how badly he doesn't want to talk about having been a POW. Why, he reminds us of this most every time he talks about having been a POW. And this is totally understandable. In addition to those being surely painful memories, Young Johnny would surely never wish to cheapen his captivity by exploiting it for sleazy political gain. Bravo, Young Johnny!
This thought only just occurred to me, and I offer it as a cheery thought for the day:
Can you imagine what it would be like if Young Johnny did want to talk about his POW experience?
Is John McCain An Honorable And Trustworthy Man? I Mean, He Was A POW
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I missed the video they showed at the St Paul HateFest last night before McCain spoke. I bet it didn't capture his essence as a political figure and as a man as well as this one does:
And if that wasn't enough for you, take a listen to a tape of McCain asking Sandra Palin to be his running mate.
McCain Decides To Compete In The Celebrity Arena-- Gets The Nod From Daddy Yankee And Half of Big & Rich (The Gay Bashing Half, Of Course)
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"Can you sing 'Dancing Queen?'"
Today John McCain, apparently thinking he was about to get another $1,394,033 check from Big Oil and Gas, accepted the endorsement from "Gasolina" singer Ramon Ayala (p.k.a.- Daddy Yankee). McCain, an Abba fan, has also been endorsed by half of country duo, Big & Rich, John Rich, whose previous political foray was a vicious homophobic tirade coupled with an endorsement of McCain's then-rival, the hapless Fred Thompson. He's now recorded a catchy ditty called "Raisin' McCain," which tries helping McCain further exploit his POW experience in Hanoi-- one thing McCain doesn't need any help doing. In fact, right after accepting his endorsement from Daddy Yankee, McCain flew off to Hollywood for his 900th celebrity appearance on Jay Leno's show. There he again shamelessly played the "I was a prisoner of war" card to try to garner sympathy and take the spotlight off another in an embarrassing series of bumbling gaffes:
Leno: "For a million dollars, how many houses do you have?"
McCain: "Could I just mention to you, Jay, that, at a moment of seriousness. I spent five-and-a-half years in a prison cell. I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair."
He then went on the sing to praises of the millionaire mobster and jailbird, his father-in-law, who's bootlegging business and Mafia connections bought McCain every single one of the 13 houses he owns.
Now Daddy Yankee, who isn't eligible to vote in presidential elections, is no Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, Nas, or John Legend, all outspoken Obama supporters. But the endorsement certainly got some of the crazier extremists in the crumbling GOP coalition hopping mad. God only knows what Dobson and Company think of Daddy Yankee's family-unfriendly, sexually suggestive act-- and "Gasolina" is not about "drill here now," (unless you mean drilling in a... colloquial sense). But extreme right, out-of-kilter GOP blogger Michelle Malkin was howling at the moon when she saw McCain and Daddy Yankee together.
Can someone, anyone, in the McCain camp stop him from self-immolation? Can the open-borders GOP establishment drive a bigger wedge between the conservative base and the GOP ticket?
Last week, it was the RNC ad touting McCain’s shamnesty superiority over Obama. Today, it’s McCain goofily, stupidly, standing with Puerto Rican singer Daddy Yankee for the all-important reggaeton vote while teenagers squealed. Celeb-u-pocrisy, anyone? The singer, whose real name is Ramon Ayala, singled out McCain’s sponsorship of the shamnesty bill as the reason for his endorsement:
“He’s been a fighter for the Hispanic community and I know that, me personally, I’m choosing the best candidate, because he’s been a fighter for the immigration issues,” Ayala said. “So, for me, he’s the best guy to lead this nation.”
Desperately seeking a coolness boost, McCain lapped it up: “I just wanna say thank you, Daddy Yankee,” McCain said.
John McCain's Ideas Of A Role Model And The American Dream
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When McCain first ran for the House, he won for two reasons: his father-in-law's great wealth and connections and his ability to exploit his POW status. McCain's father-in-law and his friends-- many of whom were criminals (as we will examine below)-- and not just the white collar kind, like Charles Keating who has bragged about bribing McCain. (McCain got far more from Keating than any of the other Keating 5. "Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.")
When McCain was challenged in his first race for being a carpetbagger and not living in the district, he viciously turned the tables on the Republican state legislator who had pointed it out by bringing up how he had been living at the Hanoi Hilton. It worked; even his opponent cried when he heard it! And he's never stopped milking it. In his 2002 book Worth the Fighting For, the ghost writer quotes McCain admitting: "Thanks to my prisoner of war experience, I had, as they say in politics, a good first story to sell." He's still selling it and hoping it will take him all the way to the White House.
I rarely pay any attention to Maureen Dowd but in yesterday's NY Times she told a story the media has been complicit in covering up: how McCain constantly manipulates audiences with his POW tales. McCain's "brutal hiatus in the Hanoi Hilton," she writes, "is one of the most stirring narratives ever told on the presidential trail-- a trail full of heroic war stories."
So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength-- and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience-- by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”
When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”
When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years-- in prison.”
As Sam Stein notes in the Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”
As for the crooked father-in-law, McCain tried using his military service to clobber his enemies yesterday too. When a reporter started straying into a place McCain doesn't like-- that, through marriage, he is a multi-millionaire and completely out of touch with the lives of everyday Americans, he got very defensive:
I am grateful for the fact that I have a wonderful life. I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it's like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation. Cindy's father, who barely finished high school, went off and distinguished himself in World War II in a B-17 and came back with practically nothing and realized the American dream, and I am proud and grateful for that, and I think he is a role model to many young Americans who serve in the military and come back and succeed.
“So the fact is that we have homes, and I'm grateful for it... I'll continue to say I am blessed and very proud that Jim Hensley, a war hero, a man who barely graduated from high school, was able to pass on to his daughter what he struggled for and saved for. That's the ambition that all of us have for our children and grandchildren. If someone wants to disparage that, they are free to do that."
Like McCain himself, Hensley was a crook and a cheat-- a role model? Maybe for gangsters and other Republicans who think the rules are for suckers. Phoenix's New Times put the myth about Hensley being a legitimate businessman to bed many years ago. The New Times story was more an investigation into why McCain gets more contributions from the liquor industry than anyone else in the Senate-- this year they've coughed up $384,110 for their boy and they've given him $644,630 since he was first elected-- but they went into the family history as well, and how Hensley started down the road to so many homes for his daughter as a gangster and bootlegger.
Until McCain dumped his first wife for Cindy he had never earned more than a respectable $45,000 a year. Now he claims a networth of $36 million, although Cindy's is several hundred million. The story "examines the roots of the Hensley fortune and John McCain's implacable bond to the liquor industry -- how it has enriched him personally and as a politician, and how those ties have dictated his actions on questions of public policy... The Hensley saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger... [A] 1948 federal criminal indictment charged, the Hensleys made approximately 1,284 false entries related to the sale of thousands of cases of liquor by their two companies-- United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson."
McCain's father-in-law was convicted on seven counts of filing false liquor records and on much more serious federal conspiracy charge. Hensley refused to testify and was sentenced to 6 months in prison. Strings were pulled and he didn't serve much time, even though he lost his appeal. Henlsey, the one McCain calls a role model, was a henchman for a bigtime mobster who had a reporter murdered and also took out a hit on then Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt. It's amazing that national journalists cover this story up so thoroughly even though the car Hensley's boss had blown to bits (with the journalist inside) is on display in DC at the Newseum.
