Joe Klein Claims McCain Is Not A Crook, Not Breaking Any Laws, But...

In commenting on today's shocking story in the NY Times about McCain's ties to the gambling industry, Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes that McCain isn't actually breaking any laws. What he leaves out is that McCain and the rest of the crooked members of Congress write the laws to make their own patterns of behavior "legal." Keep in mind, for example, that so far this year Big Oil has "donated" $22,543,340 to members of Congress, almost all of it to Republicans and to nominal Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (DNC and Blue Dog garbage like Dan Boren and Mary Landrieu). McCain, who is Big Oil's great white hope for a continuation of the policies that have enslaved American workers and consumers to their whims (and high prices), has accepted $1,663,590 from them. Even though these gargantuan sums-- more than the combined contributions Big Oil has made to their half dozen most devoted Republican shills who always push their agenda, John Cornyn (R-TX- $535,200), Steve Peace (R-NM- $283,034), James Inhofe (R-OK- $270,050), Miss McConnell (R-KY- $238,000), Pat Roberts (R-KS- $148,700), and Joe Barton (R- $146,441)-- are clearly bribes, the way Congress has written the bribery statutes, there is nothing illegal about McCain being financed by Big Oil, by lobbyists ($843,216 this year alone), by the booze industry ($466,036, their favorite member of Congress by far), by the crooks who brought us the mortgage crisis and Wall Street Meltdown (over $30,000,000) ... or by the gambling industry ($260,025). But...

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

...Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests-- including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

By attacking the Times, which endorsed McCain in the primary and has given him years of unwarranted heroic coverage, as being biased against him, McCain has been able to bully them into pulling their punches against him over and over. For example, they refer to his disgraceful role in whitewashing his Senate colleagues in the Abramoff scandal as burnishing his image as a reformer. McCain's committee would have us believe that Abramoff was a horrible briber-- which is true-- but that he bribed... no one in the Senate. McCain is a crook and has been from the very beginning of his career. He's taken and continues to take, immense sums of money from special interests to vote for their initiatives at the expense of the taxpayers. The media, including the Times thinks nothing of regurgitating his hype machine's epic deceptions. Finally, the Times has started doing its job in exposing some of McCain's hypocrisy:

... interviews and records show that lobbyists and political operatives in Mr. McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention-- and then cashed in on the resulting investigation. The senator’s longtime chief political strategist, for example, was paid $100,000 over four months as a consultant to one tribe caught up in the inquiry, records show.

McCain, of course, claims he stands up selflessly for Indians at grave risk to his career, exactly what he claims, blinking furiously, whenever he's caught with his greasy fingers in the cookie jar. But as public support for tribal casinos has diminished, Senator Selflessness has backed away. "But he has rarely wavered in his loyalty to Las Vegas, where he counts casino executives among his close friends and most prolific fund-raisers," some of whom have raised millions of dollars for McCain's efforts to capture the White House. No one expects McCain to turn the White House into a casino but "in May 2007, as Mr. McCain’s presidential bid was floundering, he spent a weekend at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. A fund-raiser hosted by J. Terrence Lanni, the casino’s top executive and a longtime friend of the senator, raised $400,000 for his campaign. Afterward, Mr. McCain attended a boxing match and hit the craps tables."

DWT has covered McCain's serious gambling addiction before. The Times had steered clear until today, although they soft-peddle the seriousness of his behavior.

For much of his adult life, Mr. McCain has gambled as often as once a month, friends and associates said, traveling to Las Vegas for weekend betting marathons. Former senior campaign officials said they worried about Mr. McCain’s patronage of casinos, given the power he wields over the industry. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We were always concerned about appearances,” one former official said. “If you go around saying that appearances matter, then they matter.”

The former official said he would tell Mr. McCain: “Do we really have to go to a casino? I don’t think it’s a good idea. The base doesn’t like it. It doesn’t look good. And good things don’t happen in casinos at midnight.”

“You worry too much,” Mr. McCain would respond, the official said.

Now, back to Joe Klein. "We've known for months," he writes, "that McCain was a high-rolling craps player. What we didn't know about was his extensive ties to the lobbyists who work the Indian gambling issue, his willingness to do their bidding, take their money and advice. There is nothing illegal here. McCain even bucks the gaming interests at time-- opposing betting on college football games in Vegas, for example. But there is much that is unseemly." Much more-- and "unseemly" certainly doesn't come close to defining McCain's life of corruption.

Some of the most amazing stuff is the etymology of the Jack Abramoff investigations--which was apparently dumped in McCain's lap by a lobbyist who was one of Abramoff's competitors.

... Finally, the notion that McCain loves craps-- as opposed to skill games like blackjack or poker-- is just too perfect. As a sometime novelist, I can assure you that you couldn't create a character whose public behavior is marked by wild, peremptory gambles and whose private avocation was shooting craps. It would be too obvious. The question is, will McCain's weird public risk-taking-- the nomination of Palin, the bizarre "suspension" of his campaign last week-- come to be seen as a problem for him as a prospective President. But his behavior as Chairman of the Indian Affairs Subcommittee is certainly disappointing-- and about as far from being a maverick, or a reformer, as you can get.

If You Vote For McCain-Palin... Pick Your City

And get ready for a draft... because, like Pat Buchanan said, McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."



Yesterday we mentioned that out of 22 countries polled about the U.S. election, residents in 22 of them thought Obama was the best choice for president. If you follow my travel blog at all, you probably know when I'm not blogging, I'm in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Argentina, or Thailand, Morocco, Sri Lanka or... on the road to Timbuktu. Early in Bush's first term I fell off a mountain in Cappadocia. We met some kind simple peasants down at the bottom of the mountain. They didn't speak much English but they knew enough to say "Bush no good." It was pretty much the reaction we got from people everywhere in the world we went for the past 6-7 years. After 2004 it got much worse-- because people thought Americans were idiots... or complicit.

Sympathy wore thin-- real thin. Sometimes I sensed real hostility. I lived overseas for seven years. I travel overseas every year at least a couple times. I see fewer and fewer Americans abroad these days.

Today's Guardian picked up on the same phenomena I've been noticing and Jonathan Freedland warns that it could get much worse if Americans are foolish enough to opt for a third Bush term. And reading his column gives you the distinct idea that people in Britain-- who have Obama over McCain by a wide margin-- may be more informed about our presidential politics than many of us are!

If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama-- with all his conspicuous gifts-- could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race-- that Obama was rejected because of his colour-- the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race."

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one-- while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars-- on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline." Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."

Of course I know that even to mention Obama's support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the "candidate of Europe" and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today's America, that the world's esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us-- and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

And part of that message will be that an unending barrage of media-debunked lies-- several a week in fact-- is the new yardstick of America's failed-- post-dumbed down-- experiment with democracy.

It's Only America At Stake As Irresponsible John McCain Plays The Wildcard

The crack McCain team-- are they on crack?-- has rushed up to Alaska to see how deep the doo doo is that surrounds Palin. One wonders why they didn't do this carefully and systematically over the last two months-- or even last week? Although Walt Monegan, the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner she fired when he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law, has already started talking, they also want to get the nitty gritty from Alaska GOP chairman Randy Reudrich, who seems to have come to the conclusion that Palin should probably be impeached. And then there's Andrew Halcro, who knows a lot-- and has written a lot-- about why Palin fired Monegan.

So why was Walt Monegan fired out of the blue? Why would Governor Palin send a surrogate to fire her Public Safety Commissioner and then not have a decent explanation for the public? And why would Monegan's replacement be telling people three days before Monegan got fired, that he was going to become the new Commissioner of Public Safety?

Walt Monegan got fired for all of the wrong reasons. Walt Monegan got fired because he had the audacity to tell Governor Palin no, when apparently nobody is allowed to say no to Governor Palin.

Monegan said no, he couldn't cut his budget because his State Troopers were already being stretched to the limit and public safety suffering. He said no, he couldn't cut his budget because fuel costs for planes, boats and patrol vehicles soaring, while crime in rural Alaska was putting more demands on the Troopers transportation system.

But more alarming than any budget battle, Monegan said no to firing a State Trooper who had divorced Governor Palin's sister because the guy was being maliciously hounded by Palin's family.

And not just that; Monegan's firing came after his Colonel had to reprimand the governor's office for meddling in department personnel affairs.

The mainstream media keeps talking about how wildly popular she is in Alaska. And maybe she is. Or maybe they're just happy she's not as overtly corrupt-- and headed to prison-- like most of Alaska's other top office holders. The Republican corruption up there goes way beyond just Ted Stevens and Don Young, even if they profited most from it. Nevertheless, Alaska newspapers don't seem as enthusiastic about McCain's choice as the TV news anchors are all indicating. Many, in fact, are now worrying that the choice has shown incompetence and unbridled willingness to put the country's best interests in jeopardy for a couple of imaginary polling points.

In an editorial, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner points out that Palin "has never publicly demonstrated the kind of interest, much less expertise, in federal issues and foreign affairs that should mark a candidate for the second-highest office in the land. Republicans rightfully have criticized the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, for his lack of experience, but Palin is a neophyte in comparison; how will Republicans reconcile the criticism of Obama with the obligatory cheering for Palin?…Most people would acknowledge that, regardless of her charm and good intentions, Palin is not ready for the top job. McCain seems to have put his political interests ahead of the nation's when he created the possibility that she might fill it. It's clear that McCain picked Palin for reasons of image, not substance."

The Anchorage Daily News is the biggest newspaper in the state (by far) and they're not detecting universal celebration for their native daughter's ascension to national prominence. "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? said [State Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla]. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

More from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Lately her reputation within the state has been bit by allegations of mixing political and family business, and by mistreating one of the state's premier marine mammals. Palin's catch-phrase of "openness and transparency" has been tarnished by revelations that staff members tried to have Palin's former brother-in-law fired from his job as an Alaska state trooper. Also, the governor of the only state with polar bears has adamantly opposed listing the animals as a threatened species, despite strong evidence that global warming has devastated their sea ice environment off Alaska's coast. Dermot Cole, a longtime columnist for Alaska's second largest newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, called McCain's choice of Palin "reckless" and questioned her credentials. "Sarah Palin's chief qualification for being elected governor was that she was not Frank Murkowski," Cole said of her enormously unpopular predecessor, who lost favor with Alaskans in part because of unpopular budget cuts. "She was not elected because she was a conservative. She was not elected because of her grasp of issues or because of her track record as the mayor of Wasilla."

Her lies and flip-flips on the notorious Bridge to Nowhere aren't going over all that well in certain parts of the state either. Kate Golden in the Juneau Empire noted that some in Ketchikan recated to the nomination with concern and ire: "In her acceptance speech as McCain's running mate Friday morning, Palin held up her opposition to the bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina-- the 'bridge to nowhere'-- as an example of 'the abuses of earmark spending.' …When campaigning in Ketchikan in September 2006, Palin promised Ketchikan residents the bridge."

And, obviously, it isn't just in Alaska, where thoughtful newspaper editorial boards are scratching their heads with dismay at McCain's bizarre choice. The Denver Post pretty much sums up how most everyone across the country is reacting:

Palin an odd choice for VP; Alaska guv's inexperience is glaring-- and a probe into the firing of her public safety chief is due just before Election Day: "I served with Hillary Clinton. I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. You, Sarah Palin, are no Hillary Clinton." Sorry to steal Joe Biden's thunder, but we didn't want to wait for the vice presidential candidates' debate to say the obvious. Yes, John McCain, who argues with a straight face that Barack Obama's 12 years in the Illinois legislature and U.S. Senate aren't enough to qualify him to run for president, has picked a running mate who just two years ago was serving as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 5,470. In short, the presumptive Republican nominee, an Old Soldier in all senses of that term, drafted the political equivalent of the Unknown Soldier as his co-pilot. McCain's pick of Palin jettisons his attack that Obama isn't ready to lead and looks more like a desperate "Hail Mary" campaign tactic aimed at female voters.

Perhaps playing on McCain's gambling problem, the Detroit News calls his choice a roll of the dice-- for us. The Kansas City Star judged the pick by the same criteria that they had earlier applied to Obama's choice of Biden. "[T]he most important question in evaluating a vice-presidential pick is whether that person is prepared to step into the Oval Office. Palin, with no national political experience and only a couple years in the Alaska governor's office, is a very tough sell for the Republicans on that score. McCain's age-- he turned 72 on Friday-- certainly doesn't help. The Republican presidential candidate has emphasized the importance of military and national security issues, and taken shots at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama the Democratic presidential nominee for having only four years of experience in the U.S. Senate. Yet McCain now suggests that someone halfway through her first term as governor is "exactly who this country needs" only one step away from the presidency." And the Tampa Bay Tribune just flat out calls it a risky choice "that stunned even some party leaders who fear that voters will have trouble imagining the former beauty queen as commander in chief, if it should ever come to that." The Bangor Daily News called it puzzling and concluded that the "pick makes no sense." What you read all over the country are descriptions like "not ready" (and here), "risky" (and here), "lack of experience," and inexcusable.

David Gergen, on CNN, pointed to McCain's stark, bare hypocrisy: "But what surprises me so much is, that John McCain again and again and again has said the transcendent issue of our times is the fight against terrorism and that we live in a dark, dangerous world. And the most important thing is to have a commander in chief that's ready. So, here to reach out-- and he's criticized Barack Obama as not being ready-- to reach out to Sarah Palin who has no national security experience, no national security exposure, and say you're my standby and I'm 72 years old and I've had some bouts with melanoma, I think that's a very large gamble and I wonder how it's going to play out with the American people."




UPDATE: MORE REPUBLICANS DISMAYED WITH McCAIN'S HORRIBLE CHOICE

The denunciations are coming in so fast and furiously that I can't even keep up with them. Right wing shill Charles Krauthammer calls McCain's pick "near suicidal" from a tactical point of view. Noah Millman, who's not even opposed to Palin says "she's totally unqualified to be President at this point in time. If McCain were to die in February 2009, I hope Palin would have the good sense to appoint someone who is more ready to be President to be her Vice President, on the understanding that she would then resign and be appointed Vice President by her successor." And Mark Halperin at Time sums it up nicely for all of America: "McCain has failed the ultimate test that any presidential candidate must face in picking a running mate: selecting someone who is unambiguously qualified to be president."

CAN JOHN McCAIN BE TRUSTED NOT TO GAMBLE AWAY AMERICA'S WELL BEING?

Courtesy of DailyKos

Last night I was driving to meet a friend and Johnny Wendell was subbing for Mike Malloy on NovaM radio. I didn't hear his whole show, just a part about how McCain seems to have a gambling addiction problem-- and possibly a criminal problem to go along with it. We'll get to that in a moment. Ironically, the friend I was going to meet is the only person I ever knew who had a gambling problem. I wished I could ask him about it but I think he's in denial and I didn't feel comfortable bringing it up. His life is a wreck and his ex-wife told me he had gambled away the family's savings, and even lost their home briefly. The gambling addiction almost completely destroyed his life, his wife's lives and any semblance of normalcy for their young children. Yeah... I didn't bring up McCain.

Instead I drove home and googled up Time Magazine's story about how Obama plays a little low-stakes polka to relax and socialize while McCain loses control and becomes a scary monster/super creep. For McCain it's like being a hot dog flyer again, only not pulling stunts that kill 134 U.S. navy men and destroying tens of millions of dollars worth of planes and nearly sinking an aircraft carrier. That's good ole John McCain.

For McCain, jaunts to the craps table helped burnish his image as a political hot dog who relished the thrill of a good fight, even if the risk of failure was high.

McCain's passion for gambling and taking other risks has never been a secret. He was a Navy flyer, trained in the art of controlled crash landings on aircraft carriers. He spent his youth sneaking booze behind the backs of his schoolmasters and reveling in his stack of demerits. He came of age on shore leave in the casinos of Monte Carlo, in a Navy culture that had long embraced dice in the officers' clubs.

The moral code of McCain's youth always distinguished between sins of honor and sins of pleasure. "Don't lie, cheat or steal-- anything else is fair game," McCain told his son Jack when the boy left for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. In his memoir, McCain recalls that by his mid-20s, he "had begun to aspire to a reputation for more commendable achievements than long nights of drinking and gambling."

Over time he gave up the drinking bouts, but he never quite kicked the periodic yen for dice. In the past decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. "Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John's life," says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. "Taking a chance, playing against the odds." Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress. "He never, ever plays on the house," says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser. The goal, say several people familiar with his habit, is never financial. He loves the thrill of winning and the camaraderie at the table.

Of course when you marry a rich heiress, you don't have to worry much about a few thousand here and a few thousand there. Why just today, McCain-- away from the Strip-- mentioned that he "imagines" we may be in a recession. I'm sure he could never imagine the policies he's been mindlessly voting for are at the base of the recession. And remember, he's bored and disinterested in economics and claims he needs to learn something about them "some time." What time? He's getting really old and maybe he should have learned this stuff when he was a young guy in his 50s or even his 60s. Lately his aides have tried to keep him away from the craps tables. It could be embarrassing.

It could also be illegal. Not the gambling. That's legal. But McCain doesn't report his winnings. He gambles thousands of dollars with the roll of the dice and has never filed a W-2G form and never filed anything at all about winnings or losings on his IRS 1040. Is he as unlucky as Bill Bennett?