IS McCAIN REALLY AS CORRUPT AND HYPOCRITICAL AS TODAY'S POST MAKES HIM SOUND?

When we think about members of the Senate who use their positions to serve their own financial interests and those of their friends we usually think of crooked schemers like Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, Don Young, Ted Stevens. Today the NY Times exposed another conflict of interest slime bucket, Richard Shelby (R-AL). But this morning's Washington Post brings up a name that hasn't been as connected to the criminal use of his office as it was when he was the star of the Keating Five, taking bribes from his father-in-law's good friend, crooked banker Charles Keating, in return for immense bribes. Since then, McCain has been very careful to at least always appear to be on a straight and narrow path. John McCain isn't going to be very happy about the page one story in the Post, McCain Pushed Land Swap That Benefits Backer. Of course, if you've already read Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain none of this will shock you. But if you've gotten your impressions of John McCain from the corporate media, especially from his pals on TV... fasten your seatbelt. This isn't McCain pal, indicted congressman Rick Renzi we're talking about-- even if it sounds similar:

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.

Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.

When McCain's legislation passed in November 2005, the ranch owner gave the job of building as many as 12,000 homes to SunCor Development, a firm in Tempe, Ariz., run by Steven A. Betts, a longtime McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee. Betts said he and McCain never discussed the deal.

No doubt. And why would they. McCain described all 66 lobbyists who run his presidential campaign-- some of whom have reputations in DC that would make Jack Abramoff blush-- as "men of honor." It will be hard to prove that McCain's actions were specifically criminal. "Men of honor" know how to keep their mouths shut. But the hypocrisy on multiple front will be hard even for the Double Talk Express media machine to ease away for anyone short of McCain appendages like David Broder and Chris Matthews.

As McCain positions himself as a champion of environmental causes, observers of the Yavapai Ranch swap say it shows a paradox in the senator's positions. At times, he has fought to protect the delicate desert ecosystem. But when wildlife concerns have thwarted development, his loyalties have shifted.

"When the public trust intersects with private interests, basically, he has favored land development . . . in every case," said Rob Smith, director of the Sierra Club's Arizona affiliate.

McCain also has been critical of government's "revolving door," which allows former government officials to position themselves as influential lobbyists. Rogers said that McCain does not recall being lobbied by his former staff members on the land swap and that "no lobbyist influenced Senator McCain on this issue."

One handy way to keep up on the outpouring of high-quality progressive-themed books is with FDL's weekly Book Salon (coming up today at 5pm ET)

No, that's not Arianna Huffington. It's Tracey Ullman as Arianna, whom she's been lampooning rather mercilessly on her current Showtime series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union. The real Arianna is the guest on today's Firedoglake Book Salon, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. That's today at 5pm ET, 2pm PT.

"Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life's work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams--and especially, how those fears and dreams change.
--from the preface to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland (Scribner)

As you see, I got my copy of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and also of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain. Again, not that I'm plugging Amazon, but two days from placing order to receiving books--with hefty discounts and "free super saver shipping"--isn't bad!

At the time I made mention of the remarkable flowering we've seen in recent years of important, exciting books written from an unabashedly progressive standpoint--many of them coming from writers who have established their bona fides in the progressive blogosphere. This is roughly parallel to the outpouring of hard-core right-wing propaganda tomes over the last several decades--with the obvious "but"s. Hardly any of the right-wing propagandists had any interest in truth, knowledge, enlightenment, or understanding, just hammering their ideological psychoses and rallying the faithful to their clarion cry of ignorance and hatred. It was the vanguard of a movement built on storm-trooper-enforced knee-jerk ideology.

And of course the right-wing ideologues had access to a cadre of free-spending-zillionaire sugar daddies, to pay them to write and to publish their damned books. These days the right-wing propagandists, not surprisingly given that their world view is built on delusions and lies, that the progressive movement is funded entirely by George Soros. I don't doubt that Mr. Soros is contributing generously to progressive projects of his choosing, but virtually none of the specific ones the wingnuts go batshit over have any connection to him.

No, in the book world we've experienced a growing willingness of mainstream publishers to go out on a limb--as they seem to see it--with credentialed non-right-wing writers and the emergence of hardy independent publishers committed to the quest for truth--as in the case of Jeffrey Feldman's Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, just published by Ig Publishing.

As I mentioned, my schedule, or perhaps just the state of my brain, makes book-reading an elusive goal, making it hard for me to keep up on the literally dozens of titles I've hoped to get to over the last few years. One resource I meant to mention is Firedoglake's weekly Bo0k Salon, where the author participates in a live online chat with a moderator carefully matched to the book.

If you read this in time and have nothing else to do, coming up today (as noted above) is Arianna Huffington. If you can't or couldn't catch the live chat, of course, it's all still accessible in the Book Salon archive, along with all the other titles that have been covered.

In addition, if you have books you especially want to commend to DWT readers' attention, you can either throw them in a comment (or comments), or drop me an e-mail at KenFromDWT@aol.com.

Happy reading!

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