Maligning McCain
Washington Dispatch: Fearing his independent streak and heretical policy stances, John McCain's biggest enemies are fellow conservatives.
January 24, 2008
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On Fox News last week, Tom DeLay, the former Texas congressman, unleashed a string of attacks on John McCain, saying the presidential candidate "has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of." Beginning with the landmark campaign-finance-reform legislation McCain shepherded in with Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, DeLay said, the Arizona Senator "has completely neutered the Republican party. [He] has violated the Constitution, has undermined our ability to participate in campaigns in an open and honest way. He has teamed up with the most liberal Democrats in the Senate." DeLay, himself responsible for a fair amount of damage to the GOP due to his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, decried McCain's surging presidential chances because the candidate has "fought the Republican Party in everything that we've done."
Along with DeLay, a large segment of the GOP elite can't stand McCain—and now that he's become the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, everyone from George Will to Rick Santorum to Michelle Malkin are taking out the knives.
Die-hard conservatives despise McCain for multiple reasons. Primarily, they fear the impact his candidacy could have on the Republican Party and the conservative movement. For conservatives, derailing McCain's candidacy is not about electability, but ideological protection. As conservative writer and activist Robert Tracinski put it this week in an article titled "Why McCain Needs to Be Stopped," "McCain is a suicidal choice for Republicans, because on every issue other than the war, he stands for capitulation to the left." And conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt recently said a "GOP vote for McCain is a vote for a shattered base."
Conservatives also feel that McCain has routinely frustrated their ambitions by taking heretical policy stances. "Almost at every turn on domestic policy," Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, said in a recent radio interview, "John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side." Just a day earlier Santorum had gone on a different radio show as part of his anti-McCain jihad and attacked the senator on a variety of issues. "He’s not with us on almost all of the core issues," he said. "He was against the President's tax cuts. He was bad on immigration. On the environment, he's absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left-wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues."
"We'd of had a much bigger tax cut if John McCain had voted with us," said DeLay on Fox. "We'd be drilling in ANWR [Artic National Wildlife Refuge] today" if not for McCain.
Michelle Malkin gets riled up by McCain's position on immigration. "After spearheading a disastrous, security-undermining, illegal-alien amnesty bill last year with Teddy Kennedy, 'straight-talking' GOP Sen. John McCain claims he has seen the light," she wrote Wednesday. But McCain can't be believed, she argued, because his credibility is "fatally damaged." In truth, McCain is just waiting for the chance to play conservatives for suckers. When he does, he'll give progressives "cover to continue smearing grassroots conservatives."
And nothing seems to irritate conservatives more than the fact that the "liberal" media, through supposedly adoring and unquestioning coverage, let McCain get away with this laundry list of crimes. On Monday, George Will wrote:
Because Mr. McCain is a "maverick"—the media encomium reserved for Republicans who reject important Republican principles—he would be a conciliatory president. Mr. McCain is, however, an unlikely conciliator because he is quick to denigrate the motives, and hence the characters, of those who oppose him....
In the New Hampshire debate, Mr. McCain asserted that corruption is the reason drugs cannot be reimported from Canada. The reason is "the power of the pharmaceutical companies." When Mitt Romney interjected, "Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys," Mr. McCain replied, "Well, they are."
There is a place in American politics for moralizers who think in such Manichaean simplicities. That place is in the Democratic Party.
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, agrees that McCain has gotten a free pass. "Other candidates who change their positions on important issues are described as 'flip-floppers,' but John McCain is viewed as that rare politician whose views on important issues have 'matured' over the years," he wrote recently. "From taxes to his relationship with social conservatives and his position on Second Amendment or 'gun' issues, McCain has shown an unending willingness to do just what he so self-righteously accuses others of doing—tailoring his position to suit his needs of the moment."
All of these attacks have forced McCain to take to the airwaves to defend his record, which he says is conservative enough to match "anybody who is running." Yet the voters don't seem terribly concerned by McCain's transgressions against conservative orthodoxy: after all, he has won more contested* primaries than any other GOP candidate. He has prevailed by emphasizing his national security credentials and by adopting a fiscally conservative message. (According to exit polls, he has attracted voters who prioritize terrorism and Iraq, as well as those who prioritize the economy.) But more important than any part of his message, McCain has won by appealing to independents, who carried him to victory in New Hampshire and South Carolina. McCain actually lost narrowly amongst self-identified Republicans in both states.
But McCain's independent appeal could pose a problem in the upcoming Florida primary and on Super Tuesday, when over 20 states hold primaries or caucuses. Unlike New Hampshire and South Carolina, which have open Republican primaries that allow independents to vote, Florida and many of the major Super Tuesday states have closed primaries that are limited to registered Republicans only.
If McCain wins in Florida, the conservative leaders who are already up in arms about his candidacy will have to conclude that they are out of step with their constituents, or that party members have been successfully snake-charmed by a man they despise. If that's the case, the conservative backlash against McCain has barely begun.
*This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that McCain has won more contested primaries (NH, SC). Romney has won more primaries total because of his victories in two uncontested states (NV, WY).
Jonathan Stein is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington, D.C., bureau.
True conservative or not, the best remark of the campaign was McCain’s when he reached 1911, quoting Chairman Mao that falling off a cliff is easy in life even when you struggle to avoid it. So let’s be thankful for the fact that the Democrats are scratching each other’s eyes out in a way that will leave them down 14 points at the start of the third quarter, even though they may poll ahead at the moment. Check out this mad endorsement for Senator Obama, which includes what seems to me to be the most murderously accurate description of Senator Clinton I have ever come across, despite the writers’ Communist take on life. This is being posted on Obama websites.
Best wishes to us all,
Martha Turner
A Warning to Obama:
Tell Obama he better listen to this. He has spirit, but is a bit out of his game, in a somewhat un-familiar environment of poisonous snakes who strike unexpectedly. So this is no lesson, to be hurt in public badly, to learn by experience. I can feel Barack to be a good man, but also as somebody destined to lose, unless he listens up to the beginning of our website, where we describe Hillary correctly. Not politely, but accurately. This is not a rant. Nor am I saying I am smarter than Barack. What I am is older than him, 64 years old, PhD in Biophysics, with some very real experience under his belt, as can be checked out on our website, www.matrix-evolutions.com. It has a bit more analysis of Mrs. Clinton on it, too. If Barack loses, we all lose. If anybody thinks this is a joke, as you might see in an Internet come-on, it’s not. It’s the real thing. And now I will turn the floor over to my wife, the one who best understands Hillary Clinton, and many other things.
The Revolutionary Party endorses Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.
This is the most important election America will ever have, possibly the last if Obama is not elected.
The Revolutionary Party derives its politics from an equation for evolution that has been accepted by science for the last eighty years and that we trust as much as religious believers trust Pat Robertson. Mathematics doesn’t lie, at least not as well as Robertson does. Anyway, an analysis based on the equation indicates that the so-called war on terror will inexorably ratchet up to world war level, a pretty horrible thought given a world armed with nuclear weapons. For that reason we support Barack Obama as the only real anti-war candidate.
The value of our mathematics based analysis lies in its ability to objectively distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. The technical aspects of the analysis make it slow reading for those without a science background, so we will give its conclusions first here and save the detailed reasoning for later.
Put simply, the Clintons are what is known in the political science textbooks as populists, those who achieve political success by playing to the people, to their needs and pains and wants. But there is a difference between patter and delivery. We are all familiar with artificial soda. The Clintons are like an artificial banana split, very likable, but with no real food value.
Recall President Clinton and his first lady. During their tenure America’s favorite political couple sang a song of health care delivery, but delivered rather on prison construction and on the number of police put on the streets. The Pew Report that came out the end of February said that one American in a hundred is locked up in a prison or jail. To put this into better perspective, the report said that America has 7 million people in jail or otherwise under the control of the penal system. This is 16 times more per capita than the communist People’s Republic of China, where, we are told, there is no freedom or human rights. Clinton legislature took America to the highest prison population in the world, a statistic historically associated with police states like Stalinist Russia and apartheid South Africa. This is not to say that America is a police state, of course, for if it were you’d have heard about it on the evening news.
Also notably absent in the media is another creation of the Clintons, the near million homeless people that wander the streets of Sacramento and Las Vegas and our other big cities. This sharp upsurge in homelessness came about inarguably as a result of Clinton legislature that ended LBJ’s war on poverty by terminating effective social protections for out of work people, something many more will become more familiar with as the stock market collapses from the cost of the war and the recession takes hold in full force.
What the Clintons did with prisons and police and welfare protection and NAFTA and failed to do with health care very much pleased the moneyed class and the conservatives. Our technical analysis objectively shows the Republican social and fiscal conservatives to be bad guys because their relationship to the working class and middle class is basically that of master to servant. This fact is also muted by populist politicians like the Clintons whose tax returns, were they to be made public, would show that they are members in good standing of the moneyed class too.
This deep secret of class control and abuse is also kept under wraps by the media, whose personalities are hired and controlled by the moneyed class. Other than the few raisins stirred into in the poison muffin of TV to make it seem fair, media people who don’t keep the secret of class control and the unhappiness of most of us that derives from it don’t last long on their jobs or are not hired to begin with.
The ones who do make the cut endlessly spout the lies of the so-called American Dream in one form or another. The power of the media to control people’s thoughts and actions in conformity with American ideology is difficult to assess for people who get their information primarily from the media, which is most people. This power of media to control thinking was dramatically illustrated towards the end of WWII in Germany just before the fall of Berlin as the Allied and Russian troops converged on the city. Most Germans even in those final moments still believed Hitler’s media propaganda that they were still winning the war.
In our own times, hidden by the media from public sight are facts about life readily observable even by doing something as simple as riding public transportation. Here the observer notes that the common people are unhappy, fear and personal failure showing clearly on their faces and in their behaviors. This effect of control and abuse in the workplace and at school is not made clear from TV where all the media personalities act through their endlessly smiling and bubbly days to show to the audience that America really is a happy place, the steady stream of mass murders in schools, workplaces and malls not able to be kept out of the news notwithstanding.
And much as the ugly facts of our present existence are air brushed out in the media, so also is the future we realistically face. Not made clear is that the dollar is fast becoming as worthless as the paper it is printed on to keep the war going. Or that the stock market and the housing market will soon halve their value giving those who have been spared homelessness and jail to date a taste of these hells on earth firsthand. The Clintons will not care because they are a part of the apparatus that brought us to where we are at in America today.
And to be completely and totally unkind – and very logical -- doesn’t it make you wonder about the guy’s wife? Really, does any intelligent female over the age of 22 think that Hillary actually felt bad about Bill and Monica? Judging from the observable obvious that Bill is no more than Hillary’s showboat, the best educated guess is that is Hillary is lesbian, a married one, not that unusual in modern America. If Hillary was mad about anything with Monica, it was that she didn’t get a shot at her too. Watch one of Hillary’s girlfriends surfacing soon to clarify Hillary’s preference as to penile object.
The smiling Clintons are so phony and so odd in this area that one would not be surprised to find that the unconfident Chelsea Clinton developed as such as a result of some form of child abuse. Chelsea does not look happy. Neglect by the Clintons is hardly to be overlooked as this ambitious pair had better things to pay attention to in their furious political rise to the top than their daughter. And sexual abuse is not to be totally ruled out either given Bill’s sexual tastes.
The best bet to end the war and end our American style police state is to vote for Barack Obama. Not for Hillary, who is sufficiently self-serving and devious that one would not be surprised to see her team up with Huckabee on a national reconciliation ticket to satisfy her political ambition. Hopefully Obama will not be removed by the ruling class by assassination, which they would do if methods to remove him don’t work. These could include much media humiliation or using their federal prosecutors on a leash to try Resko at this most inopportune time or even Resko inventing a story about Barack in order to trade 15 years over his head for two.
Dr. and Mrs. Calabria
www.matrix-evolutions.com