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Source/Letters: CommonDreams <editor @ commondreams.org> (close spaces)
Link: <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/05-0>
Published on Friday, September 5, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Things They Left Behind
(or Didn¹t Remind You About)
by Dave Lindorff
The introduction to John McCain at the Republican National Convention last
night was all about family values. There was the paean to his mother and
father, the touching story of his and Cindy's adoption of a baby girl from
India, and then there was Cindy herself, who was the focus of much of a
gauzy introductory film on McCain, and who also did the introductory speech,
and who brought all the kids up on stage with her at the end.
Oddly missing from this warm, feel-good picture, however, was a single
mention of McCain's first wife Carol Shepp-the one who stood by him, raising
their three kids, through his trying five years in a Vietnamese prison, only
to be dumped upon his heroic return for a younger woman, despite, or because
of, her having suffered permanent disabling and disfiguring injuries in an
auto accident during his absence.
Now I'm not faulting McCain for leaving his wife for a younger, richer
woman. Who knows what the relationship was like at the time. Maybe Shepp
wanted him out of her life by the time he started slipping off to date beer
heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. But if McCain and his campaign staff wanted to
make him a poster child for "family values," they should have had the basic
integrity to explain that he didn't always consider marriage a binding
covenant, for better or worse, richer or poorer, and in sickness or in
health. (If you want an unvarnished view of the real John McCain, read an
interview with Carol McCain published last June in the UK newspaper, The
Mail, headlined The Wife US Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind.)
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1024927/The-wife-John-McCain-call
ously-left-behind.html>
McCain's party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are always
attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by saying that
marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but clearly, with over
half of all those marriages between a man and a woman ending in divorce,
it's not all that sacred, and McCain is living testament to that hypocrisy.
But this was just the most blatant of a string of hypocrisies that ran on
for four days in the Twin Cities.
There was the long list of speakers touting America's "freedoms" as, outside
the convention hall, police thugs dressed in military gear, and armed with
huge batons and assault weaponry were bashing in doors and terrorizing
journalists, arresting others and dragging them face down along the street,
using teargas against peaceful demonstrators and arresting them by the
hundreds.
There was McCain talking about how everyone, including the "child of Latino
immigrants," is an American, to an audience of Republicans that was so
embarrassingly white that you had to shield your eyes from the glare of the
screen.
There was Sarah Palin, complaining about a media focus on her pregnant
17-year-old daughter Bristol, all the while shamelessly parading that same
daughter and her 18-year-old impregnator, who was dragged down to the
convention to be shown off after the two had been somehow convinced to get
married and make the baby "legal."
There were the repeated characterizations of McCain as a battler against
corruption and the influence of "special interests," without a word of
mention of his having been the recipient of over $100,000 in cash from
Charles Keating, a corrupt banker whose interests McCain shamelessly pimped
for in Congress, only narrowly escaping indictment himself.
Perhaps the most outrageous hypocrisy of all was claiming that the
McCain/Palin ticket would be "taking on" the corrupt Washington
Establishment, as though that establishment hadn't been predominantly
Republican for most of the past decade, and as though McCain and Palin
hadn't been an integral part of it. McCain, after all, has spent those years
dutifully voting with his Republican peers over 90 percent of the time,
shoveling out perks to the rich and the corporations, while Palin, first as
mayor of the small town of Wasilla, and then as governor of Alaska, employed
an Abramoff-linked Washington lobbyist to help win massive amounts of
corrupt "earmarks" for her town and state. She even backed the notorious
$400-million earmark for the "Bridge to Nowhere" until it became a national
joke, yet there she was, in her acceptance speech, claiming to have opposed
that outrageous taxpayer ripoff.
Republicans are claiming that this election will not be about issues as much
as about character. But given the incredible fraud that was perpetrated on
viewers by the four-day Republican extravaganza, I'd say it's more about
caricature.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
12 Comments so far
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Source/Letters: The Consortium for Independent Journalism
<consortnew @ aol.com> (close spaces)
Comment: <http://consortiumblog.com/>
Link: <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/05-2>
Published on Friday, September 5, 2008 by Consortiumnews.com
The Anti-Obama Hate-Fest
by Robert Parry
The Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was
back at it again, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display
that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew - or George W. Bush's last
convention where GOP operatives passed out "Purple Heart Band-Aids" to mock
John Kerry's war wounds.
After a slow start because of Hurricane Gustav, the convention in St. Paul,
Minnesota, has turned into an anti-Obama hate-fest with a nearly all-white
gathering laughing at and mocking the nation's first African-American
presidential nominee of a major party.
However, beyond the pulsating contempt visible on the faces of the GOP
delegates, many of the nasty attacks on Obama - as well as the effusive
praise for the Republican ticket - were blatantly false, as if testing the
depths of American gullibility and bigotry.
In speech after speech, Republicans didn't so much as tell the Big Lie as
they deployed Wholesale Lies.
The Associated Press, which mostly had been recycling the Republican spin
about the supposedly "maverick" ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, was
so struck by the litany of distortions that the AP produced a special
fact-checking article describing how Republicans had "stretched the truth."
For instance, Palin said about Obama, "it's easy to forget that this is a
man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not
even in the state senate."
However, as the AP noted, Obama "worked with Republicans to pass legislation
that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass
destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The
legislation became law last year."
Plus, the AP reported, "In Illinois, he was the leader on two big,
contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and
requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He
also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation."
The AP's fact-checking article noted, too, that former Arkansas Gov. Mike
Huckabee's slap at Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden - that
Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden
got running for president of the United States" - was a "whopper."
The AP wrote that "Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got
909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of
the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states
and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008
presidential primaries."
Parallel Reality
The Republican National Convention also acted as if the Republicans had not
controlled the White House for the past eight years and the Congress for
most of that time.
"We need change, all right," declared former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney,
"change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a
prescription for every American who wants change in Washington - throw out
the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."
Beyond this parallel universe of who runs Washington, there was fanciful
puffery about the GOP "reformer" ticket - dubbed "maverick squared" - that
doesn't square with reality at all.
For instance, the AP cited Palin's claim that "I have protected the
taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the
abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no
thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
The reality, of course, was much different.
As the AP noted. Palin, as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, hired a
lobbyist and made annual treks to Washington seeking earmarked spending that
totaled $27 million, and then as Alaska's governor for less than two years,
she sought nearly $750 million in special federal spending, "by far the
largest per-capita request in the nation."
And as for that $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50
residents, the truth is that Palin enthusiastically supported the project
before she reluctantly opposed it, rejecting the "Bridge to Nowhere" only
after it had become politically indefensible.
The Los Angeles Times discovered that Sen. McCain had specifically cited
several of Palin's earmarks on his annual list of wasteful pork-barrel
spending.
In 2001, for instance, McCain's list included a $500,000 earmark for a
public transportation project in Wasilla, and in 2002, he criticized $1
million targeted for an emergency communications center that Palin sought
but local law enforcement said was redundant and a source of confusion.
Remaking Palin
Now, however, Palin has been transformed into a maverick reformer. McCain's
campaign even cites her experience as an abuser of the earmark process as
part of the reason she supposedly understands why it must be scrapped.
McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin said Palin's successes in getting earmarked
funds "was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the
reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed."
Nevertheless, Palin wrote in a newspaper column just this year that "the
federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to
us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship." [For
more details, see Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2008]
<http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-earmarks3-2008sep03,0,2482434.st
ory>
Beyond the GOP's reality-challenged speeches, there was the startling image
of a nearly all-white convention - where only 36 of the 2,380 delegates were
black, the smallest number in at least 40 years - rollicking in ridicule and
bristling with animosity toward Obama, an African-American.
With their loud chants of "drill, baby, drill" regarding energy policy and
boisterous shouts of "USA, USA" about "victory" in Iraq, there was a sense
that St. Paul was hosting a convention of American Falangists, rather than
that of a modern national party.
The whiff of authoritarianism extended to outside where demonstrators and
journalists were swept off the streets in indiscriminate arrests.
What's less clear about the GOP convention is whether the Republicans are on
to something, that perhaps the United States has crossed over into a
post-rational society that cares little about facts and reality or serious
policy ideas and respectful debate, but rather is a nation moved by anger
and ridicule, fear and nationalism.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat,
and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy &
Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available
there
74 Comments so far
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