John McCain's Skeletons
by Srdja Trifkovic
Chronicles Online, Wednesday, June 18, 2008
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=636
The mainstream media is catching up with Chronicles.
On Tuesday, June 17, the Chicago Tribune published a major articleexposing Sen.
John McCain's connection with the Reform Institute (RI), a Washington think
tank founded in 2001 ostensibly to promote transparency and accountability in
government. But behind the scenes, the paper says, the Institute's practices
have been at odds with its reformist message and "with McCain's political
identity as an enemy of special interests." This discrepancy may be a
revelation to the Tribune subscribers, but not to the readers of Chronicles.
The Tribune article focuses on five red flags:
* Donations to the RI of $200,000 in 2003-2004 froma cable company with
business before the McCain-led Senate Commerce Committee.
* The role of Rick Davis, a veteran Washington lobbyist who was
president of the Institute 2003-2005 and who is now McCain's campaign manager.
* The fact that "three members of the institute's inaugural four-person
board worked on McCain's 2000 campaign."
* The manner in which McCain has benefited from a stream of
special-interest gifts to the RIalmost 5 million dollars through 2006similar
to the "soft money" he has scorned.
* The Institute's use of the same Alexandria, Va., office building as
McCain's PAC, his Senate campaign committee and Davis' lobbying business.
Our subscribers have probably seen the July issue of Chronicles by now. It
includes an article on McCain I wrote last month ("The Dream Ticket"), which
contains all the significant information presented in the Tribune feature. It
also reveals some interesting additional detailssuch as the close connection
between McCain and George Soros, and the role of a Mexican open-immigration
activist on McCain's staffwhich are inexplicably missing from the Tribune
article, and which are essential to understanding John McCain:
The point of contact [between McCain and Soros] was campaign-finance reform,
and the channel of support was the Reform Institute, founded in 2001 and headed
by the Arizona senator until 2005, when he resigned in order to prepare for
another presidential bid. The RI was initially funded by Soros's Open Society
Foundation and by Teresa Heinz-Kerry's Tides Foundation. They were excited by
the McCain-Feingold bill because it had the capacity to limit private groups'
ability to challenge the institutionalized leftist bias of the mainstream
electronic media with "issue ads"such as those Swift Boat ads that inflicted
so much damage on John Kerry in his subsequent presidential bid. [
]
When the Reform Institute opened shop under McCain's chairmanship in July 2001,
Mrs. Huffingtona close associate and confidante of Soroswas on its advisory
committee. The Institute was a pseudo-think tank designed to keep McCain's
staff assembled and gainfully employed in anticipation of another presidential
bid. Its offices were in the same building in Alexandria as his election
committee, his PAC, and the lobbying firm of his 2000 campaign manager, Rick
Davis. The Institute hired three other key campaign staffers: legal counsel
Trevor Potter as legal counsel, finance director Carla Eudy as finance
director, and press secretary Crystal Benton ascommunications director.
The Constitutions and Legal Policy Program of Soros's Open Society Institute
donated "above $50,000" to the RI while McCain was at its helm. In addition,
the OSI distributed $300,000 in grants to different groups that defended
McCain-Feingold from threatened legal challenges during its passage through
Congress in 2002.
Last April, McCain tried to distance himself from his benefactor, with his
old/new campaign manager Davis describing Soros as a "liberal mega-donor" who
wants to "buy this election." The performance was as convincing as George H.W.
Bush decrying the influence of "those Washington insiders." What matters is
that McCain has not given back any money to Soros. He has not returned the
$200,000 that the Reform Institute received in donations from Cablevision in
2002 and 2003 either, when McCain was on the Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation. It was undoubtedly coincidental that, in a letter
to the FCC written at that time, McCain supported Cablevision's proposal for
the introduction of a more profitable cable pricing scheme.
The Reform Institute has promoted another important pillar of Soros's agenda:
open and unlimited Third World immigration. [
] This is not to say that
McCain's support of illegal immigration correlates exclusively with the money
he is getting from Soros. By all accounts he is an "honest" amnesty enthusiast.
His man in charge of immigration reform at the RI was, until two years ago, one
Juan Fernandez, who holds dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and is a former
member of Vicente Fox's cabinet in charge of Mexicans abroad. This man believes
that anyone of Mexican ancestry, even after going through the motions of
becoming an American citizen (as he has done), remains a Mexican forever and
should "think Mexican first." Such a one should never contemplatelet alone
acceptassimilation as an option. Dr. Fernandez now serves as John McCain's
Hispanic Outreach Director and is seen as a potential Cabinet-level appointee
in a McCain administration.
It is entirely possible, probable even, that the publication of the Chicago
Tribune feature on John McCain and the Reform Institute a week after the July
issue of Chronicles was mailed to our subscribers is coincidental. It does not
seem incidental, however, that the paper chose to ignore significant
information about McCain's links to Soros, the OSI, or Huffingtoninformation
that was most unlikely to remain unavailable to the story's authors and their
editors in the course of its writing. It is far more likely that the omission
was deliberate: it reflected the unwillingness of this once-great newspaper to
publicize the connections of these actual or potential supporters of Sen. Obama
with his GOP opponent. There is precious little to choose between the two, of
course, but the Chicago Tribune editorial board thinks otherwise.
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