And Some Questions His BM Camp Followers Should Ask Their Republican Paramour
Political junkies and other perverse creatures who tempt aching necks following this tennis match between John McCain and Barack Obama already know that if Obama had made the glaring blunders McCain has been prone to, he would have been crucified by the Big Media (BM) Punditocracy and his political carcass left for the buzzards.
Let’s look at McCain’s recent spate of arrant ‘gaffery,’ just on Iraq, where he’s been anointed by his friends in the BM as an ‘expert’:
1. McCain said an occupation of Iraq of a hundred years or more wouldn’t bother him. His Pundit Pals said he didn’t really mean that and it was taken out of context.
2. On four different occasions in a 24-hour period, McCain mixed up the Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. His BM buddies excused that by exasperatedly fuming, ‘Of course, John McCain knows the difference – after all, he’s a foreign policy expert! He just misspoke!’
3. McCain has claimed repeatedly that the surge is working, although there has been no recent official report to that effect, no US general on the ground in Iraq has made that statement, and Americans and Iraqis continue to die in attacks over there. I have yet to hear the BM challenge McCain on this unsupported assertion.
4. Then McCain said on the Today Show that it doesn’t really matter how long we have troops there. He’s since backtracked while his reliable Hallelujah chorus in the corporate media have echoed the GOP Talking Point that he was, again, ‘taken out of context.’
On June 12, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on McCain’s statements, showing with video clips how many times the Straight-Talk Express has been circling the cul-de-sac — right turns only, of course, ‘my friends’ — and that putting his remarks in context is even more frightening than dismissing them as the senile obfuscations and precinct-captain pandering of a doddering old political fossil. It sketches a picture of McCain as a remote and careless dauphin who really doesn’t give a fig about the troops he pretends to support. Leave ‘em in there to rot as an occupation force, as long as they’re not getting shot at. This is the antiquated foreign policy of a King George III or Kaiser Wilhelm II, not a modern American president.
Most recently, McCain has attacked Obama for opting out of public financing for his presidential campaign, calling it a ‘big deal’ and alleging that Obama reneged on a ‘commitment to the American people’ that Obama never made, but McCain did. The BM have nearly completely ignored the fact the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission has chastised McCain for taking private funding after committing to public financing in the Republican primary, and spending more than the legal limit allowed by the public financing laws, a federal crime with a possible fine and jail sentence attached.
Also, let’s not forget that McCain has just flip-flopped on offshore oil drilling, as well – he was against it before he was for it. Many of his loyal BM cohort have earned their bull-session access on the campaign trail by excusing Mr. Maverick’s reversal as a wise decision in response to soaring $4.00 a gallon gas prices.
And the Media Kennel Club continue to eagerly jump on his bus, tails wagging, waiting for the next pat on the head or Sedona barbeque at McCain’s multi-million-dollar ‘rustic cabin’ in the Arizona desert. Although it might be in vain, since the love-struck rarely listen to critiques of their paramour, here are a few questions a real journalist would ask the Republican presidential nominee, between bites of pork rib:
– Sen. McCain, since we’re already borrowing money from overseas to finance our occupation of Iraq, and the American economy is in recession, how do you plan to pay for our troops staying in Iraq, and still maintain Bush’s tax cuts without enlarging the deficit?
– Sen. McCain, several polls over the years indicate a large majority of the Iraqi people want us to leave. In your opinion, are the Iraqis entitled to a free and sovereign state, even if they decide their interests are better served by alliances with nations other than the United States? Or are they simply a US colony run by a puppet government who must adhere to our policies in the Middle East?
– Sen. McCain, many senior US military and civilian experts have said our combat forces are nearly broken from over-deployment and lack of adequate equipment. The long-term occupation you’ve talked about would require hundreds of thousands of new troops, and recruitment levels are down. Would you institute a draft to rebuild our forces, and how would you pay for such an expansion without raising taxes or increasing our indebtedness?
– Sen. McCain, you have advocated an attack on Iran. What would you do if the Iran-friendly Mahdi Army, reportedly over 100,000-strong, then launched a brutal counterattack on our forces in Iraq in retaliation, assisted by other Iraqi groups opposed to our occupation?
– Sen. McCain, how would you define victory in Iraq? Since our forces have already fulfilled every one of the Bush Administration’s original missions of the Iraq invasion – toppling Saddam Hussein, making sure they had no WMD, establishing a constitutional government, and training the Iraq Army and law enforcement – haven’t we already achieved victory? What reason is there for us to occupy the country any longer?
– Sen. McCain, how can you attack Obama on his legal choice of campaign financing when you have been violating the campaign finance laws you helped pass, according FEC Chairman David Mason? Will you now make a promise to the American people to stick to public financing limits in the future during your presidential campaign, and turn over the amount you’ve overspent in the primary to the FEC?
– Sen. McCain, you have repeatedly said you want this election to be about the issues and have deplored personal attacks and negative campaigning. Will you hold a press conference to publicly inform the voters to ignore any negative ads attacking Sen. Obama, and order your staff and surrogates to cease making any such personal attacks?
– Sen. McCain, since offshore drilling will not affect oil prices at the pump for at least fifteen years, will you stop misleading the American people by giving them the impression that it will lower gas prices in the short term? Furthermore, what will compel oil companies to reduce prices even if they have that oil? You are against corporate regulation, and there is no competition in the oil business these days, so can you explain in detail what mechanism will force Big Oil to lower prices at the pump?
These are just some of the questions that the BM have left unasked in their open adulation of John McCain, but the good news is that the media hold on public opinion is weakening. The poor peasantry suffering out beyond the TV cameras and radio microphones of the corporate media elite of the Manhattan-to-Beltway nexus are quietly angry, sick and tired of being pelted by the usual BM monkeyshines of judging a candidate by his haircut, her bust line, his pastor, or sniveling embarrassingly at the altar of a war hero with gaping holes in his armor.
The Corporately-Owned Punditocracy and their cousins on McCain’s bus may never pose any of these questions, but you can bet they are occurring to a lot of the awakened rabble so long abused and misled by the BM and the Republican Party for which they stand.
http://liberaltopia.org/?p=250
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