The Rude Pundit
At some point last night, it stopped being funny. Here was the scene: the Rude Pundit was watching John McCain speak on a movie screen at the Parkway Theatre in south Minneapolis. In the audience were over 300 people who had come to see a comedy show, which happened before McCain spoke. The past couple of nights at the Parkway, the whole thing took on a raucous, Rocky Horror Picture Show/MST3K feel, with anyone who wanted hurling sarcasm at Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin.
Last night, the set-up was much the same. And, after McCain started speaking, there was much mirth in that way that people will try to top each other. But then, all of a sudden, you could feel the wind go out of the room. It wasn't funny anymore. If you wanna pick a moment, it was probably when McCain started into his story about his time as a prisoner of war.
Now, the humor didn't end because of the "power" of McCain's tale of torture and woe. No such bullshit like that a crowd of liberals was brought to silence by war stories or whatever. Sorry, the expiration date on McCain's Hanoi Hilton parable has long since passed, and now it's just become so much rank, inedible cheese. And the Rude Pundit has no problem mocking McCain's experience.
For the Rude Pundit, it was the cynicism of the tale's re-telling in this setting. The exploitation of one's pain for political gain is common. Hell, Democrats do it regularly: Al Gore's sister, John Edwards' child, Joe Biden's wife and baby. But it was the extent of the description and details that just became so repulsive on a gut level.
Conservatives reading this, and there are a few, will see it and say, "Well, of course, you couldn't take it, punk ass pussy liberal," thinking that McCain is a great man. No, no. Sorry, that's not it. The Rude Pundit knows great men and women, people for whom suffering becomes a means by which they attempt to do everything - and that means goddamn everything - to prevent suffering at all levels.
For John McCain, his suffering is an end to itself, the alpha and omega of his life. Beyond that, he's just a cranky fucker who pissed off everyone so now he's a "maverick," which is just a fancy word for "dick."
The point here is that McCain has never moved past it. And he learned the wrong lessons. The lesson of McCain's captivity is not that "No man can always stand alone." If it took getting his bones broken to realize that, then he must have been a shallow, shallow boy prior to the day his plane hit the ground in Vietnam. And if it took something that extreme to make McCain "fall in love" with his country, well, Michelle Obama is owed an apology.
The lessons of McCain's captivity are these: if you are punished enough, you will submit; and that people don't like their homes bombed. Michael Moore takes that second point on in his new book in detail. Essentially, it boils down to: if you fuck people's shit up, they'll want to fuck up yours. Or your children's.
McCain alluded to that first point when he said, "They broke me." Of all the vivid details he developed in his narrative at the convention, he left out what that meant, which was that he signed confessions and gave up information. It's easy to reduce this to "See? Don't torture." But if you expand that notion of submission enough, you take that into other realms: those with power want you to submit, whether through buying their shit, ignoring their crimes, or agreeing with their decisions as long as they leave you alone enough so you can get back to buying their shit.
John McCain didn't come back from Vietnam to change anything. In fact, he wanted to go back and kill more gooks. He didn't get into office to end war. His career has been built on a vested interest in keeping war on people's minds because, without war always being in process or imminent, his story is diminished. John McCain simply has accomplished virtually nothing. He has allowed any cause he might have to be gutted and compromised to worthlessness because, in the end, on campaign finance reform, immigration, torture, everything, he has submitted to those who can break him again and again.
So the Rude Pundit got up and walked out of that theatre, as did many others. He scribbled his little post from last night and hit the bar.
And this morning, here at this suburban Caribou Coffee where he sits tapping this out, he just heard two older men talking about how great a speech it was and how the Democrats can't attack McCain because he's a hero, and all the Rude Pundit can think is how America is filthy with fools.
By Stephen Pizzo - News for Real
The McCain camp is asking us to choose him over Barack Obama because McCain has the kind of international/military experience we need in today’s evermore complicated and dangerous world. But, even though McCain is still only a US Senator, he played a key role in a recent international crisis. And what happened, before, during and in the aftermath of that crisis should gives reason for concern.
I am, of course, referring to the recent dustup between tiny Georgia and its next door neighbor, and former owner, Russia. If you are one of those who believes McCain’s five years in a North Vietnamese prison and 26 years in the senate provided him with the right skill sets for the world of today, please take the time to consider McCain’s role in the events that led up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in early August.
(No, not THAT Georgia. The other one. The one that’s even closer to Russia than, of say, Alaska.)
What exactly happened in early August? What prompted the tiny and fragile Georgian democracy to take a swing at the Russian bear? The answer is that the Georgian leadership had been led to believe America was waiting in the wings to back them up if the bear swung back.
The bear swung back, but the Georgians were left asking themselves, “Where are the Americans?”
Its the same question Cuban counter-revolutionary troops asked back in in 1961, as they were being slaughtered on Bay of Pigs beaches and hunted down in Cuban swamps. They’d been led to believe that, if they moved to dislodge the Communist Castro regime, the US would have their backs.
In the case of Georgia, 2008, the assurances weren’t even proffered by the US government, but by a mere candidate for president, John McCain. As his first major foreign policy decision, Georgia demands a closer look. And the closer one looks the more it looks like McCain’s Bay of Pigs.
Let’s begin with the man who described as McCain’s own Henry Kissenger – Randy Scheunemann. Understanding where Randy comes from informs us where he’d like to take a McCain administration:
“Scheunemann’s lobbying firm is one of three that he has operated since 1999, with clients including BP Amoco, defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and the National Rifle Association…..
Scheunemann is part of the community of neoconservatives who relentlessly pushed for war in Iraq.
In the months before the war began, Scheuenemann ran the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, set up in November 2002 when public support for the looming invasion was eroding.
Before that, Scheunemann was on board with the Project for the New American Century, whose letter to Bush nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks pointed to Iraq as a possible link to the terrorists. The letter said American forces must be prepared to support “by all means necessary” the U.S. government’s commitment to opponents of Saddam Hussein.
Scheunemann was among the letter’s 37 signers, a Who’s Who of neoconservative luminaries including William Kristol and Richard Perle.
If anything, Scheunemann’s duties have been enhanced from McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, when Scheunemann also advised McCain on national security and foreign policy issues. (Source)
Scheunemann, who now serves as the McCain campaign’s chief foreign policy guru, has gorged himself on the Bush administration’s Apple-Johnny-Seed-of-Democracy agenda. Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO/US war guarantee, he was also paid handsomely by Romania and Latvia to do the same.
McCain, who likes to rant against the evils of lobbyists, burned up the phone lines with his lobbyist-BMF. In addition to the 49 contacts with McCain or his staff regarding Georgia, Scheunemann’s firm lobbied the senator or his aides on at least 47 other occasions since 2001 on behalf of the governments of Taiwan and Macedonia, which each paid Scheunemann and his partner Mike Mitchell over half a million dollars; Romania, which paid over $400,000; and Latvia, which paid nearly $250,000.
Scheunemann relied almost entirely on his access to McCain for his work involving foreign clients. He and his partner reported 71 phone conversations and meetings with McCain and his top advisers since 2004 on behalf of foreign clients, including Georgia, according to forms they filed with the Justice Department.
The contacts focused on Georgia’s aspirations to join NATO and on legislative proposals, including a measure co-sponsored by McCain that supported Georgia’s position on South Ossetia.
The neoconservative reign of GW Bush has been a gold mine for those who believe in the shoot-first-negotiate-later, (if ever) Bush/Cheney foreign policy. It has also been a gold mine for the companies, like Northrop, Boeing, Halliburton, etc. These are companies that only really profit once the talking stops and the shooting gets underway.
With the neo-con’s string beginning to run out in Iraq, these same forces had been queuing Iran up as the next patient needing a forced democracy enema. Trouble is few of our former allies are anxious to follow the gang that can’t shoot straight into another war in the Muslim world.
So neo-con forces turned their attentions back to more familiar territories; former eastern bloc Soviet satellites, like Georgia. Their case — keeping Georgia in the west’s camp is a national security issue because, 1) It’s a democracy, and 2) a critical oil and gas pipeline feeding Europe runs through it.
Re-igniting the Cold War with Russia would suit neoconservatives just fine. The war on terror, while its been profitable, has not required the kind of big-ticket weaponry that fed US arms companies so well during the Cold War ; bombers, nuclear subs, space weapons, anti-ballistic missile systems, aircraft carriers … ah, those were the days.
Randy Scheunermann is now at the head of the table within the McCain campaign and, if he wins, he is likely to be tapped as National Security Advisor in a McCain administration. In the meantime Scheunermann and his crew of neo-cons have been preparing the ground for a new run of high-dollar, high-conflict years ahead. Randy and his boss, McCain worked the little nation of Georgia like a high school boy in heat in the back in seat on Lookout Point. “Come on.. what are you waiting for. You love us don’t you? We love you. Just do it. Of course we’ll respect you in the morning. Then we’ll be together forever.”
We know that because it’s part of the public record:
Campaign Dismisses Timing of Phone Call, Contract
Washington Post - August 13, 2008 — Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic….The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.
We don’t know exactly what McCain told Georgia’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, during that April 17 phone call. But Georgians had repeatedly been assured by Scheunermann that McCain’s views on Georgia’s importance to the US mirrored those of the current occupant of the Oval Office. It was not an unreasonable assurance for the Georgians to accept. After all, the McCain campaign itself had boosted the very same, that when it came to spreading and protecting Georgia’s emerging democracy, the US was four-square on their side.
Based on precisely those assurances Saakashvili figured he had a small window of opportunity, a window quickly closing as the likelihood Obama would be the next occupant of the Oval Office. If he was going to integrate Abkhazca and South Ossetia into Georgia once and for all, it had to be now while the Bush/McCain team still had control of US foreign policies. By August it was clear to Saakashvilli that if the US was to be in any kind of posture to militarily support Georgia, it was now — or maybe never.
And so Georgia’s weak military marched against Russian forces in South Ossetia… a mouse roaring. And that’s how the Georgians came to learn what it must have felt like, 47-years ago, on the blood-soaked beaches of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs and the steamy death-trap of the Zapata swamps.
What does this episode say about John McCain’s judgement? You know what liberals, like me, think. But how about conservative foreign policy experts:
When you are leader of the free world, you have to understand that your words have consequences. And here, Senator McCain failed.
Russia has been acting like the classic schoolyard bully, puffed up by the surge in oil prices. Senator McCain took the side of the 90-pound weakling: democratic Georgia with its heart in the right, pro-American, place, even if its claim to two separatist provinces is uncertain.
McCain’s resolve was undoubtedly strengthened by his top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who was a paid lobbyist receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Georgia until just three months ago. But if Senator McCain’s gut was right, his reading of the region, which was waiting to explode, was wrong.
By promising Georgia America’s undying support, Senator McCain basically told the 90-pound weakling that America had its back if it threw a punch at Russia. Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, did just that last week, launching a lightning attack to retake its separatist province — and lo and behold, the bully struck back with overwhelming force.
But Senator McCain couldn’t keep his promise. Georgia is not a NATO ally. And while America should punish Russia severely for its disproportionate use of force, we should hardly enter a third war in the Caucasus while we still have two hot wars on our plate.
Our next president will have to face down Russia’s increasingly noxious foreign policy. He will have to set uncrossable red lines and clear punishments if Moscow continues to disdain the course of “peaceful rise.” But in so doing, it would be useful to avoid embroiling America in a war with another vast nuclear power. On that score, John McCain has lost round one. (Conservative Foreign Policy Watch – Rachel Kleinfeld and Thomas M. Donnelly (Source)
A final observation on all this. Conservatives will dismiss this as an “apples and oranges” comparison. But it’s not. It’s right on the money. Because the money is what it’s all been about for the past eight years.
The Randy Scheunermann’s of Washington have had a lucrative field day during the Bush/Cheney years. Lobbyist like him used their access to fleece those wishing to use that access to buy legislation. Jack Abramoff is another example. Abramoff decided that he did not have to look overseas for suckers when he had them right here at home; American Indians. Like Schuenermann he collected six-figure fees from Indian tribes hoping to gain administration and congressional backing for their issues, mostly involving high-dollar Indian Casino operations.
Abramoff, like Scheunermann made promises he either knew he could not deliver on, or had no intention of even trying. And trust me, Abramoff and Scheunermann were only two of dozens of other Bush/Cheney connected lobbyists who treated their access licenses to steal. These guys made post-Civil War Carpetbaggers look like social workers.
And then we have John McCain’s first international crisis since he became a candidate for Commander in Chief, and how did he do? He led a tiny nation thousands of miles away to believe that he could deliver US backing if Russia threatened them. Then, when the Georgians acted on those assurances, he could not, would not and did not deliver. Instead all he could deliver was more words — “Today we are all Georgians.” Empty words, but at least this time, for the first time, those words had not been bought and paid for. Because Georgia isn’t about to be fooled twice.
Now that tiny democracy must face down an dangerous, enraged next door neighbor. The Georgia affair was John McCain’s very own, personal, Bay of Pigs Invasion. Georgians died, Scheunermann profited, and America’s prestige took another giant hit:
“The taunting Russian troops are already making fun of Americans as they roll deeper into Georgia. According to media reports from War fronts, Russian troops waved at journalists and one soldier jokingly shouted to a photographer: “Come with us, beauty, we”re going to Tbilisi!” Where is George Bush and his super power military ask the common Georgians who face the Russian armored vehicles and tanks in their door step. ” (Source)
While Georgia itself lost, neo-cons see progress. Russia and the US are back to staring daggers at each other.
Can big boosts in the defense budget for a new generation of large weapons systems be far behind? And that would be just fine with John McCain.
By David Corn, MotherJones.com - Alternet
Number of sentences in John McCain's RNC speech about being a POW in Vietnam: 43. Number about his 25 years in the House and Senate: 8.
The convention ended as it began: a commemoration of McCain's hellish years in a Hanoi prison cell four decades ago. The political equation was a simple one: POW equals patriotic hero equals a fighting president. Before McCain walked down the long runway at St. Paul's Xcel Center, a baritone voice declared over the P.A., "When you've lived in a box .... you put your people first." Case closed.
But there was a speech to get through. And before McCain arrived at the climactic I-was-a-POW finale, he delivered, in wooden style, a no-better-than-par speech that was mostly a series of traditional GOP buzz phrases: lower taxes, cut spending, open markets. He noted, "We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don't legislate from the bench. We believe in the values of families, neighborhoods and communities." (Just not community organizers.) Was the speechwriter who penned Sarah Palin's acceptance speech too busy to work on McCain's?
Unlike most speakers at the convention, McCain acknowledged that some Americans are facing tough times. "I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market," he said. "Bill got a temporary job after he was out of work for seven months. Sue works three jobs to help pay the bills." And he said he would fight for Jake and Toni Wimmer of Franklin County, Pennsylvania. "Jake," he explained, "works on a loading dock; coaches Little League, and raises money for the mentally and physically disabled. Toni is a schoolteacher, working toward her Master's Degree. They have two sons, the youngest, Luke, has been diagnosed with autism." But how would McCain help these folks? Moments later, he offered a dumbed-down version of his economic plan: " I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can. My opponent will raise them. I will open new markets to our goods and services. My opponent will close them. I will cut government spending. He will increase it." (By the way, many analysts and journalists have repeatedly noted that Obama's economic plan would cut income taxes far more than McCain for Americans below the top 1 percent.)
Over and over, McCain cited his love of country and his dedication to the nation that "saved" him. He tried to present himself as the candidate of change, who wants to transform "almost everything: from the way we protect our security to the way we compete in the world economy; from the way we respond to disasters to the way we fuel our transportation network; from the way we train our workers to the way we educate our children." (He did not explain why after eight years of a Republican administration the country needs so much change.) McCain reminded the GOP delegates that he has on occasion challenged his own party. His domestic policy ideas, the few he offered, did not rouse the crowd -- except when he called for more oil and gas drilling. In response, the delegates once again enthusiastically chanted, "Drill, baby, drill!" It was one of the biggest shout-outs of the night. The audience was notably silent when McCain called for boosting alternative energy sources.
Maverick, fighter, fixer -- McCain said he was all of that. But, above all, he was McCain the warrior who had returned home. He had fought for the country once before -- and he had suffered. He will fight for it again. "I have the record and the scars to prove it," he declared. "Senator Obama does not." Wave the bloody shirt.
McCain denounced the "constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving" the nation's problems. But this week McCain had commanded a convention that had reprised the standard GOP playbook of spin and fear. Speaker after speaker accused Barack Obama of plotting to raise taxes on middle-income voters. They portrayed Obama as weak, indecisive, inexperienced -- particularly concerning national security. On the final night, retired Lieutenant General Carol Mutter, denouncing Obama's stance on Iraq, told the delegates that the United States' "enemies don't talk about timelines for retreat." Yet the United States' ally in Iraq -- the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- has called for a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops. (Whoops: reality.) Repeatedly, GOP speakers claimed that Obama is not a man who can handle evil. "We cannot afford a president who thinks you can negotiate with evil," proclaimed Representative Mary Fallin, an Oklahoma Republican. But didn't Ronald Reagan negotiate with the Evil Empire? On the first night of the convention, the delegates watched a tribute film to the late President Gerald Ford that celebrated his negotiation of an arms control treaty with the Soviets. (A onetime negotiator-with-evil, Henry Kissinger, was sitting in the V.I.P. section as Fallin spoke.)
Branding Democrats as national security weaklings and tax-and-spend drunkards was predictable. After all, the convention planners didn't dare defend the current administration. In fact, there was hardly a mention of the Bush presidency -- except when George W. Bush addressed the convention by video on its first night. And there was no talk of what the Republicans did between 1994 and 2006 when they controlled both houses of Congress for most of that time. The convention was a very Soviet-like affair; the Bush administration and the Republican Congress of recent years were airbrushed out of the picture.
And there was a heavy dose of us-versus-them -- with "them" being the usual targets of conservative agitators: the media, liberal elites, Hollywood celebrities, "cosmopolitan" Americans (as Rudy Giuliani, of all people, put it), and the government. McCain was exploiting the culture wars. Sarah Palin praised small-town America and mocked Obama for having been an urban community organizer. Onetime football coach Joe Gibbs called for a government of people who "follow [God's] game plan, his Bible, his word," adding that John McCain would be such a leader.
There were more words spoken at the convention about the evils of elites than the subprime meltdown, more words devoted to depicting Obama as an ambitious egomaniac than to addressing the health care crisis. Former Senator Fred Thompson dismissed the Democratic convention for focusing too much on the economic challenges of the day. (He nearly called the Democrats whiners.) When Cindy McCain, the candidate's wife and a multimillionaire heiress, recalled traveling on the campaign trail and seeing Americans facing "difficult situations," she noted that these Americans could "make things right" if the federal government would get "out of our way." A string of speakers accused Obama of failing to recognize the true threat of Islamic terrorism, but none of the major speakers said much -- or anything -- about Afghanistan. McCain himself uttered not a single word about Afghanistan. And nothing about climate change. More words at the convention were spilled about McCain the POW than job loss in America. And the Vietnam War was mythologized over and over as a fight waged for America's freedom and survival.
On the last night of the convention, Senator Sam Brownback told the delegates, "It's not about him; it's about us." Not really. It was about what happened to John McCain forty years ago and what that means to Americans today. His acceptance speech broke no new ground, and it was not meant to. It was just another reminder to cap a convention of reminding. The balloons then dropped, video fireworks fell, the crowd cheered. And for McCain, it was on to the final battle, the old soldier, faith-tested and faith-proved, accompanied by a stylish hockey mom representing small-town goodness -- against those whose mettle have not been tested, whose love of country has not been tested, whose America is rather different from the America of the Republican convention.
By Laura Flanders, AlterNet
Will the media test her on substance or let her play "Ms. Congeniality?" It is up to the public to see through the fact-free diet we're being fed.
In selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain is dusting off an old GOP tool: the estrogen guard. Slap a friendly, female face on a hard core-conservative political platform, and pray that the pundits will only take pot-shots and talk about gender. It worked for George W. Bush and it just may work for Palin.
Watching Palin address the RNC from here in St. Paul, Wednesday, I could have sworn I heard Katherine Harris cheer. Remember Harris, Florida's Secretary of State in 2001, and co-chair of her state's Bush/Cheney Committee? No one did more to snag the White House for her man -- and no one was laughed and scoffed at more heartily by the media. While the press poo-poo'ed her make-up ("she seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel" wrote the Washington Post) and introduced her to the public as caricature ("Cruella de Ville"), as Florida's top election-cop, Harris purged enough voter rolls, understaffed enough voting places and ill-equipped the voting system sufficiently to guarantee election day chaos. Parodied in the press, she rose to stardom in the GOP. Come Inauguration Day 2001, Florida Republicans threw an enormous bash for the woman they dubbed "our Joan of Arc." Soon after she was elected to Congress.
So it is with Palin. While her record stinks, so does the media coverage. In place of serious discussion of her policies on the environment, on human rights, on taxes, free speech and governance, we've had five days of "Veep Pregnant Teen Shock" and there's more than enough misogyny in the mix to give the McCain camp a stick to beat any truly investigative members of press-corps with.
Desperate for female votes (a group the Democrats have taken for granted for years,) John McCain clearly hopes his Palin pick will burnish his appeal among middle-of-the-road women. It's a long-shot. Palin believes abortion is a crime even in the case of rape and incest (that was even too draconian for the voters of South Dakota). She supports teaching creationism in schools as strongly as, as Governor, she opposed environmental protections for the Holy planet.
The hypocrisy is rank. Bristol, Palin's daughter "made the decision on her own to keep the baby," McCain's aides told the press. That's not a choice pregnant teens would have under the proposed administration of her mother and McCain. As for her claims to oppose corruption and pork - according to the Alaska press, she supported that costly bridge to "nowhere" for years, before finally canceling it as Governor. And experience? Again, according to Alaskan papers, during Palin's tenure as Mayor, most of the actual work of running small Wasilla was turned over to an administrator after Palin's precipitous firings gave rise to a recall campaign. Mayor Palin even tried to fire City
Librarian after she demurred at a proposal to censor the library's collection.
Will the media see the substance or only the "Ms. Congeniality." We'll find out soon enough. But it's likely she'll get plenty of jabs in before then if her first performance on the national stage is anything to go by. Palin can dig at Obama more effectively than her running mate. (Does anyone not hear the racism in her allusion to John McCain's as the "sort of name you find on small town war memorials.") And if you're counting on her getting a grilling on the campaign trail, don't hold your breath. Reading from the Karen Hughes/Karl Rove campaign playbook, they McCain team will keep Palin from answering questions (as they did a young Texas Governor called Bush.)
They're already de-legitimating the questioners, and there will simply be no access for anyone but "Fox News" pals and those who act like them.
So will the public that's been fed a fact-free diet of John McCain the "maverick," see through Palin, the fresh-faced feminist? Don't bet on it.
by John Nichols - The Nation/Common Dreams
Forty years ago, mounting a comeback campaign after losing a presidential race eight years earlier, Richard Nixon secured the Republican nomination and then selected as his running-mate a former local official who had served a scant twenty months as the governor of a small state.
The choice was questioned by pundits and mocked by Democrats. They called the vice presidential nominee: "Spiro Who?"
But when Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew hit the campaign trail, he did so as "Nixon's Nixon" - the attack dog the party needed to take the opposition apart while making the Republican presidential nominee look presidential.
It was the same role that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin assumed Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
In her speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, Palin did a full Agnew.
Like that other Republican vice-presidential nominee in that other time, the newly-minted Republican nominee defended herself against unsettling revelations with regard to her personal and political missteps by attacking the messengers.
"I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone," she announced with a sneer in her voice. "But here's a little news flash for those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this great country."
The "average hockey mom" from Wasilla was devoted most of her first real speech to the American people to the serious political work of tossing verbal brickbats at the men who lead the Democratic ticket.
Palin barely even mentioned Barack Obama or Joe Biden by name. But everyone knew who she was talking about when she picked up her party's new theme of belittling Obama's experience as a community organizer working with laid-off steelworkers in Chicago.
The former mayor of the small city of Wasilla, Alaska, turned questions about whether her tenure in that position qualifies her to be second in line for the presidency into a populist defense of small-town America that highlighted an embarrassing off-the-cuff comment made by Obama at a San Francisco fund-raising event with regard to "bitter" rural voters that embarrassed the Democratic candidate during his Pennsylvania primary campaign.
"(Since) our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves," said Palin. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening. We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco."
Sarcastic, bombastic, at times witty, at times savage, Palin ripped and ridiculed Obama with an eye toward challenging the common sense, logic and patriotism of the Democrat.
I've noticed a pattern with our opponent.
Maybe you have, too.
We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers.
And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.
But listening to him speak, 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.
This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it.
Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit.
Terrorist states are seeking new-clear weapons without delay ... he wants to meet them without preconditions.
Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?
Government is too big ... he wants to grow it.
Congress spends too much ... he promises more.
Taxes are too high ... he wants to raise them.
Never mind the conflicts between reality and Palin's over-the-top mischaracterizations of Obama's record and positions. The governor of Alaska was not about to be constrained by the facts.
The point was not to debate the Democrats.
The point, as in Spiro Agnew's day, was to destroy the opposition. "(Though) both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, ‘fighting for you,' let us face the matter squarely," shouted Palin. "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death ... and that man is John McCain."
This is the Sarah Palin America will hear in the fall of 2008.
Those who listen closely will hear echoes of 1968.
The echoes will not be precise.
John McCain is not Richard Nixon.
Barack Obama is certainly not Hubert Humphrey.
There is no George Wallace dividing the Democratic vote.
But there is a Spiro Agnew, and her name is Sarah Palin.
Nothing Means Anything
By ALAN FARAGO - Counterpunch
John McCain says it plainly: he is running against the status quo, he is running against the lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and he can't wait to unleash Palin on its culture. What McCain is really saying to top donors in states like Florida is that he is running against what they built: a red state majority based on the Rove/Cardenas/Bush plan to put campaign money spigots in every infrastructure project from the Panhandle (St. Joe) to Homestead (LBA/sprawl).
Florida's top donors must believe, as in other red states; McCain doesn't mean it. And maybe he doesn't, because nothing means anything in the McCain/Palin campaign. In Florida it is result of the Hurricane Hoffman/ WCI Communities effect.
In 2003, Al Hoffman-- then chair of WCI Communities, a condo/ home builder, and also finance chair for both Bush brothers (now, top fundraiser for McCain)-- crowed to the Washington Post that suburban sprawl was "an unstoppable force". Why is sprawl an issue?
Because insta-grow communities in Miami's suburbs and the American south and West-- in places like Pheonix, Las Vegas and Sacramento-- are littered with foreclosures, crashing neighborhood values, and the seeds of a financial tsunami.
Bloomberg reports, "Foreclosures accelerated in the second quarter to the fastest pace in almost three decades as interest rates increased and home values fell, prompting more Americans to walk away from homes they couldn't refinance or sell. New foreclosures increased to 1.19 percent, rising above 1 percent for the first time in the survey's 29 years, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report today." (US Mortgage Foreclosures, Deliquencies Rise to 29 Year High, Sept. 5)
Those crushed dreams belong to Republicans, too. Today Hoffman's former company is bankrupt and the entire array of special interests related to development and speculation is dazed as a bee colony hit by a cloud of smoke.
Most political observers have no idea how it happened, but the results are clear and articulated, partially, in today's report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Today’s extremely disappointing employment report shows that the economy remains mired in a slump and still waiting for something to jump start a sustainable recovery. Consumer spending supported by the stimulus payments that Congress enacted earlier this year helped keep the economy growing in the second quarter, but the headwinds from still-high energy prices, a weak housing market, tight credit markets, and continuing financial market uncertainty will make it difficult to sustain economic growth as the effects of the first round of stimulus wear off."
"Financial market uncertainty" euphemistically refers to the biggest threat to the nation's financial system since the 1930's.
Most people don't have any idea how to buy a Collateral Mortgage Obligation, a type of financial instrument at the heart of the multi-trillion dollar credit crisis and housing market crash, but the top donors from the real estate development industries do: at financial institutions like Bear Stearns (defunct) or Lehman Brothers, where Jeb Bush took a paid consultancy after leaving the Florida governor's office, now raising billions from Korea just to stave off bankrupcy. And Korea is just the latest in a long line of foreign investors with accounts bulging with dollars, from Abu Dhabi to Beijing, who have their own concept of what the ownership society means.
This is what the foundation for Florida's future rests upon: the quicksand of capital "rescue plans" from vultures and sovereign wealth funds. Yesterday, Bill Gross, manager of the world's biggest bond fund, told Bloomberg News: "The U.S. government needs to start using more of its money to support markets to stem a burgeoning "financial tsunami". (U.S. Must Buy Assets to Prevent `Tsunami,' Gross Says) Fiscal conservatives should be apoplectic.
This isn't-- as Sarah Palin, George Bush, and John McCain claim-- the "angry left" talking. I'm not sure the Republicans cheering at their national convention understand this part: that nationalization of private financial institutions is happening right now, under the supervision of the Bush administration and the shield of US taxpayers, while the party values continue to tout the "free market". Free market, to whom?
Today, the Republican spin machine is struggling to pin the socialization-- nationalization, if you will-- of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on someone else. How dare the Republicans accuse "liberals" for being angry about the fire sale of US assets to Asia, the Middle East, and even Russia? Filled up your car at Lukoil recently? The fact is that lefties and liberals have been no where in view, except as community organizers and neighborhood activists.
We didn't hear John McCain, last night in St. Paul, nor will Florida top donors hear Sarah Palin in Miami next week utter a solitary word of the fiscal irresponsibility that pushed the US economy into the biggest crisis since the Great Depression while making many of them a fortune in the process.
What I heard John McCain say, was that his campaign is running away from the Republican status quo lickety-split: change we can trust. What I heard was a convention full of Republican party faithful cheering against the performance and record of their own party and against the windfall profits that enriched their top donors.
So it is going to be interesting to watch Alaska Governor Sarah Palin vacuum political money from those top Florida Republicans before Hurricane Ike, whose name recalls a real Republican hero who precisely understood the threats of powerful vested interests against representative democracy.
Palin comes in the fundraising footsteps of her own political Alaskan enemies: Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young, both of whom have very close connections to wealthy South Florida Republicans donors.
I'm not sure what her sales pitch will be, but it is not likely along the lines of the truth: "write your check to the Republican National Committee or a 527 committee so we can continue to hold power even if it means running TV ads against what we represent." Nor is she likely to say anything along the lines of Bill Gross', "If we are to prevent a continuing asset and debt liquidation of near historic proportions, we will require policies that open up the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury."
No. When Sarah Palin arrives for her coming out party by Miami's Republican elite, the media is likely to be shut out from everything but the choreographed entry of a shooting star.
This is what the Rovian politics of the past decade proved: how, if you control the mainstream media-- overtly through ownership (Fox News) or through intimidation (access to Larry King Live) and say a thing often enough; most Americans can be persuaded it is true.
In Miami on Monday, Sarah Palin will not be aiming against "all those special interests" because all those special interests are going to be her audience.
Alan Farago, who writes on the environment and politics from Coral Gables, Florida, and can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
---Henry Mencken
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