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 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.
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Let’s call her Becky. She’s white, middle-class, ’50-ish’ and owns her own small physical therapy business employing a couple of full-time and several part-time workers. In the past she voted for George W. Bush and other Republicans, mainly because she believed the Republicans are good for business, she thought she’d enjoy lower taxes, and, as a woman who has worked hard for what she has, it irked her to provide welfare for those she didn’t feel deserved it.
That was then, this is now: First off, the GOP has done nothing for Becky’s small business in the last eight years – in fact, her costs and taxes have steadily gone up. Every time she hears some Republican gassing about helping small business she grits her teeth and laughs bitterly. It’s become a sour joke to her these days.
Then there’s our privatized health care system – although she’s had problems with Medicare/Medicaid paying its bills slowly, she eventually gets her money. Not so with private HMO’s – not only are they slow payers, but she’s currently going to court suing an insurance company for promising to pay a $900.00 claim and then arbitrarily reducing the amount to $180.00, not even providing her with a reason beyond that this is their ‘new policy.’ Universal health care, something that was anathema to Becky just a few years ago, now seems like a pretty good idea in contrast to the arrogant corporate types she must deal with in the for-profit insurance companies.
What does she think of John McCain? “That old man is just going to get us in wars forever and waste our tax money. No way!” While she hasn’t come out and said she’ll be voting for Obama, she’s lost to the Republican Party. She is also one of the half-dozen small business owners I have talked to who feel approximately the same way. The GOP has made much of babbling about helping small business owners and entrepreneurs but, as another SBO put it, “They only give the tax breaks to the big guys. We don’t even get the trickle down.”
If these are the kinds of voters McCain is counting on to put him into the presidency, I have two words for him: ‘President Obama.’