danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Perhaps you read this webpage but dislike politics.  If that is the case you may want to take a break and come back in late November.  Meanwhile…

John McCain has been one of relatively few politicians whom I have respected as an individual.  I haven’t generally been on his side of the issues, but sometimes I have, and even when I wasn’t I could respect his simple, unaffected manner and, for lack of better expression, “straight talk”.  I regretted that he got shafted in 2000 in South Carolina.  I couldn’t understand why he would have supported George W. Bush in 2004 without assuming one or the other of the following was true:

1. John McCain really did believe that George W. Bush was good for America (in which case his advertisements now saying that we are “worse off than we were four years ago” suggest he has terrible judgment), or,
2. He knew that if he didn’t actively campaign for Bush he’d never get the chance to gain the Republican nomination in any future election.

Neither of those reflects very well on John McCain’s integrity, in my opinion.  But Senator McCain didn’t really lose my respect until recently.  It wasn’t picking Governor Palin as his running mate. No, I don’t believe her qualified to be vice president, and yes, I do think his choosing her was much more about securing a particular segment of the electorate that he needs in order to win.  But, that’s politics, for better or for worse (worse), and if he wanted to have any chance of winning he needed to make sure he got the cultural conservatives on his side, since he was never their first choice.

No, what lost my respect was when Senator McCain chose to surround himself with disciples of Karl Rove, who have no scruples, and for whom the ends justify the means, no matter how despicable those means are.  These are people who have no qualms about lying and cheating to get what they want.  Now there are those who claim that politicians have always lied and cheated.  This isn’t about taking a kickback on a deal to bring some pork barrel project to a district.  (I don’t begrudge Governor Palin trying to bring home money to her state; I just object to her telling bald-faced lies now, claiming she never did.)  No, what I find offensive is the way John McCain’s campaign is putting out advertisements and press releases that contain demonstrably false information.  They know it isn’t true, but they also know that the media is lazy, and that big claims get headlines, and the inevitable retractions will be buried.  The sheer number and intensity of the lies–and it’s important to call them what they are; they are not mere exaggerations or “distortions”, they are lies, pure and simple–has exceeded what a man of John McCain’s character should be comfortable with.  But there was McCain on a stage a week or so ago saying explicitly that Governor Palin sold her state jet on eBay and made a profit.  That is demonstrably false, but they used it to try and further their claim that they are reformers.  They knew that by the time the press looked into and saw that a) the plane sold through a broker, and b) it sold at a loss for the state, the correction wouldn’t make the national news, and their next lie would be the headline of the day.

The paper today highlighted how some of the more recent lies have played out:

First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).

Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and health care.

A McCain advertisement called “Fact Check” was itself found to be “less than honest” by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama.

So those are some pretty outrageous lies.  And what, to me, makes Senator McCain look like scum is that he has a spokesman who says the following (from the same article): “We stand fully by everything that’s in our ads,” [Brian] Rogers said, “and everything that we’ve been saying we provide detailed backup for — everything. And if you and the Obama campaign want to disagree, that’s your call.”

Then he provided no proof, no evidence, even, that any of their claims were true. And he’ll get away with it.  Later I’ll explain how.

Filed under: Current Events, Politics, Rantings on September 13th, 2008