John McCain

Although I have done versions of this before, this was inspired by a Daily Kos Diary:

This is what happened Monday, Aug. 29, 2005...the day Katrina hit, John McCain's 69th birthday...the day America realized that Republicans don't give a shit about Americans.

Hurricane Katrina:

I remember the radar images from the weather channel the night before landfall. I remember distincly watching it and thinking, "My god...that's going to be bad." I also remember thinking that the government had better be ready to get people out and to deal with the situation.

I was right...it was going to be really, really bad. I mean THIS bad:

While Mississippi and Louisiana were getting slammed by Hurricane Katrina and Americans were dying, THIS is what Bush and McCain were doing:

From CurrentTV comes this amazing footage from WITHIN Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans:

It is now five years since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. Five years since Bush gloated that we had won...and yet almost every day brings more casualties. We are STILL mired in Iraq, still have no exit strategy. And Osama bin Laden, who has never set foot in Iraq, remains free and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization is stronger than ever.

Bush has failed.

And John McCain has vowed to continue Bush's Iraq Quagmire for as long as 100 years. Yes...he said he would be fine with continuing this failure for 100 years. Let's look at McCain's views of Bush's failed Iraq Quagmire: (thanks to MoveOn.org)

* John McCain recently said, "No one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have."1 He was Bush's strongest ally in the march to war in Iraq. McCain consistently repeated the same misjudgments made by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and President Bush. More than 4,000 American troops have lost their lives because of these misjudgments.2
* McCain says we could be in Iraq for 100 years, and has consistently opposed any plan to withdraw troops from Iraq.3 He'd rather dump billions more in Iraq than invest it in our economy back home.

In the immortal words of Team America, Fuck yeah!

John McCain can't seem to make up his mind what he thinks about the economy. Sometimes he seems to say the Bush economy is just splendorifous, don't worry, be happy. Other times he gets his serious face and tells us straight talk about things being tough. But you can't have it both ways, Mr. John McBush. You can't say times are tough without recognizing the dismal failures of the Bush economy.

The DNC is calling him on his economic confusion:

And Marc Ambinder discusses some details of the issue at the Atlantic.com.

John McCain seems to think America really is better off than it was 8 years ago. I don't know about you but no one I know is better off. In fact with unemployment, inflation, banks struggling, record level bankruptcy, decaying infrastructure, a second recession in 8 years, and a record deficit, it is hard to see how anyone who isn't CEO of Halliburton or Exxon could see these times as anywhere comparable to the low inflation, low unemployment boom times of the Clinton years.

UPDATE: Sometimes a story is too good to be true. Even though this story sounds plausible, turns out http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/kinsley.asp ">it's been debunked on Snopes.com.

While John McCain is eagerly embracing Bush and vowing to continue Bush's failed policies, it may be a good idea to remember what Ronald Reagan thought of the Little Bush:

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his n'er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida; the one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

From the REAGAN DIARIES------entry dated May 17, 1986.

So this is the guy we had shoved down our throats and who John McCain wants to emulate?

Time for the voters to reject the failed Bush/McCain poli

I have been reporting on how John McCain has an abyssmal record on the Environment, a poor record on Veterans Issues, but gets the full support of the entire Bush family and bigoted, right wing extremist pastors.

Now MoveOn.org has a good round up of what the true John McCain is really like. Anti-civil rights, anti-choice, wanting to continue the Iraq war indefinitely, anti-children, etc. From MoveOn.org:

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3

The Democratic Senators unanimously support a new GI Bill to help returning Veterans, providing them with full tuition, room and board to give them more education opportunities.

George Bush, John McCain, and all but 9 Republican Senators are oppsing this support for Veterans, going so far as to threaten a fillibuster to prevent a vote on this.

General Wesley Clark, Robert Greenwald, and Captain Jon Soltz are joining together to demand Republicans support our Veterans:

I think it is useless to try and get McCain behind this. Ironically McCain, along with most Republican Senators, get very poor ratings from Veterans and Solder advocacy groups. From Project Vote Smart, here are John McCain's ratings on Veterans' Issues from 2004 on:

2006 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Disabled American Veterans 20 percent in 2006.

2006 In 2006 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave Senator McCain a grade of D.

2006 Senator McCain sponsored or co-sponsored 18 percent of the legislation favored by the The Retired Enlisted Association in 2006.

The much touted "surge" that was dreamed up by John McCain and pushed so eagerly by George Bush, Joe Lieberman and most Republicans (against the advice of many generals) first saw a large INCREASE in violence in Iraq as ethnic clensing of neighborhoods in Bagdhad and elsewhere ran its course. Then there was a lull in violence, as formerly mixed Shia/Sunni neighborhoods became sharply segregated. But Bush, McCain and Lieberman claimed that the surge was working.

This month should put an end to that claim. As civil war broke out again, violence skyrocketed. From BBC news:

The monthly figure of people killed in Iraq rose by 50% in March compared with the previous month, according to official government counts.

A total of 1,082 Iraqis, including 925 non-combatant civilians, were killed, up from 721 in February...

March also saw an increase in bombings and intense fighting between Shia militiamen and government forces.

The number of deaths last month seems to confirm a trend of rising deaths due to violence.

More than 1,800 people were killed in August 2007. This declined to 540 in January 2008, but the figure has risen steadily since...

What happened was not that the surge worked. What happened was that al-Sadr has been calling the shots. When he declared a cease fire, violence went down.

The media frenzy over a pastor at Obama's church seems to finally be dying down. But why hasn't there been a similar frenzy over the bigoted hate-mongers who are endorsing John McCain. McCain embraces the endorsement of far worse people than Obama's pastor, and it gets ignored by the media. Jews on First has this report:

Barrack Obama dealt frankly, openly and intellectually with the issue of his complex relationship to Jeremiah Wright. Contrast that with John McCain's embrace of Christian Right leaders Pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley. This is big picture stuff...

...the media has not lingered on John Hagee's anti-Catholic bigotry, even though McCain stood smiling with Hagee to receive the televangelist's endorsement. When McCain subsequently distanced himself from Hagee's hateful statements, it was only for fear of losing Catholic votes...

Hagee has based his career, wealth, position and enormous power on hatred: hatred of Islam, of homosexuals, and of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Yet John McCain went out of his way to court him, in hopes that Hagee's endorsement would make the Christian Right forget his not-so-long ago disdain for them as "agents of intolerance." McCain courted Hagee knowing full well that, when it comes to Israel, Hagee is doing all he can to insure there is to be no land for peace deal. Ever.

As oil and wheat prices skyrocket, banks quite literally teeter on the brink of collapse, our soldiers keep dying, and the US deficit keeps on climbing, we may sometimes forget the monumental blunder that got us into this mess: the invasion of Iraq.

This is the number one drain on our economy, the number one reason for high prices and the number one reason the international alliance that supported American after 9/11 now barely speaks to us.

The Iraq Blunder is one of the biggest blunders ever in American History...and yet the George Bush/John McCain/Joe Lieberman axis of blunders STILL thinks we should be occupying Iraq for eternity.

But the one, single question that no Republican has ever been able to answer is just why did we ever invade in the first place. Why did we invade, what are our goals, what is our exit strategy? No answer from Bush. No answer from McCain. No answer from Lieberman.

No answer because there IS no answer. Every single excuse they ever gave us for invading Iraq proved to be a lie. I was one of those who, at the time they were making their case to the world for invasion, was dead certain they were lying. My knowledge of history and politics, everything I knew about the Middle East and Islam told me their excuses were lies. Those of us who saw through their lies were proven right. This morning I was reminded of this, on the eve of the 5th year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq Blunder, that I was right.