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Kerry Woos McCain

John Kerry wants John McCain to be his running mate.

But wait a minute.

John McCain is a Republican and John Kerry is a Democrat.

No problem.

It would be a “unity government.”

“The enthusiasm of Democrats for Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, is so high that even some who have been mentioned as possible Kerry running mates — including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator — are spinning scenarios about a ‘unity government,’ effectively giving Mr. Kerry a green light to reach across the political aisle and extend an offer,” reports the New York Times.

Aisle?

What aisle?

As Gore Vidal tells us, there is but one party in Washington and it is the Property Party. In other words, all property worth owning shall remain in the possession of big honking corporations. Dem-Repub partisanship is merely a squabble over formula. Our citizen-politicos agree wholeheartedly with the strikebreaker Calvin Coolidge, who once said “the business of America is business.”

“Democrats say a bipartisan Kerry-McCain ticket, featuring two decorated Vietnam War veterans from different parties and regions of the country, would give them a powerful edge in the debate over who can best lead the nation in the war on terror.”

It does not require a whole lot of reading between the lines to understand this. In order to “best lead the nation in the war on terror,” Kerry and McCain — as determined participants in an immoral war resulting in the death of 2-3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans — are remarkably qualified to finish the job in Iraq and in due course invade Syria and Iran, maybe even Saudi Arabia. Thus the Johns avidly embrace the degenerate neocon ethos — that is to say total and “preemptive” war against the third world or “under-developed” countries bearing appreciable measures of oil, minerals, lumber, etc. — beginning with the Arab Middle East and its uncooperative Muslim hordes.

Let’s call it Bush Lite minus opposition to abortion.

Naturally, a Kerry-McCain ticket is a long shot. However, the ABBers (Anybody But Bush) out there should take note.

Come November, if John is John’s running mate, you will need pinch your nostrils extra tight to fend off the pervasive stench. Consider:

McCain was one of the Keating Five. He was investigated on ethics charges for taking contributions (a generous $112,00) from the swindler Charles Keating who was convicted of racketeering and fraud in both state and federal court. Total cost to American taxpayer: $3.4 billion. McCain hung with Keating at his extravagant Bahamas pad and flew on the racketeer’s airplanes at least nine times. McCain’s wife and father-in-law invested heavily in a Keating shopping center in Arizona described as a sweetheart deal.

In addition to associating with bank swindlers, McCain is fond of mobsters. He sent birthday cards to Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonano, the head of the New York Bonano crime family, after the notorious mobster retired in Arizona. I guess sun birds of a feather flock together in the Grand Canyon State.

John’s in favor of allowing corporations to do whatever the heck they want — especially when it comes to raiding the till to support political candidates such as himself. He opposed legislation that would have forced companies to get permission from stockholders before using treasury funds for political activities.

Republicans like to say Democrats have loose morals — recall how they so mercilessly lambasted Clinton for his juvenile dalliance with an intern — but the Republican John M. also had a WD40 lubricated zipper. McCain readily admits his first marriage crashed and burned due to his fooling around with women other than his wife.

Republicans have zero tolerance for drug abuse — or they did until it was discovered Rush Limbaugh had an obsession for munching pain pills like M&Ms. It seems McCain’s wife Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy Budweiser beer distributor, was addicted to prescription drugs. Mrs. McCain even stooped so low as to steal drugs from a medical charity that she ran.

But when it comes to the drug abuse of other people — especially poor people unable to hire fancy lawyers or acquire country club memberships — McCain is about as flexible as reinforced concrete. “Of the four major candidates, McCain has expressed the most hawkish positions on drug policy,” explains the Issues 2000 website. “He wants to increase penalties for selling drugs, supports the death penalty for drug kingpins, favors tightening security to stop the flow of drugs into the country, and wants to restrict availability of methadone for heroin addicts.” No word if McCain finds it necessary to shut down doctors and pharmaceutical corporations that allow rich talkshow hosts to squirrel away thousands of pain pills and turn the domestic help into couriers.

McCain fully supports the neocon way of reacting to the world. He believes al-Qaeda and Saddam were in cahoots and urged Dubya to invade Iraq way back in December, 2001. He mindlessly declared the invasion justified even as a mountain of evidence began to surface indicating Bush and the neocons had lied through their teeth about Saddam and his illusory WMD. McCain supports the so-called missile defense system — even though the thing is an immense failure and will result in flushing billions of dollars down the rat holes of gluttonous defense contractors. For McCain, our future is one of never-ending war and aggression. According to McCain, the job of the United States is “not simply to contain rogue regimes, but to drive them from power.”

Finally, McCain is determined peace will never exist in the Middle East. Like Bush and Kerry, McCain is all agog over the Butcher of Beirut, Ariel Sharon. He likes to tell the accused war criminal what a fine job he’s doing turning the Palestinians into impoverished prisoners on their own land. Last August McCain said “there should be no linkage of the route” of Israel’s apartheid wall to the $9 billion in loan guarantees the US planned to bestow on the scofflaw Zionist state. McCain told Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom that “the Oslo Accords failed because they were based on the premise that Palestinians and Israeli could live peacefully together. The fence is an effort to see if Israelis and Palestinians can live peacefully apart.” In other words, Palestinian Bantustans are fine by John McCain and John Kerry. “Israel’s security fence is a legitimate act of self defense,” Kerry believes. “Israel has a right and a duty to defend its citizens. The fence only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel.” No mention of the additional land Israel has stolen in the process, much of it valuable agricultural land.

A John-John ticket would be virtually indistinguishable from a Bush-Cheney ticket on foreign policy. Nothing will change if Kerry-McCain are elected come November. It will be more of the same — only the United Nations and the Europeans will be coaxed back into the fold after they were so viciously alienated by the boorish neocons. Old Europe will be back in vogue.

Regardless of Kerry’s choice of running mate, the ABBers will hold their collective noses and vote for more of the same in November, so desperate are they to get rid of Bush and his warmongering entourage. It’s all about window dressing.

Is it possible they will come to their senses in 2008?

Or will they be fooled again?

KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.

He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com