May 15, 1999
"Cream Them!"
The Horrors of
Senator John McCain
The top war-monger in Congress has been Senator
John McCain, Republican from Arizona, seeker of the Republican
presidential nomination. In one rhetorical bombing run after
another, McCain has bellowed for "lights out in Belgrade"
and for NATO to "cream" the Serbs. At the start of
May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces
to use "any means necessary" to destroy Serbia.
McCain is often called a "war hero",
a title adorning an unlovely resume starting with a father who
was an admiral and graduation fifth from the bottom at the US
Naval Academy, where he earned the nickname "McNasty".
McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging
about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes.
For these brief excursions the admiral's son was awared two Silver
Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses,
three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three
Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned
a medal an hour, which is pretty good going. McCain was shot
down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967 and parachuted into Truc
Boch Lake, whence he was hauled by Vietnamese, and put in prison.
A couple of years later he was interviewed
in prison camp by Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist living
in Cuba. The interview appeared in Granma on January 24, 1970.
Barral's evaluation of McCain is quoted by
Amy Silverman, author of many excellent pieces on McCain in the
Phoenix-based New Times weekly. Here's how Barral described "the
personality of the prisoner who is responsible for many criminal
bombings of the people." Barral goes on, "He (McCain)
showed himself to be intellectually alert during the interview.
From a morale point of view he is not in traumatic shock. He
was able to be sarcastic, and even humorous, indicative of psychic
equilibrium. From the moral and ideological point of view he
showed us he is an insensitive individual without human depth,who
does not show the slightest concern, who does not appear to have
thought about the criminal acts he committed against a population
from the absolute impunity of his airplane, and that nevertheless
those people saved his life, fed him, and looked after his health
and he is now healthy and strong. I believe that he has bombed
densely populated places for sport. I noted that he was hardened,
that he spoke of banal things as if he were at a cocktail party."
McCain is deeply loved by the press. As Silverman
puts it, "As long as he's the noble outsider, McCain can
get away with anything it seems - the Keating Five, a drug stealing
wife, nasy jokes about Chelsea Clinton - and the pundits will
gurgle and coo."
Indeed they will. William Safire, Maureen
Dowd, Russell Baker, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine,
Vanity Fair, have all slobbered over McCain in empurpled prose.
The culmination was a love poem from Mike Wallace in 60 Minutes,
who managed to avoid any inconvenient mention of McCain's close
relationship with S & L fraudster Charles Keating, with whom
the senator and his kids romped on Bahamian beaches. McCain was
similarly spared scrutiny for his astonishing claim that he knew
nothing of his wife's scandalous dealings. His vicious temper
has escaped rebuke.
McCain's escape from the Keating debacle was
nothing short of miraculous, probably the activity for which
he most deserves a medal. After all, he took more than $100,000
in campaign contributions from the swindler Keating between 1982
and 1988, while simultaneously log-rolling for Keating on Captitol
Hill. In the same period McCain took nine trips to Keating's
place in the Bahamas. When the muck began to rise, McCain threw
Keating over the side, hastily reimbursed him for the trips and
suddenly developed a profound interest in campaign finance reform.
The pundits love McCain because of his grandstanding
on soft money's baneful role in politics, thus garnering for
himself a reputation for willingness to court the enmity of his
colleagues.
In fact colleagues in the Senate regard McCain
as a mere grandstander. They know that he already has a big war
chest left over from his last senatorial campaign, plus torrents
of pac money from the corporations that crave his indulgence,
as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Communications
companies (US West, Bell South, ATT, Bell Atlantic), have been
particularly effusive in McCain's treasury, as have banks, military
contractors and UPS. They also know he has a rich wife and the
certain knowledge that his supposed hopes for an ending to soft
money spending will never receive any practical legislative application.
McCain is the kind of Republican that liberals
love: solid military credentials as a former POW, ever ready
with acceptable sound-bites on campaign finance reform and other
cherished issues. Thus it was that McCain drew enthusiastic plaudits
last year when he rose in the Senate chamber to denounce theinsertion
of $200 million worth of pork in the military construction portion
of the defense authorisation bill. Eloquently, he spoke of the
11,200 service families on food stamps, the lack of modern weapons
supplied to the military, the declining levels of readiness in
the armed forces. Bravely, he laid the blame at the doors of
his colleagues: "I could find only one commonality to these
projects, and that is that 90 percent of them happened to be
in the state or districts of members of the Appropriations Committees."
Sternly, in tones befitting a Cato or a Cicero, he urged his
colleagues to ponder their sacred duty to uphold the defense
of the Republic rather than frittering away the public purse
on such frivolous expenditure: "We live in avery dangerous
world. We will have some serious foreign policy crises. I am
not sure we have the military that is capable of meeting some
of these foreseeable threats, but I know that what we are doing
with this $200 million will not do a single thing to improve
our ability to meet that threat."
In the gallery, partisans of pork-free spending
silently cheered while those who hoped to profit from portions
of the $200 million gnashed their teeth in chagrin. Yet, such
emotions were misplaced on either side. This was vintage McCain.
Had he wished to follow words with deeds, he could have called
for a roll-call on the items he had just denounced so fervently.
That way the looters and gougers would have had to place their
infamy on the record. But no, McCain simply sat down and allowed
the offending expenditure to be authorised in the anonymous babble
of a voice vote ("All those in favor say Aye"). Had
McCain really had the courage of his alleged convictions he could
have filibustered the entire $250 billion authorisation bill,
but, inevitably, no such bravery was in evidence. Instead, when
the $250 billion finally came to a vote, he ^voted for it.
This miserable display provides useful insights
into the reason for McCain's ineffectiveness on issues such as
campaign finance that have garnered him so much favorable publcity.
A conservative Senate staffer offers these observations on McCain's
fundamental weakness of character: "The real question is
why this Senator did not use the strong leverage he has to insist
that his 'ethical' position be incorporated into a major bill?
After all, Senator McCain couched his concerns in issues of the
highest national importance: readiness, modernization, and the
military's ability to defeat the threats we face (whatever they
are). "Pragmatism is the most commonly heard excuse. If
McCain had made a pain out of himself in insisting on keeping
the unneeded and wasteful pork out of the Milcon Authorization
bill, some people would argue he would have lost comity with
his Senate colleagues. They wouldn't respect him anymore; they
would have been angry with him, because he kept them up late
(it was about 10:30 pm), and they would have been embarrassed
by his showing them up as pork-meisters. This would weaken his
ability to get things done.
"This argument assumes politics in the
US Senate is a popularity contest: if you want to get anything
done around here, you have to go along and get along. Well, this
place is a popularity contest, but it is supposed to be one with
the voters, not one's colleagues. Besides, this place doesn't
really operate that way. Here, they have contempt for fluffy
show pieces. Show them you mean business, and you're someone
who has to be dealt with (rather than a talk-only type), and
you'll begin to get some results. Get ready for a fight, though,
because they are some on the other side who are no push-overs.
Obviously, Mr. McCain was not prepared to make that investment."
CP
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