"Dollars! All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations seemed to be melted down into dollars." --Charles Dickens
I just watched a Democrat and a republican go at it, tooth and nail, over the latest smear and fear floated by McCain's pit bull partner. It was an amazing display from the republican legislator who took the bait from Wolf Blitzer that the McCain campaign so publicly set out on Saturday (declaring that they were going to go negative to distract from the focus on the economy which has boosted his Democratic rival in the polls.) The media is always accommodating of the demagogue to perpetuate their own inane patter.
As she delivered her broken, second-hand narrative, the republican mimic of McCain's newest fear-and-smear strategy assumed the very same air of arrogance and superiority that we've suffered from her Bush administration as they've worked to dodge accountability for running the country into the ground. Those of us who remember the state of the nation when Bill Clinton left office, maintaining relative peace and prosperity, can hardly keep from jumping right out of our skins at any suggestion from the bungling pack of republican thieves and warmongers that we need to change the subject to tabloid and fear now that their ultimate accountability is so close at hand. It's even closer to the bone to watch the media so willingly oblige the deliberate distractions.
“We think the McCain campaign made a huge error by telling the press that their strategy was to distract from the most important issue facing voters,” a senior Obama official
said Saturday, only hours after the McCain smear strategy was reported.
Karl Rove's cynical politics of 'smear and fear' worked to elevate George Bush over McCain in 2000, and now, McCain has desperately decided to adopt the same destructive politics to divide and distract from the anger in the nation over the failed economic policies and the devastating invasion and occupation which McCain enabled, promoted and has perpetuated. McCain cravenly lent his almost unanimous support to the lame-duck loser in the White House in the years before he decided to run again for the presidency just to curry the votes of the shrinking base of his party. Desperate to hold onto that recoiling family of voters, McCain has decided to try, once more, to manipulate their fears and to replace their disgust in his party with deliberate lies.
For some voters, the McCain campaign lies provide a familiar refuge from accountability for their own role in elevating the president and the party which has caused so much havoc in their own lives over the last eight years. Instead of coming to grips with the fact that, in 2004, they willfully voted for four more years of war and unbridled greed at their expense, this sorry base of republican voters that McCain is stretching to appeal to is primed to accept yet another scapegoat who will help assuage their pathetic denial of their own party's moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
It's a reflection of the weakness of the divisive material the McCain campaign could pull out of the garbage to dress-down their Democratic rival, that they've resurrected a supposed 'association' he allegedly had with someone who had committed a crime when Obama was eight years-old; an accusation that even the infamous political machine in Obama's hometown of Illinois has laughed off for years as a ridiculous exaggeration.
It would be justified for the Obama campaign to turn the accusations back on the McCain campaign and highlight his own 'associations' with criminals and figures whose misdeeds and crimes had a direct, destructive effect on our government and on the lives of those subject to their privileged manipulations. As voters reflect on the anxiety and anger they feel waiting to change the direction of the nation, they should also reflect on the associations McCain has chosen to elevate himself into the presidency.
For example, John McCain's close association with and enabling of war criminals, George W. Bush and Richard 'Dick' Cheney, raises serious questions about his judgment and his patriotism. The standard of associations McCain has set with his opportunistic embrace of Bush and Cheney's illegal militarism should give Americans pause about electing someone who would associate himself in such a close and supportive manner with such dangerous, unstable demagogues.
Co-founder, president and executive director of the infamous 'Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,' Randy Scheunemann, who served as a consultant on Iraq to Donald Rumsfeld, now serves as John McCain's top foreign policy aide. In a scheme to hijack the next-generation of defense dollars, which our soldiers desperately need, and our country can scarcely afford, McCain's Scheunemann heads a Washington lobbying firm called Orion Strategies, which just happens to share Chalabi's address and the location of his old CLI enterprise. His is just one of the investment groups who sprang to life in the wake of the invasion who hope to benefit from the blood and sacrifice of our soldiers.
His firm is also involved in securing U.S. reconstruction dollars in Iraq for members of the former Soviet bloc. An influential instigator behind John McCain's hard-line on the Russia/Georgia conflict, Scheunemann concealed the fact that he'd been a paid lobbyist for Georgia until as late as December 2007.
McCain's Schennemann is one of a band of political opportunists who thoroughly enmesh themselves in the focus and direction of our nation's foreign policy through the establishment of policy institutes and think-tanks which issue corporate-influenced policy documents and public statements that support, encourage, or echo legislative initiatives in Congress.
As voters reflect on the anxiety and anger they feel watching the orchestrated economic emergency directed by the republican White House, they should pay close attention to these associations McCain has chosen to help elevate himself into the presidency. The lobbying firm of the man McCain tapped to orchestrate his hoped-for ascendancy into office reportedly earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, even as McCain railed against the financial institution as the cause of the recent economic turmoil.
Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager, was just nailed in the NYT for collecting nearly $2 million for running a lobbying effort for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac designed to help them to duck regulations. Also, two of McCain's top advisers include John Thain, from Merrill Lynch, and Martin Feldstein, who serves on the crumbling AIG's board of directors.
from
Mother Jones:
Aquiles Suarez, listed as an economic adviser to the McCain campaign in a July 2007 McCain press release, was formerly the director of government and industry relations for Fannie Mae. The Senate Lobbying Database says Suarez oversaw the lending giant's $47,510,000 lobbying campaign from 2003 to 2006.
According to the Senate Lobbying Database, the lobbying firm of Charlie Black, one of McCain's top aides, made at least $820,000 working for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004. The McCain campaign's vice-chair Wayne Berman and its congressional liaison John Green made $1.14 million working on behalf of Fannie Mae for lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations. Green made an additional $180,000 from Freddie Mac. Arther B. Culvahouse Jr., the VP vetter who helped John McCain select Sarah Palin, earned $80,000 from Fannie Mae in 2003 and 2004, while working for lobbying and law firm O'Melveny & Myers LLP. In addition, Politico reports that at least 20 McCain fundraisers have lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pocketing at least $12.3 million over the last nine years.
Those are the associations of John McCain with persons who have directly affected the ability, of anyone concerned, to actually begin to address the wanton greed and thievery of this republican class of demagogues. Those are the associations voters should stay focused on as they look to make a real and significant change in the next administration and in Congress with their ballot cast in November. Those are the associations that McCain hopes Americans will forget and ignore in favor of yet another plate-full of fear and distraction. Those are the associations the media brushes aside as they eagerly devour and spit out the latest political smears and present them as news.
Heed the counsel Charles Dickens gave in 'Martin Chuzzlewit' to a company of New Yorkers:
"Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures were gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Nature and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars! What is a flag to them!"
What is the welfare of our nation to these opportunistic liars?
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