John McCain’s Perfect 10

[McCamy Taylor]

John McCain has a problem with the base. Not the money base. They are happy with his plan to stay in Iraq for 100 years stealing someone else’s oil for the profit of a handful of U.S. companies like Chevron and Exxon at an enormous cost to U.S. tax payers. They are pleased that he will veto any Congressional bill that ends the health insurance industry’s practice of skimming the cream off the top of our bloated, inefficient medical industrial complex, the system of price fixing and waste which eats up 15% of our GNP---and leaves almost 50 million of us uninsured while the rest of us die from preventable disease. He will follow the advice of people like Phil and Wendy Gramm---though not the Gramms themselves, they have been booted from the campaign after being involved in one financial scandal too many----advisers who will keep Enron economics a thing of the present for four more years , meaning that mortgage lenders will continue to write bad loans, secure in the knowledge that the feds will bail them out for $100 billion or $200 billion at a time, while the victims of their predatory lending will be called “suckers” and told that they have learned an important lesson.

Those who worship money will have their Golden Calf of Baal, their Mammon. To hell with the hereafter and having their pie in the sky by and by. Heaven is for chumps who can not make a million in this life .

For a little over a century, American capitalists have gotten away with this behavior by citing the Calvinist doctrine that material wealth on earth is a sign of God’s blessing. However, as Max Weber pointed out many decades ago, in the U.S. businessmen went much too far in their pursuit of riches for their own sake, turning it into a sport rather than an act of devotion. Despite their efforts to cozy up to Christians in the 1980s, the ultra rich forgot one important rule, By their acts you will know them.

Even Christian Conservatives were not born yesterday. They can see when they are being taken for fools. They can tell when the people who promised to bring morality back to government are instead worshiping at the altar of the almighty dollar. And that violates the first all important Commandment I am the Lord Your God, Thou Shalt Have No Gods Before Me. .

After seven and a half years of unchecked greed and unmet promises, the NeoCon Republicans have a very big problem with their rank and file religious base. And then they had the nerve to offer them the unrepentant sinner, John McCain.



In no particular order, I give you…. The Ten Commandements Roman Catholic version (that John McCain has broken).

6. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery John McCain does this one for a living---literally. He cheated on his first wife, the one who waited for him during his captivity. He found a rich blonde and cheated with her, dumped his first wife, married the millionaire's daughter. And then he proceeded to cheat on the woman with whom he had committed adultery. One of his relationships was with a blonde lobbyist named Vicki Iseman

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html

They impeached Clinton for it, and McCain did it while running for office. Shows a certain lack of judgment, even if you do not believe that carrying on with a woman who is not your wife is a sin.

7. Thou Shalt Not Steal For a man who is married to a millionaire, John McCain sure does like money. He likes doing Congressional favors for rich people and having them donate money to his charity, which employees his campaign staff. When the Republicans were in control of the Senate, his job as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee allowed him to shake down the telecommunications industry for some big bucks. Sums of $50,000-$200,000 went straight towards his campaign expenses by way of his “charity”, all for doing favors for telecoms. (The Vicki Iseman affair was as much about money as it was about sex.) I document some of his more daring monetary escapades in this journal I wrote back in the spring of this year, called (Forget the Woman) McCain the Faux Reformer is in Bed with the TELECOMS!!!. There are links.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2900382&mesg_id=2900382

And don’t forget the Keating 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators, when Lincoln Savings and Loan was being investigated by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB). Lincoln ultimately failed, sticking taxpayers with a bill for $2 billion. Asked whether his contributions had bought him influence, Keating said: “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so.”

And then there is this hot off the presses news item which I have been expecting ever since Congress began investigating that bank in Lichtenstein for being a haven for US tax cheats.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3642854

UBS vows to expose tax-cheat
Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent | July 19, 2008

UBS, the world's largest private banking group, stunned the financial world yesterday when it shelved all its offshore banking services for US residents and appeared to rip up the traditional Swiss franchise of secrecy, saying it was co-operating with the US's tax authorities to expose tax cheats.

Caught up in the same document sweep from the LGT Bank in Liechtenstein that exposed the private banking dealings of Australia's Frank Lowy, a UBS executive fronted a congressional inquiry in Washington DC and announced a stunning about-face.

"I am here today to make it absolutely clear that UBS genuinely regrets any compliance failures that may have occurred," said Mark Branson, UBS's Zurich-based chief financial officer of global wealth services.

"We have decided to exit entirely the business in question," he said of questionable banking services for US residents. "That means UBS will no longer provide offshore banking or security services to US residents through our bank branches."

Guess who works at UBS? Phil Gramm. Not only did he make it all possible with his "Enron loophole", he has been using his Washington contacts as a lobbyist. And what has UBS been up to that has lead to its decline, disgrace and now federal investigation? Here is a summary from The Slate about Phil Gramm and UBS.

http://www.slate.com/id/2194933/

UBS's investment banking unit made disastrous forays into subprime lending. Last December, having already announced a third-quarter loss, UBS raised about $13 billion to replenish its balance sheets, mostly from the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. In the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008, it racked up Mont Blanc-sized losses on subprime debt of nearly $32 billion. In May, it sold about $15 billion worth of mortgage-related assets to the investment firm BlackRock—but only after it agreed to finance most of the purchase price. In June, UBS raised another $15.5 billion in a rights offering. The credit losses—some $38 billion so far, according to UBS—caused the bank to replace its chairman and install new leadership at its investment bank.

UBS was hardly alone in getting caught up in the global credit bubble—although its losses are truly impressive. But UBS has suffered further reputation damage. Late last month, the state of Massachusetts charged UBS with screwing over well-heeled customers who had purchased auction-rate securities. The mechanics of auction-rate securities—instruments that pay a slightly higher rate of interest than municipal bonds or cash deposits and were thought by many purchasers and brokers to be as safe as cash—are complicated. But the issue is relatively simple and familiar to anyone who has combed through the Spitzer Wall Street research settlement of 2003. UBS stands accused of selling retail brokerage customers products that turned out to be profitable for the bank's investment banking unit but caused the customers to suffer significant losses. (Read some of the internal e-mails here.)

Note the name Spitzer above. As I conclude in my last journal, Eliot Spitzer was taken down by a Bush DOJ media assassination that occurred just weeks after he wrote a Washington Post editorial denouncing the criminal conspiracy between the Bush administration and the mortgage lending industry to defraud consumers and prevent any government body (like states) from intervening to stop the flow of cash from average people into the pockets of the wealthy investors. In other words, Spitzer was trying to warn us that people like Phil Gramm were robbing us blind, and people like Bush and his hand picked successor John McCain were getting their cut from the criminal enterprise. When Phil Gramm leaves the McCain campaign, they will have no trouble replacing him, but it will be difficult to find a crusader to replace Eliot Spitzer now that the Bush cabal has removed him as a threat.


5. Thou Shalt Not Kill People on the left get squeamish about the fact that McCain bombed North Vietnam. I am not discussing them in this journal. To the religious right, wars against godless communism have God’s seal of approval. So do wars against Muslims and any other nonChristians.

However, John McCain and his advisers are on record hoping for the deaths of Americans. That is not going to sit well with the Christian Coalition. First, McCain adviser Charlie Black said that a terrorist attack on U.S. soil would help his candidate in the fall election. I wonder if God got the message, or if he was speaking directly to Al Qaeda. Could be the latter, for today, John McCain revealed that he has a new role as Al Qaeda’s U.S. spokesman.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3401130&mesg_id=3401130

Republican presidential candidate John McCain warned that al-Qaeda will step up terrorist attacks in Iraq leading up to the November election in the U.S.

"Al-Qaeda is on their heels but not defeated," McCain said today at a town hall meeting with General Motors workers in Warren, Michigan. ``I also predict that they will make an attempt, as we get into election season, to make more of these spectacular kinds of attacks'' by suicide bombers to destabilize the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Later, McCain’s handlers got Bloomberg to amend their article to say that McCain meant that Al Qaeda would attack before the October Iraq elections---which will still end up killing American troops stationed in that country and alarming U.S. citizens at home.

How do we stop our guys and gals in uniform from getting killed in Iraq? Presumably by putting John McCain well ahead in the polls in October, where Al Qaeda wants him to be. The NeoCons have been very, very good for Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda has been indispensable for them. If the Al Qaeda network did not exist, the NeoCons would have had to create them---maybe from a group that the Reagan-Bush administration funded to fight the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. And though they might pretend to give chase, they would never actually capture their leader.



10. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s House

If you or someone you know is about to lose your home, because you were the victim of predatory lending, listen up. Phil Gramm, former Senator and soon to be ex-McCain economic adviser is to blame. The so called “Enron loophole” helped a lot more fat cat investors than people realize.

http://casadelogo.typepad.com/factesque/2008/06/the-mortgage-cr.html

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing." Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: "So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages." Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the CFTC's division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, "were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets."
These unregulated swaps have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown," says Greenberger.

There is not a separate Commandment against gambling (or drinking) but the religious right does not like either of them. Cindy McCain gets big points off with the Republican base for making her millions brewing beer . The good capitalist makes his money through hard work, not through risky investments. And he definitely does not deprive other hard working Americans of their homes while expecting taxpayers to fork over $200 billion at a time to bail him out when his bets go bad. John Calvin would not be amused.

8. Though Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor . Fancy talk for don’t lie. McCain lies all the time. His biggest lie is that he is a straight talker. From Countdown, last night, Rachel Maddow:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25736124/

MADDOW: Well, he‘s improved to the extent that sometimes the things that he‘s saying and his campaign are saying that are not true about his record—sometimes those falsehoods about his record are better. For example, Carly Fiorina recently said that John McCain would support requiring insurance companies to cover contraception if they also covered Viagra. She implied McCain would support that. Turns out, he voted against that.
John McCain suggested recently that he is all in favor of equal pay for equal work, so that women get paid the same amount as men would do for doing the same job. He suggested that he‘s been in favor of that and his record reflects it. The problem is that he‘s voted against that every time he‘s had the chance to do so. So, his falsehoods about his record are getting better for women all the time. What he‘s actually done in his actually positions are not improving.

Here is an interesting McCain lie, from a religious right point of view. Read about how he had a conversion for the press, going from Episcopalian to Baptist last fall.

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2007/september/0917_mccain_religion.shtml

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has long identified himself as an Episcopalian, said this weekend that he is a Baptist and has been for years.
Campaigning in this conservative, predominantly Baptist state, McCain called himself a Baptist when speaking to reporters Sunday and noted that he and his family have been members of the North Phoenix Baptist Church in his home state of Arizona for more than 15 years.
''It's well known because I'm an active member of the church,'' the Arizona senator said.
While McCain has long talked about his family's and his own attendance at the Arizona church, he appears to have consistently referred to himself as Episcopalian in media reports.

This lie leads us straight to another Commandment....

2. Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord Thy God in Vain This means no swearing. Since McCain has a temper problem, he fails Commandment number 2 all the time. Personally, I am inclined to cut him some slack---except that some of his ugly language is so violent. I mean gooks ? Cunt ? And this whole trying to paint Obama as a Muslim when he is a Christian violates the 2nd Commandment, too, since it also includes not misusing religion for other, secular purposes----like winning elections. Same goes for having a news conference conversion. These people have no shame.

3. Observe the Sabbath and Keep It Holy Like any political candidate does that.

9. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife Jimmy Carter told the world the truth back in 1976. Even effeminate heterosexuals covet their neighbors' wives. Until we get a gay male presidential nominee (or a straight female), this is something they will all do.

That leaves Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother, No. 4. . What kind of man drags his 95 year old mother out in public knowing she will say something like this?

When McCain's 95 year old mother, Roberta McCain, was asked how much support she thought her son had among the base of the Republican Party, she instantly replied, "I don't think he has any. ... Maybe I don't know enough about it, but I've not seen any help whatsoever."
She went on to say that if McCain wins the nomination, "holding their nose they're going to have to take him," but that didn't exhaust what she had to say about the GOP base.
"I'm really popping off," the elder McCain continued, "but he worked like a dog to get Bush reelected. He's backed Bush in everything except Rumsfeld. ... And I've never seen any public recognition of the work that he's done for the Republican Party."

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/McCains_mom_gives_GOP_some_straight_0125.html

Straight from Mama McCain’s mouth: McCain is Bush’s poodle.

I can not recall a presidential candidate who has failed all 10 commandments running on either ticket. Usually the ones with money scandals are good husbands and the adulterers are frugal. And if there is a guy who fails both tests, he is such a fast talker that he can make it all seem kosher--or Catholic.

John McCain is such a perfectly wretched candidate that you have to wonder if he is a diversion. Do they plan a last minute substitution? Someone whose left brain speech and memory centers still work?

[givemebackmycountry]

1. The Perfect Ten is... well... Perfect.

I'll say it again.
War hero?
Blow me.
He's a whore.

John McCain, is a right wing effing' whore.

I get a lot of looks when I voice that opinion.
But, not many arguments.

[speedoo]

2. Yes, he is a wretched candidate.

K&R.

[BobTheSubgenius]

3. Good concept, well executed. :)

I especially liked the part about his mother. Pure gold!

[Oldtimeralso]

4. Well Done K&R n/t

[NanceGreggs]

5. A GREAT read, McCamyT!!!

:applause: