Sunday, August 24, 2008

The Long Road Home - Vol. 4 Issue 6

Now the battle is joined. The John McCain of yesteryear is gone: the “maverick” has been replaced by the xenophobic tool of the military industrial complex and the oil cartel. McCain has abandoned his formerly principled positions on offshore drilling and environmental protection. Of course, he never supported the constitutional right of privacy embodied in Roe v. Wade and the long tradition of Habeas Corpus embedded deep in Anglo-American law. Worse, the not-so-subtle racism adopted by the McCain campaign (run by the progeny of Karl Rove) is nauseatingly clear to all but the denizens of the extreme right.

To understand the depths to which ambition has driven McCain, let us go back just a few months. Remember when Bush went before the Israeli Knesset and attacked the patriotism of Obama and his other critics? As an American and as a Jew, I have never been more horrified by a President’s actions than I was by President Bush’s hideously inappropriate accusation of “appeasement “ Did McCain object to this unseemly behavior? No. Yet the target of the attack, Barack Obama, showed incredible restraint. He should have said something like this, ideally in a tone of restrained anger:  “The president of the United States has gone to a foreign country and stood before foreign leaders to make outrageous
slanders of his domestic political opposition. I am appalled that
he would soil the Office of the President this way on a mission of
diplomacy, spoken in front of a government body while representing
the United States of America. I will have no further comment on
this until Air Force One leaves foreign airspace on its way home.”

Then, when Air Force One left the Middle East and was over the Atlantic, only then should he have said this: “President Bush soiled the Office of the
Presidency by making outrageous attacks, joining a political debate
at home while representing the United States at home. This
Administration, and the people who are following in lockstep its
failed policy into the future, are the ones who abandoned the fight
against Islamic terror, by abandoning the search of Bin Ladin, by
being distracted by a convenient war in Iraq instead of the necessary
war in Afghanistan, by having thought through the war so poorly
that we created chaos in Iraq, not the peace we sought. The failed
Bush policy, now adopted and continued by Senator McCain, attempts to
distract us from the simple truth that our policy did not make us
strong, it made us weak. We turned away from the real source of
terror and we have now created a much bigger breeding ground for
terror. The Bush-Rumsfeld-McCain policies abandoned our need for
energy independence, it falsely argued that this war would pay for
itself with cheap oil, which policy is a total disaster and when President Bush’s trip concluded with him visiting the Saudi government to plead for cheaper oil, THAT was below the dignity of a strong, free nation.”

Yet Obama said none of this. He remained dignified and respectful of the President. Does anyone believe that John McCain would have shown such restraint? Hold on gang, only a couple of months to go before the nightmare is over.

Semper fi,

Savant