Whatever Happened to Straight Talk?

If John McCain really wanted to talk straight to the American People, it would be easy. Here are some suggested talking points:

• Apologize for blindly following the leadership of the most foolish man who’s held the Presidency in my lifetime, and then claiming to be a maverick.

• Apologize for repeating the lie that Alaska provides 20% of America’s energy needs or even 20% of the oil and gas we use.
• Retract the statements made by your ad, “A Gross Distortion,” which claims that Obama killed the immigration bill, when it was really your abandonment of your own legislation in order to further your political ambitions, that killed the bill.
• Admit that Sarah Palin has accepted earmarks. While she’s used fewer than her predecessor, Alaska still leads the nation in earmark spending per capita.
• Apologize for making up bogus crowd size numbers and then trying to claim they came from the fire marshal or Secret Service. Isn’t this the kind of thing we usually see done in China and in the old USSR?
• How about coming clean about just how ugly the “Disrespectful” ad was. Using out-of-context quotes, it tried to make it your opponent Obama and his running mate, Biden, look as if they were saying nasty things about Palin. In truth, they have made reasonable statements that have stayed respectful when the same can hardly be said of you or your running mate.
• Or maybe you could pledge to stop making up facts and then attributing them to respected new sources.
• Perhaps you could explain that by “taking on the oil companies,” you really meant that Palin married a man who worked in the oil industry. And that when you claim she said “thanks, but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere, what you forgot to say was that she supported it while running for office, and then opposed it when it became an embarassement, but kept the money anyway, so she could use it on other transportation projects.

I’m sure you can think of more.

McCain gained initial credibility in his run for the White House by claiming that he would talk honestly about the real issues facing this country. At the time, I believed him, and even suggested that my mother, who is Republican – since she lives in Florida, where Democrats have been considered game animals since Jeb Bush was governor – vote  for McCain. (Although, to be fair, none of the other candidates were even close to being good choices, at least to me.) But then McCain ran out of money. It seems that none of the big Republican donors, like Oil interests, Banking, and all the fat cats that depend on Washington earmarks, were happy with what McCain was saying. They didn’t like his claim that he’d repeal the incredibly wasteful Bush tax cuts, support a woman’s right to choose, and other moderate ideas.

McCain was faced, I believe, with the choice of dropping out of the race, or cutting deals with the people he claimed he wanted to boot out of Washington. The sudden huge influx of money into his campaign, along with his about-face on ideas he used to consider important, has convinced me that John McCain is so hungry for the Office of President, that he would do anything, literally anything, in order to get it. That’s the same kind of dangerous ambition that gave us his buddy, George Bush, who was determined to be President despite losing the election, and got himself appointed President by the Supreme Court Chief Justice that was put in place by the Sr. President Bush. (Just as a side note, most judges are expected to recuse themselves from a case if there could be a perceived conflict of interest.) It’s also the kind of ambition that does something cheap, like select Sarah Palin as a running mate, and tries to claim, to disgruntled Clinton supporters, that Palin is just as good as Hillary. (Not in this lifetime. I may have picked Obama over Clinton, but it was close, and I’ll take Clinton over a whole herd of Palin’s any day.)

By now, McCain has abandoned any attempt to put truth into his campaign at all. Frankly, I don’t see how he can look at himself in the mirror. He’s come to represent everything that George W. Bush has done wrong, lying to the American People, treating us as if we’re stupid children that simply aren’t capable of understanding the world, and thus undeserving of democracy, unless that democracy is being manipulated by the rich elite that they represent. McCain has fully adopted the Bush policy of telling lies over and over, no matter what anyone says, in the cynical belief that if a lie is told often enough, people will believe it. Why not, it worked well enough to get us into a war in Iraq?

If you’d like a recent accounting of McCain’s tally of lies, check out this link.