The Pure John McCain

“The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients
only when their positions hewed to his principles.”
New York Times, February 20, 2008

I like John McCain. The more people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Anne Coulter rave against him, the more I like him. Well, I think I like him. He appears to be a “straight-shooter”, and fairly honest guy who speaks his mind– or used to, before he got into the thick of the campaign and decided to suck up to the Moral Majority. He’s a maverick. Well, maybe he is. Maybe he’ll turn back into a maverick after he is elected, which he won’t be.

Remember we’re talking politicians here.  Everything positive about John McCain is a “relative” positive– for a politician, he’s relatively honest.

McCain’s wife invested heavily in some properties, back in the early 1990’s, on the advice of a man named Keating, who, it turns out, was playing fast and loose with the deposits of customers of a Savings and Loan, which went bankrupt, costing the government billions of dollars in bail outs, for a system that was predicated on the idea that the government wouldn’t provide expensive bail-outs if it failed. McCain received big donations from Keating. He then lobbied extensively against more stringent government oversight of Savings and Loans. The kind of oversight that might have prevented Keating from recklessly gambling his depositors money on ill-conceived investments.

McCain’s career was almost ruined by the scandal. But he survived and he became a bit of a crusader against the corrupting influence of money on politics, and joined with Democrat Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act, to push through campaign finance reform which, as it turns out, didn’t quite have the impact we all hoped and was later rescinded.

McCain was tortured by the communist North Vietnamese. Inexplicably, he has been opposed to the Bush administration’s advocacy of the use of torture against alleged enemies of the state. Torture is useful in extracting information which can be used to justify the use of torture. The information doesn’t have to be true. That is the secret charm of torture. If you don’t get it– I am being very sarcastic.

The Christian Right supports Bush, the Torture President– you can’t get a more profound indictment of established religion than that.

McCain voted against Bush’s tax cuts to the rich in the “mistaken” belief that adults pay their bills. He is now a convert to the cause of borrowing from your children to pay for wars against countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. By all means, cut taxes to the rich, so that the wars that protect the oil that keeps America’s stock market humming can be fought and paid for by the poor.

McCain rather stunningly allowed his own son to serve in Iraq. McCain, even more stunningly, actually even fought in one those wars the Republican’s were so high on, and the Democrats, treasonously, are not.

Where did he get the chutzpah? Did he check with his party establishment first to see if it was a good idea to actually risk your own life to preserve all those patriotic values that sound so rich and compelling at those parades and speeches? Did he ask Bush? Cheney? Rumsveld? Wolfowitz? Perle? Come on– Rice? How about Romney? Huckabee? Thompson? No?  Any one of them could have told you how to be a chicken-hawk.

Anyway– John McCain has a friend named Vicki Iseman. Vicki Iseman, who is 40, apparently, has been spending a lot of time with Senator McCain, flying to Florida and back in private jets, hanging around campaign headquarters, annoying McCain’s campaign staff… They talked to her and they talked to him. This is unseemly, they said.

So what’s the problem? Is there something in the air? Yes– it seems that Ms. Iseman is… a lobbyist. It seems that Mr. McCain had written a few letters to the FCC on behalf of some of her cable tv clients. And thus the response at the beginning of this page: “The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles.”

Well, isn’t that just classic! I assume that he also only accepted campaign favors or donations when their positions “hewed” closely to his own principles.

It should be noted that some of McCain’s campaign staffers are also former lobbyists. Okay– if you hang around long enough, eventually I might find you a real job. Some of them went into lobbying after working for him, which, in my opinion, should be illegal for at least five years. Some of them came to work for him after lobbying him. (But then– what’s Bush going to do until 2013?)

McCain won’t be President. He’s too old. He’s a bit reckless. He won’t invite Rush Limbaugh to the inaugural ball. Is he having an affair with Ms. Iseman? The fig leaf in this story– for the Times– is the lobbying angle. The salacious overtones will be gobbled up by McCain’s sharpest critics on the right.

Does Hillary want to make this a campaign issue?

And why, really, did he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate?

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