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FACTS: Re John McCain, in case you haven't seen them.

For all the coverage this week of Senator John McCain's
background, there are some important things you won't learn
about him from the TV networks. His carefully crafted
positive image relies on people not knowing these facts.
Please check the list below, and then forward it to your
friends, family, and coworkers to tell all about the real
John McCain. SEE SOURCES at bottom:
10 things you should know about John McCain (but not know
all):


1. John McCain voted against establishing a national
holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he
says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to
oppose key civil rights laws.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than
Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture,
but McCain voted against a bill to ban water-boarding, and then applauded President
Bush for vetoing that ban. He refuses to ban CIA torture and only opposes torture by the military. What's the dif?

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do
not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."

5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for
children. He voted against the children's health care bill
last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with
millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife
own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to
the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get
a "second job and skip their vacations."

7. Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too
reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator
said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold
chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He
loses his temper and he worries me."

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but
his campaign manager and top advisers are actually
lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen
says McCain has corporate lobbyists raising money for his
campaign, more than any of the other presidential
candidates.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious
right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his
"spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's
founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a
"false religion." McCain sought the political support of
right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane
Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the
Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored
a 0, yes, zero from the
League of Conservation Voters last year.Check their
non-profit website.

John McCain is not who the Washington press corps make him
out to be. He is backed by the military industrialists who
have put our country in HUGE debt in Iraq. They want to
continue making their profits and will back McCain's
election so that the Buxh/Cheney policies can continue
destroying our economy.

Please help get the word out and forward this to
your personal network.


SOURCES:

1) "The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day," ABC
News, April 3, 2008

2) "McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq,"
Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF28rSC
tk0ZM&refer=us_
"Buchanan: John McCain 'Will Make Cheney Look Like
Gandhi,'" Think Progress, February 6, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/06/buhanan-gandhi-mccain/

3) "McCain Facts," ColorOfChange.org, April 4, 2008
http://colorofchange.org/mccain_facts/_

4) "McCain says Roe v. Wade should be overturned,"
MSNBC, February 18, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17222147/

5) "McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto
Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill," Think Progress, February 20,
2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/20/mccain-torture-veto/


6.) "2007 Children's Defense Fund Action Council:
Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard," February 2008
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_learn_scorecard2007"

7.) McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance
expansion, CNN, October 3, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/03/mccain.interview/

6) "Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady," Associated
Press, April 3, 2008; http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-S1sWHm0tchtdMP5LcLywg5
ZtMgD8VQ86M80_

7) "McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End `Systemic Risk,'"
Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHMiDVY
aXZFM&refer=home_

7) "Will McCain's Temper Be a Liability?," Associated
Press, February 16, 2008;
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4301022_

"Famed McCain temper is tamed," Boston Globe, January 27,
2008; http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_mccain_temper_is_
tamed/_

8) "Black Claims McCain's Campaign Is Above Lobbyist
Influence: 'I Don't Know
What The Criticism Is,'" ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008
_http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/02/mccain-black-lobbyist/_

"McCain's Lobbyist Friends Rally 'Round Their Man," ABC
News, January 29, 2008
_http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4210251_

9. "McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam," Mother Jones
Magazine, March 12, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john
-mccain-rod-parsle y-spiritual-guide.html_

9) "Will McCain Specifically 'Repudiate' Hagee's Anti-Gay
Comments?," ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/12/mccain-hagee-anti-gay/_

10. "John McCain Gets a Zero Rating for His
Environmental Record," Sierra Club, February 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/77913/_

Obamamania, a febrile disease

( Well, yeah ... sure, some of us realize this -- those of us who've done our homework. I applaud the summation and I'll agree with everything but the gratuitously irrelevant remark about the Clintons sleeping in separate beds and Hillary's total lack of experience --- ahem, a bit of misogyny for a change?)

Go to article for links and video:


Obamamania, a febrile disease

Would you like change with that?

Super Tuesday II, as Fox dubbed it, took some steam out of the Obama bandwagon, but he’s still the likely Democratic nominee, and therefore the likely president-to-be. Which is remarkable, really—a nonparticipant can only stand slackjawed in awe of Obamamania. Previously rational people whom LBO admires, like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hayes, have fallen in love with the Senator’s brand of change we can believe in, a slogan that has to be one of the emptiest since Sandburg’s “The people, yes!,” that the New Party used in New York in the early 1990s. Obama has become the Tokio Hotel of politics.

On what is this mania based? Obama is inspiring the young, lifting the alienated off their couches, and catalyzing a new movement for…change, presumably one we can believe in. The content of this change is hard to specify. Some serious leftists we know and love point to Obama’s roots as a community organizer in Chicago, though many people in a position to know say he didn’t rock many boats in those days. He was embraced by foundation liberals, however, who greased his way into the Harvard Law School via a lakefront condo.

All of which doesn’t make Obama uniquely bad: he’s just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past. Though he’s being touted as an early opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position….” He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports Israel’s continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip. A Congressional Quarterly study found his Senate voting record was virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s; the only major difference in their votes is a surprising one: a move to limit class actions suits against corporations, which Clinton voted against, and Obama for. Obama’s vote was against the preferences of a Dem financial base, trial lawyers, but pleasing to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street.

In this binary world, when you criticize Obama, people immediately include you’re a Hillary Clinton fan. Uh, no. Her politics are bellicose and neoliberal. Her “experience” consists largely of having watched her husband be president for eight years, though it’s likely they were sleeping in separate bedrooms for much of the time. A plague on all their houses.

Agendas

Some more thoughtful victims of Obama Disease point to detailed position papers on the candidate’s website. These must always be taken with a grain of salt, especially during primary season. Candidate Bill Clinton promised to “invest in people” and ended up being the president of “a bunch of fucking bond traders,” as Hillary’s husband memorably put it. LBJ campaigned as the peace candidate in 1964, and ended up killing a million Indochinese.

Obamians also point to his rejection of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC); they put him on their list of rising stars, and he asked to be removed. Encouraging—except for the fact that his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, the fellow who told the Canadians not to take the anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously, is the DLC’s chief economist. Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. That hire is more significant than asking to be struck from a list.

Big capital would have no problem with an Obama presidency. Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, “The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,” one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they’re socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he’s the man to do their work. They’re also confident he wouldn’t undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth. You could say the same about Clinton—but you know those hedge fund guys. They like a contrary bet. A share of Obama stock on the Iowa Electronic Market was 30 on May 19, 2007, the day of Jones’s Obama bash; it peaked at 86 on March 1, a gain of 187% (in a year where triple digits are rare). It’s since settled back into the low 70s, which is still quite a gain.

The phantasmic

LBO would be the last to argue that politics is all about rationality. Fantasy matters. But fantasy can have some relationship to policy. Take the example of Ronald Reagan, a man for whom Obama professed some admiration for having rolled back the “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” and bringing back “a sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Reagan promised to make America “stand tall again” and “to get government off the backs of the people.” Certainly these phrases didn’t appeal to the rational faculties of the electorate, but they did correspond with a military buildup, a greater willingness to go to war, and an economic agenda of deregulation and reverence for private wealth. And Reagan had real political forces behind him—first, his cabal of right-wing Southern California businessmen, later supplemented by the corporate and financial establishment, and operating with a playbook written by movement conservatives and the Heritage Foundation.

What does Obama have? A lot of slogans that connect with nothing in the real world; in fact, their very emptiness may be the source of their appeal, because it allows people to project whatever they want to onto him, without getting bogged down in specifics, as Reagan liked to say. (Under attack from Clinton and McCain, he did get specific in his long Wisconsin victory speech. This brought attacks from Karl Rove and others, placing him on the “far left”; it’s not likely we’ll see much more of this irresponsible stuff from Obama as November approaches.) And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn’t really have a movement behind him—he’s got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable? It’s not like he’ll take the phone calls of all those 27-year-olds who gave him $100 on the web as quickly as he’d answer a summons from Paul Tudor Jones.

Obama’s appeal is a strange thing. Though he’s added to it as his political momentum builds, his original base consisted of blacks and upper-status whites. The black support is out of racial pride, but the initial white support was driven by his post-partisan, post-racial appeal. Well-off whites love to hear a black man say that racism has largely receded as a toxic force, though it’s really hard to figure out what the hell he’s talking about in a world where black households earn about 60% as much as whites, and where black men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men. And what of this post-partisan business? Politics is about conflicts over resources and priorities, and over the state’s power to coerce; how ever could comity prevail in a world where interests and preferences diverge so widely?

As Adolph Reed told LBO, an Obama presidency could give us the worst of all possible of worlds: one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate critical discussion of inequality, the language of ‘disparity,’ it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. Obama already when he talks “black” (e.g., with his “Cousin Pookie” riffs, which are the exact equivalent of Shelby Steele’s rantings about underclass, shiftless “Sam”) opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite metaphor of victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural, and he has always played the Immigrant Success Story Up From Slavery Ain’t America Great and Don’t I Show It angle. And, moreover, what many of his white supporters like about him is that he doesn’t have the ‘chip on the shoulder’ that so many indigenous blacks do. Add all this to his commitment to appealing to the right and to the investor class, and the upshot is that inequality could lose whatever vestigial connotations it has as a species of injustice and be fully consolidated as the marker, on the bottom end that is, of those losers who failed to do what the market requires of them or a sign of their essential inferiority.

Turn to cheer

Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to induce some forward motion. There’s no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world—more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He’ll deliver little of that—but there’s evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed.

As this newsletter has argued for years, there’s great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg’s focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us.

Never did the possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That’s not what the candidate means by that word, but history can be a great ironist.