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From : AntiConformist911
Added: Sep 26, 2008
For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen every part of our economy. He didnt, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. Its not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Thats why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice. McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obamas included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it. If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else. You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on The View. Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word lies to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from the filter that Cindy McCain later complained that The View picked our bones clean. In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow. Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCains drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palins governance of Alaska (in last Sundays New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCains past usually remains off limits. Thats strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keatings bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide. It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keatings corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight...McCain was reprimanded for poor judgment...McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a maverick. But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten. The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the filter from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihouseholds multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCains still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCains full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted. This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddams nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=2&oref=login&oref=slogin
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