Mar 11 2006
McCain is Bush’s Man
So the Southern Republican Leadership Conference is being held right now, and the usual suspects are down there courting their votes, angling to succeed Bush in 2008. What I find interesting is how McCain is acting in front of the base:
“We must keep our presidential ambitions a distant second to standing with the president of the United States,” [McCain] said.
…
The extent of Mr. McCain’s embrace of Mr. Bush was striking, and Republicans here suggested it reflected two political facts: that he needed to reassure conservatives of his loyalty to Mr. Bush, and that, at this point, he was in a strong enough position in this inchoate field to have flexibility in presenting himself.
Mr. McCain went so far as to condemn the collapse of the port deal, saying that Congress had served Mr. Bush poorly by not permitting a 45-day review of security concerns, though he did not mention that the deal was sunk by fellow Republicans.
“The president deserved better,” Mr. McCain said.
Mr. McCain praised the president for his failed effort to rewrite the s Social Security system, said he supported the decision to go into Iraq and blistered critics who suggested the White House had fabricated evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq in order to justify the invasion.
“Anybody who says the president of the United States is lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying,” Mr. McCain said.
Read that last line again- it’s important. “Anybody who says the president of the United States is lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying”. Well, we’ve been there what, three, four years? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Why haven’t we found them yet? There are only two conclusions I can reach from this- that either a) McCain is delusional, and thinks we did, in fact, find WMDs in Iraq (despite all evidence to the contrary), or b) McCain is such a strong Bush supporter (at least in front of the base), that supporting Bush is more important than the truth.
The inevitable response to this is that this is just what he needs to do to get nominated. Once nominated, he’ll dump the extremist wing of the party overboard and return to his moderate, maverick ways. The problem is that this is exactly how we got W. in office (the first time). W portrayed himself as a moderate- a “compassionate conservative”. A new kind of conservative, a moderate, one not beholden to the extremists of the right. Well, he threw some red meat speeches at them- mostly dog whistle politics (political speeches tuned to a frequency most people are deaf too). But once he wins the nomination, he’ll abandon them and return to his moderate, compassionate roots. And then what happened?
This is exactly what I’ve been warning of for years- that the next Republican Presidential candidate will try to pass himself off as a new sort of conservative, one not tied to the past crimes of the party. As the current crimes of the party are getting revealed ever more, the pressure to try to pull this stunt again- Bush as a scape goat carrying the sins of his party with him into the political wilderness only works if the replacement positions himself as not like Bush. They won’t be stupid enough to reuse the same slogans as before- they won’t call themselves compassionate conservatives. But it’ll be some other phrase that means basically the same thing, that they’re a new breed of conservative. “Maverick Conservative” fits the bill perfectly.
We have to John McCains here- the supposed moderate/maverick, and the self-confessed fervernt Bush supporter. One of these two McCains is false. For the radical McCain to be the false one, McCain himself has to be lying to the SRLC. If McCain is lying to them, might McCain also be lying to us? Seems likely. Last time around, it turned out they were lying to us.
The only real question remaining to be seen is: will we fall for the scam a second time?
Popularity: 3% [?]
McCain always has been a strong supporter of Bush’s foreign policies — he’s a hawk, of the non-chicken variety for a change. This is precisely why I don’t particularly like the idea of President McCain: I don’t like his foreign policy stances. On the other hand, I very much appreciate McCain’s domestic policy stance, which is much more the realm of the Senate.
Something was bothering me about this post, and I finally figured out what it was.
Uh, why does he need to reassure conservatives of his loyalty to Mr. Bush? It’s getting to be that loyalty to Mr. Bush is considered more of a libaility than any kind of benefit. So that first part really doesn’t make a difference.
Just to add insult to injury, California Democrats are now calling for McCain (and Arnie) to be investigated for violating campaign finance laws. Certainly simply showing up for a $100K/head fundraising dinner should be enough to put a serious dent in McCain’s “Reform” image.
More fuel for the Fire- McCain now supports Bush’s illegal spying, according to comments made on ABC’s “This Week”. McCain originally called for an investigation- but then, so did Snow and Hagel, and Snow and Hagel voted to not do it. Loyalty to Der Fueher overrides more trivial concerns, like civil liberties.
As to why he’s courting the base, that’s what you need to do in order to get nominated as a Republican. Unfortunately, dependence on the base (and on the big money donor corruption) doesn’t end once you get elected- because once elected President, you have to get elected again. And work with fellow party members in Congress who don’t dare piss off the base because they need to be nominated and elected again. If a Republican President ever did seriously piss off the base, they could just retire and go flyfishing at that point- they’re done. Even Bush, even now, doesn’t dare piss off the base.
And this is where the real radicalism, and real anti-democratic philosophy, is comming from. The Religous Right and the Corporatists/neo-Facists. The philosophy is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment, and thus anti- everything the Enlightenment brought with it, including anti-science and anti-democracy.
If it was just a bunch of bad apples who had maneuvered themselves into power, I’d be a lot more worried. But we’re not dealing with a snake here, which we can kill by cutting off it’s head. We’re dealing with a hydra- cut off one head, two more grow in it’s place, even more radical than the last.
And yet the radical right understands, somewhere deep down, that their values are not shared with the majority of the population. Thus the need for dog whistle politics- the need to mislead a signifigant percentage of the voters. They will keep trying the “New Conservative” schtick, because it’s still working. When it stops working, they’ll try something else.
Until the radical right is discredited and marginalized, a good rule of thumb is: if a candidate is acceptable to them, they’re not acceptable to anyone else.
The problem is that the Republican “core” themselves have greatly lost patience with the War in Iraq. The line on the street from John Q. FoxNetworkDotCom is — and I shit you not — that if the Iraqis can’t take care of themselves after three years, no reasonable amount of effort is going to stabalize them. Literally, they’re citing failure to perform for the Iraqi citizens themselves.
But, that disgusting realization aside, while you can’t badmouth the War in Iraq or the barely-obfuscated hand of PNAC too loudly in Republican circles, you can get away with a much more moderate position than McCain decided to take. Which brings me back to my original claim that McCain isn’t lying, he’s just being the hawk that he always has been, and the only thing that’s surprising about this support of the War in Iraq is that the author missed it before.