McCain: bending over for Falwell

[Irvine511]

I thought Newt Gingrich said that should be the Dem's slogan?

oh -- maybe i got it mixed up.

either way, i like it.

 

[Irvine511]

America's best hope for 2008:

is he not only the president, but also a client?

 

[U2DMfan]

McCain had already bent over for Bush in 2004, so I'm sure after doing that, Falwell was a piece of cake. He had already assumed the position.

 

[MsGiggles]

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought they both came out of the closet

 

[Scarletwine]

McCain had already bent over for Bush in 2004, so I'm sure after doing that, Falwell was a piece of cake. He had already assumed the position.

I agree, his independence is all spin.

In fact, McCain has always been far more conservative than either his supporters or detractors acknowledge. In 2004 he earned a perfect 100 percent rating from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and a 0 percent from NARAL. Citizens Against Government Waste dubs him a "taxpayer hero." He has opposed extension of the assault-weapons ban, federal hate crimes legislation and the International Criminal Court. He has supported school vouchers, a missile defense shield and private accounts for Social Security. Well before 9/11 McCain advocated a new Reagan Doctrine of "rogue-state rollback."

"He's a foreign policy hawk, a social conservative and a fiscal conservative who believes in tax cuts but not at the expense of the deficit," says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer and conservative activist who now works at the Democratic Leadership Council. McCain's ideology resembles an exotic cocktail of Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan--a conservative before conservatism was bankrupted by fundamentalism and corporatism. His centrist reputation simply proves how far right the center has shifted in Republican politics. "The median stance for Senate Republicans in the early 1970s was significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain," write political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off-Center. "By the early 2000s, however, the median Senate Republican was essentially twice as conservative--just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania."

Much of the moderates' love affair with McCain, and much of the conservatives' distrust of him, stems from 2000, when The Weekly Standard dubbed his reformist campaign an "insurrection." After the religious right smeared him during the South Carolina primary, McCain condemned Bush as "a Pat Robertson Republican" in Robertson's hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Following Bush's election, McCain continued to stump relentlessly for campaign-finance reform, opposed Bush's tax cuts, became the Democrats' favorite co-sponsor on issues like global warming and a patients' bill of rights and fought government corruption harder than anyone in Congress. By 2004 he was flirting with the idea of becoming John Kerry's running mate.

This is more to the point.

THE RIGHT'S MAN By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us."

But now — at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger — Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later.

Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire.

"If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right.

Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded.

But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard right. How far right?

A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo. President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House.

But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.

It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W. Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

 

[Scarletwine]

Apparentley he's know taking it for the great homophobic base.

I've lost all respect. He's also changed his mind on campaign financing and is introducing new modified legislation to gut dem money raising.

Another moment with John McCain in "crazy base land"
by John in DC - 4/07/2006 02:23:00 PM

John McCain doing a press conference with anti-gay far-right fundamentalist leaders Janet LaRue (that's Chi-Chi without the make-up) of the Concerned Women of America and Tony Perkins (Chi-Chi with the make-up) of the Family Research Council.

 

[STING2]

Its easy to see that some people are really scared of McCain. They know that if he runs and wins the Republican nomination that he is unbeatable. As this becomes clear to more people on the left, I expect the negative articles to increase. In a way, this is actually good news for McCain supporters.

 

[Scarletwine]

NO

This thread shows that McCain has no real guts. He's pandering to the wingnuts exactly the opposite presentation he made in 2000.

 

[STING2]

NO

This thread shows that McCain has no real guts. He's pandering to the wingnuts exactly the opposite presentation he made in 2000.

McCain is one of the last people you could ever accuse of having "no real guts" and you know that! If he decides to run, be prepared for Republican control of the White House through 2016.

 

[BonosSaint]

You might be right, Sting. I think he is a highly attractive candidate to a lot of people. But he's either showing his real self now or pandering. Either way, I've lost interest in him as a candidate as I have with Senator Clinton. However, what do I know? I've only voted for a legal winner once in my life.