McCain On Meet The Press
McCain’s appearance on ‘Meet the Press’ was a pleasant Sunday morning experience, akin to tea and crumpets. The genial affair was like one would visualize an after-dinner political chat between the kindly uncle and the wound-too-tight uncle.
Geniality took a sharp dive, of course, when McCain felt the heat on his feet. As soon as Brokaw brought up the perks and tax adjustments of his plan, McCain decided instead to insult Obama’s.
In classic form, he lied at every turn - so many turns it felt like ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.’
Obama would fine small businesses on health care. Lie. Obama would fine people with children who don’t get health care for them. Big lie. Obama voted to raise taxes. Little lie; at least a substantial and slanderous crimping of the truth. Obama loves raising them taxes. Lie.
This kind of soiled the air, and Brokaw was not afraid to wade into the muck. As soon as McCain floated out his quavering jab about “spreading the wealth around,” Brokaw threw right back into his face two facts that wiped the color right out of it:
One, Reagan raised taxes during a recession, and scholars believe it saved the economy. And two, McCain’s own plan “spreads the wealth around” plenty, with massive nationalization plans, buying of failed mortgages and bailouts that would have Lenin winking approvingly right back at Sarah Palin.
McCain just continued to lustily beat the red baiting drum. But I think any creature with higher brain function and an honest heart got the point - by his own definition, he’s as much a Commie, if not more, than Obama.
Of course, the real point is that such characterizations are almost as insipid as they are unhelpful. Socialism - get your gasps out of your system, as I’ll be saying it alot - is a vital part of our nation. It been since Das Kapital and similar tomes inspired people to such radical movements as:
Public fire departments. Public education. Public law enforcement. Public roads.
And of course, the huge elephant in the room is that every medicare, medicaid, social security, disability or unemployment recipient has Karl Marx as the Godfather of their livelihood. If it hadn’t been for hordes of unwashed and fiery-headed intellectuals marching in the streets against the billy clubs and mercenaries of the 19th and early 20th century rich, the state wouldn’t be dropping so much as a penny for the sake of the wounded, the helpless or the elderly.
So McCain’s snide remarks are dumb, and a barb in the shoe of any path to policy in this nation - whether to the left or the right. Without giving due humility and appreciation to the contributions of the state to the free market and society, nobody can think in the appropriate terms to run a country.
For the road we walk was paved by revolutionaries and all manner of unsavory characters. And even if we had a flat tax and paid for the barest of our entitlement programs, we would still be “spreading the wealth around.”
We are guided with that honesty, or, like John McCain, we’re getting in the way.
Mike - on the subject of what literary sources inspired people to march in the streets and debate in the town halls for more services from the state, I stand by what I said. Yes, I know those things existed on Earth before Karl Marx - the Mongols had a postal service; Augustus Caesar had fire brigades; we all know about the roads leading to Rome.
But before agitation from leftists - some of who read the works of Marx, Luxembourg, Alinsky, Debs, whoever - started shaking the streets, we were a long way off from many of the social services we enjoyed. Fire brigades were still largely private in the 1860s, and public education was much more decentralized and privatized, to the extent that it was not universally available until the 20th century. And what this article demands is that people recognize that it wasn’t the right-wing that fought - sometimes literally - for these services by and large.
Bottom line: Before people started voting in the types of politicians who believed that tax money had to go to welfare projects and services - social security, unemployment, disability, welfare for the poor or the elderly - then the prevailing attitude was that the state didn’t have any responsibility to support the lower classes or promote their opportunity. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts did just super, while poverty, lack of education and poor opportunity were holding this country back. The people who were writing about those things as problems were, many of them, inspired by Marx, or by the basic notion of Social Democracy that the government should help the less fortune.
As for the caustic remarks about associating with Socialism, and thus with Communism, they get right to the point of my article:
Shutting out points of view, demonizing, making snide remarks and extreme associations do not help the discussion. They do not help America have the proper flexibility during a time when threats crush in from all around it. They do not serve to bring our diverse view points together.
We need to face our issues of today honestly, reasonably and with a commitment to solving them together - not by tearing each other down. Considering what this nation has overcome in the past when united with respect around a common purpose, I would say that such divisiveness is not on /a/ threat, it is the greatest threat.
Comment by M. Funk — October 28, 2008 @ 10:50 am
Hmmm. Sounds like someone knows their talking points.
Comment by Dave Courtemanche — October 29, 2008 @ 3:55 pm
Examining my work and attitudes, I come to a conclusion that may not surprise you, Mike: I don’t think I’m partisan.
If you’re talking about the issues I put out there, there are a lot of aspects of the issues I advocate and how I advocate them that don’t conform to party lines. I have spent time on talking about how it’s important that both parties find common ground on faith-based initiatives and abortion. I’ve talked up the virtues of conducting war in Pakistan for the sake of winning the global war on terror, and am a staunch interventionist when it comes to prudently defined military exercises. What’s more, I don’t see a lot of liberals extolling the intellectual virtues of Rupert Murdoch.
Still, when it comes to most social issues, I would side with the Left. As much as I want a strong military, accountability in schools and a recognition of the positive role that conservative fiscal prudence could play in government, I think there are a lot of problems that the Right, as a political party, has either ignored or glossed over:
I’m tired of a political attitude that discriminates against the faiths that want to practice same-sex marriage. I detest the effect that the war on drugs has on our society – in terms of both money wasted and lives ruined over a lifestyle choice like substance use that, to me, seems no different than the use of alcohol: Intoxicants that have the potential to do harm to oneself and others. I think that the notion of a “free market” is a facile illusion considering that safety regulation and corporate welfare are necessary evils in the global market, and that other countries’ protectionist tariffs go unchecked.
There’s a balance to that, and if it’s not evident, well, I don’t know what “nonpartisan” sources you’re reading.
As for partisanship when it comes to the McCain-Palin campaign, I stand guilty as accused. I’ve yet to hear a foreign policy or economic system from them that’s more advanced than what a second grader could scrap together. Broad brushstroke statements about “victory” mean nothing when an actual plan is called for, and I want more than faith to go on. More is needed in this economy than corporate welfare and tax schemes that give incentives to overseas investment while ridding corporations of assistance when it comes to domestic investment.
And above all, I have little time for a campaign that pushes a central message of suspicion and doubt. If McCain and Palin spent half the time on getting scholars to endorse their plans that they did on laying into Obama’s character, they might have something. As it is, the message they’ve pushed for the last months has been one of fear of Obama, fear of socialism, fear of terrorism, fear of “anti-Americanism” – all the ad hominem nonsense used to undermine an opponent’s character when you can’t make an intellectual argument against their policies.
That’s where the “rabble” comes in: Not everyone who disagrees with me is among the rabble, but some are. The ones who reduce sophisticated issues, thought and position to hate-tinged labels designed to inspire fear – those are the rabble. The red-baiters, the ones who think talking with enemies is “weakness”, those that would rather talk about “elitism,” “exotic” or “un-American” than solve problems. They are distractions; they are part of the problem.
This is because we live in a world of both conflict and cooperation, but those that demonize and simplify are terrified of facing this. They ignore the fact that part of making war is responsibility for instituting peace. They make themselves deliberately numb to the notion that we can’t destroy everyone with a different point of view. They deplore diversity of views and attitudes, they shun the notion of flexibility in growth, and rather than embrace sophistication, they distill arguments down to their most inflammatory form. And yes, I count those who call Palin a cunt among that rabble.
That’s no good any more. We are running an atrocious deficit and debt. We are locked in two very grave conflicts overseas. We have social clashes here at home. We need better solutions than the ones we’ve been going with. And we certainly deserve better than character attacks and division.
This is why I spend time on talking up conservative figures who I consider to be the intellectual keystones of their movement – not as a mask. I gain no readership by lack of partisan vitriol – if anything, I lose some. But I believe that people like James Baker III, General Scowcroft, Douglas Kmeic and Rupert Murdoch have a viable, thoughtful foundation to their arguments. I do not see that kind of knowledge and comity from the likes of McCain and Palin nowadays.
In closing, I understand some of the concerns of the GOP. As I wrote in an e-mail recently, raising taxes on the wealthy while lowering them for the middle class is by no means a surefire solution. The people who argue against it are not without intellectual merit. Nor are those who object to issues I am definitely on the Left over – abortion and gay marriage – without valuable personal concerns.
But what I object to is the message of many in the GOP, and how they convey it. As times become more dire by the moment, we need less character-based politics, less sweeping generalizations, less fear – not more. If I spend text on condemning McCain for lying or distracting, it’s because I think that whether those are strategy or character traits, they are fundamental problems with how our nation conducts its political business.
As such, I try to stay away from the character scandals. I don’t talk about G. Gordon Liddy, $50K renovations to the Wasilla mayoral office or the moral implications of the Bristol Palin pregnancy.
If there’s one glaring exception that comes to mind, it’s the McCain POW scandal. And if I write about that, it’s because I care about the POW/MIA cause and would like to see it become an issue so that the McCain-driven ban on releasing information about the North Vietnam POWs is struck down. That’s an issue that was brought to my attention by a member of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, who has me thoroughly convinced as to the role that another Presidential aspirant – John Kerry – played in selling out our troops for personal benefit.
That came about through evidence, not through red-baiting, guilty-by-association or vitriol. I mention it because it’s an example of my listening to a voice judged by the mainstream to be on the fringe. If it’s anecdotal, so be it. I can list a number of issues where I think the right-wing has been a force for positive action: Gulf War I, welfare reform, tax reform among them. But just as I won’t side universally with one party or political persuasion or another, I’m not going to claim that my morals and knowledge inform me to take certain stands of principle.
Among those is the conviction that the current plank of the GOP Presidential campaign is just a dangerous continuation of the distraction, double-talk and inertia that has brought us to suffering and decline. If that’s partisanship, then I’m proud to be partisan in this election. As it is, I feel it’s an insistence on a united, civil political dialogue between all viewpoints, and in that regard, only fundamentally American.
Comment by M. Funk — October 30, 2008 @ 7:25 am