Most Americans agree President Bush has done a horrible job, but there’s been a disturbing tendency lately to attribute his failed presidency to incompetence: he didn’t know what he was doing.
Bush certainly is a raging incompetent. But he’s consistently chosen to do the wrong thing, often the worst possible thing, while others were warning him with logical, factual information about the mistake he was making.
So, New York Times columnist Frank Rich does a valuable service pointing out a key characteristic of Bush’s misleadership in making an equally telling point about Sen. John McCain (emphasis ours).
Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his face.
The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove, is larger than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.”
The clear and present danger for America, should McCain and his neocon neophyte No. 2, Gov. Sarah Palin, follow Bush into the White House is more of the same.
McCain the maverick made a political calculation four years ago. He decided the only way to get the GOP presidential nomination and then win the White House was by kowtowing to Bush and emulating the Bush, Cheney and Rove way of doing things.
From then on it was goodbye maverick and hello valued team player.
So, a McCain presidency will mean more excessive secrecy, more deceit, more cowboy diplomacy, more “my way or the highway,” more ignoring the Constitution and having a sock-puppet attorney general OK whatever he wants to do, and more making out that anyone who disagrees with him is a political enemy and un-American.
Oh, and lest we forget “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” you can be sure it’s not lost on McCain that Americans are extremely reluctant to change leaders in the middle of a war.
We’ve long believed that notion played more than a small part in Bush’s compulsion to invade Iraq. That, and Bush’s desire to match his father’s day in the sun following the success of Desert Storm with his own mission-accomplished photo op.
I am not sure where McCain is going with this type campaign he has put in front of the American People. Could it be that he wants to be President so bad that he would cause such a divide within this country.
I look at his VP and wonder how this man could possibly be comfortable with Palin as VP, even when he knows that this woman would be President if he died or became ill.
How can he say that he really loves this country and do such a thing as to pick Palin to take over his realm if he is unable to do so himself.
Yes, LT, it’s clear McCain has no problem with dividing the country if doing that will bring him what he wants, which is to be president. That’s also why he picked Palin.
OK, you’ve given me still another reason to not want McCain. Not that I needed another one.