Candidate McCain: A Risky Choice

Ninth, there is the legitimate question of his age and personal health. The New York Times has recently been complaining about the lack of medical information regarding the presumptive Republican candidate and how little people know about his health. After all, this is not a trivial matter, since Sen. McCain will be 72 years old in August and he is recovering from an August 2000 surgery for a melanoma cancer, the deadliest of all cancers. A recently released medical report does not alleviate a bit concerns about this very issue.  

And ten: Since the media have criticized Senator Barak Obama for his close association with an outspoken black minister, it is worth noting that Senator John McCain has also been endorsed by probably one of the worst right-wing religious bigots in the U.S. today, Texan anti-Catholic televangelist John Hagee. Let us remember that televangelist (San Antonio megachurch) leader John Hagee, has said that the 2005 hurricane Katrina was God's punishment to New Orleans; he has also referred to the Roman Catholic Church as "the great whore" and called it a "false cult system" and "the apostate church." (There are 60 million Catholics in the U. S. and they could resent such insinuations.) And to top that, he has also declared that God sent [Adolf] Hitler to perpetrate the Holocaust in order to force Jews to move to Israel!   

Therefore, it is certainly legitimate to ask why there is all the media attention on Senator Barack Obama's association with a controversial pastor, and hardly any directed at Senator McCain's association with another controversial pastor. Does this not smack of double standards? In conclusion, when all the dots are connected, it would seem to be clear: Senator "100 Years" John McCain must be considered a man too dangerous and too unpredictable to be entrusted with the presidency of a heavily armed country. Do Americans really want a man whom some call  "Senator Hothead", to become "President Hothead" and place him in a position of high responsibility? Let's hope that enough Americans will reflect about all that before the events unfold, not after. If Americans really believe that their country is headed in the wrong direction, does it really make sense to line up behind a candidate who wants to go even further in the same direction? There are many more important issues regarding Mr. McCain that the media should raise, but they don't.  For example, let me point out that Senator McCain is still against public regulation of corporate fat cats who have in the past, and who continue today to milk the public for billions of dollars. For instance, Sen. McCain recently opposed a farm bill because the bill proposed to regulate energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California's electricity prices in 2001, and robbed Californians of hundreds of millions of dollars.   

Let us also remember that about twenty years ago, Sen. McCain was accused of corruption after it was discovered that he was deeply involved in the Savings & Loans scandal, after it was found that he and four other senators had intervened to prevent necessary regulation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board of some of the most risky thrifts and loans companies, such as the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine in California. Indeed, Sen. McCain and the other four senators (the Keating Five: John McCain plus John Glenn and Alan Cranston, Don Riegle, and Dennis DeConcini) had received $1.3 million in campaign contributions from chairman Charles Keating of the Lincoln Saving and Loan Ass. -Sen. McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. The other four senators have since quit politics, but McCain is still running strong and is the presumptive Republican candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.  

Let's keep in mind that Sen. McCain has been behind Bush's Iraq War from day one. Indeed, Sen. John McCain is the very one who delivered a response to Sen. Robert Byrd's magistral denunciation of Bush's war, on March 19, 2003, and who defended the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to go to war. Therefore, those who opposed the Iraq War cannot vote for McCain, lest they betray their own conscience. Those who like unprovoked wars of aggression should vote for McCain. They are many skeletons in Sen. McCain's closet. If only the media were doing their job, the public would know better before voting for him. This does not seem to be the case.   

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at  rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire' Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/ Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ 

Posted, Monday, June 2, 2008, at 5:30 http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1088 

 1  |  2