February 7, 2008
You have no doubt heard all week long about the latest lie the corporate media is trying to sell to us this election cycle. Now that Mitt Romney has bowed out with all the grace of a pile of bull dung in a china shop; we are left with John McCain as the presumptive GOP candidate with all apologies to Mike Huckabee. So what is the first move of the far right? Do they rally around the former POW? Do they roll out the red carpet for him? Ehh, not quite. They are all pretending that John McCain is Hillary Clinton.
That’s right America. The strategy being perpetrated against you now is that John McCain is not conservative enough. To listen to Rush “Pills” Limbaugh tell it, Hillary might be better than Johnny Mac! Tom “How Am I Not In Jail” Delay actually said tonight that he had not made his mind up yet between voting for McCain or Hillary. Anne Coulter has said the same thing recently and an alleged conservative group has already run an ad comparing Hillary to Senator McCain. What is going on here? At first I just thought it was a passing fancy but tonight it was the lead on nearly every news program. How did I go to sleep last night and wake up in a world where John McCain is the second coming of Mike Dukakis? When you start to dig a little deeper however, you see the strategy unfold before your eyes.
The first bonus of the far right wing nuts in attacking McCain on his conservative credentials is to try and get him to name a far right veep choice, such as a Mike Huckabee. It is a way of bullying their way onto the ticket, when they couldn’t get the job done on their own. The fact of the matter is that the far right are really only a fraction of the Republican Party. They have had more control for the past several years then they deserved. But their power is starting to wane and their star is starting to fade. This is an attempt to reassert themselves as being a major player in their own party.
Perhaps the more sinister reason behind the ploy however is in the amount of independents that will determine the outcome of the 2008 election. More so than ever before, people are fracturing out of the two major parties. There is a far larger and politically motivated independent base of voters this year than ever before. The majority of these independents however are currently leaning to the democratic –anti-war side. McCain is locked into his pro-war stance so this strategy is nothing more than an attempt to soften the edge on the clearly conservative McCain. Is John McCain an uber-conservative? Probably not. But his voting record is still scores an 82.3 conservative rating with the American Conservative Union. That is not extremely high, such as someone on the hard right might have but guess what the rating is from the ACU for Hillary? ZERO. Her lifetime rating is a whopping NINE. This silly notion that McCain is somehow Hillary is beyond insulting in its transparency.
Do people like Rush and Coulter really expect us to believe that they might vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain??? Of course not. The ACU specifies the issues which McCain deviates from their positions. They are the fringe issues such as environment, campaign finance reform, and immigration. They note that he is consistently conservative on spending and defense. In case you have forgotten, it is spending and defense which are the true cornerstones of conservatism. The true goals are to continue to hand back billions of dollars to the richest in this country while continuing the wars of aggression throughout the world. None can deny that on those two fronts, John McCain is your man.
Except that is not what they are selling us now. They have rolled out their big guns; the fake media such as Limbaugh and Coulter to set the façade and the corporate media has jumped all over the faux story. Don’t fall for America. There is nothing liberal about John McCain, NOTHING. There is nothing mainstream about John McCain, NOTHING. They can discuss all the fake issues such as immigration that they want but in the end, this election will be about the economy and the war. John McCain is decidedly conservative on both fronts, as he always has been. Do not fall for the fake hype being pumped up by the fake media. There is nothing soft and fuzzy about John McCain. He has already stated that he could see us in Iraq for 100 more years and sang a song mocking the possibility of bombing Iran. His conservative voting rating stands at over 82, compared to a NINE for Hillary. The right wing nuts realize that they are losing their power and are trying to dictate the tenor and tone of the discussion. They also realize that in order for the GOP to win in November, they need to turn John McCain into a moderate, even though he is the furthest thing from it. That is what is unfolding right now. Their only hope is to have McCain be portrayed as a moderate and the democratic nominee to be portrayed as the liberal, or the extreme. It is nonsense however. Keep in mind who these people really are. John McCain is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He is just a wolf, no matter how much they try and dress him up.
