Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (35 page)

*
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPON DENT:
You were speaking yesterday on the one-year anniversary of the president calling for the troop surge about how, A, you think it was the right policy, and, B, you think, frankly, you deserve a little credit, because you stood up and pushed for it when it was unpopular.

It was interesting yesterday. I kept looking at my BlackBerry e-mails all day long. I didn’t hear the Democratic candidates talking much about that date. What does that tell you about the evolution of the politics of Iraq, if you will?

*
KING:
As you know, one of the issues you have had here in South Carolina in the past is either people don’t understand your social conservative record or they’re not willing to concede your social conservative record.

There’s a mailing that hit South Carolina homes yesterday. It’s a picture of you and Cindy on the front. It says, “Always pro-life, 24-year record.” Why do you think you still, after all this time, have to convince these people “I have been with you from the beginning”?

*
KING:
The flip side of that mailing shows Cindy holding Bridget…tiny Bridget, at the Bangladesh orphanage. As you know, some heinous and horrible things were said in the campaign eight years ago about you and about your daughter. Is that mailing in any way meant to tell people, here’s the truth?

*
KING:
You feel good about the state this time?

That was the whole interview as broadcasted by CNN—all four questions. To recap: (1) Democrats want to ignore your Glorious Surge; what does that tell you, huh? (2) Why are South Carolina voters failing to recognize what a stalwart rock-ribbed conservative you’ve always been? (3) Your baby daughter is absolutely beautiful, and it was reprehensible what was done to you and her in 2000. (4) How great do you feel? End of “interview.”

One asks this question literally, not rhetorically: If McCain’s actual Press Secretary had conducted this “interview,” how would it have been any different? Maybe they would have at least tried to pretend the questions were a little more probing, less adulatory, just for the sake of appearances if not basic dignity. King’s interview ended this way:

KING:
You feel good about the state this time?

MCCAIN:
Feel good. But I…

[
laughter
]

MCCAIN:
…have felt good about this far out some years ago. We’re not—but we’re not revisiting the past.

Yes, I feel good, John.

KING:
Senator, thank you very much.

MCCAIN:
Thanks.

If one sought to parody the drooling vapidity of our media stars and their giggly collective crush on John McCain, it would be impossible to outdo John King’s performance here. For reverent, propagandizing behavior from our Liberal Media comparable to this, one has to go all the way back to…the 2000–2005 lionization of the Great Warrior King, George W. Bush.

The media’s adoring depiction of McCain’s character is grounded in the same falsehood-drenched mythology that they used to build up Bush into the plain-spoken, honor-bound, swaggering cowboy-everyman. And no McCain mythology is as grounded in falsehoods as the media’s relentless depiction of him as an independent-minded, unprecedentedly honorable transpartisan maverick who is incapable of pandering or doing anything other than shooting “straight talk.”

Indeed, the press’s veneration of McCain as “a different type of Republican” has echoes of how George Bush was built into an iconic hero. In 2000, we were inundated with claims that Bush was a departure from the hard-core, Gingrichian right-wing Republican. Bush was no mere conservative, but a “compassionate conservative,” someone who, exactly like McCain, combined the most admirable virtues of the conservative man with a streak of idiosyncratic independence that rendered him substantially different—better—than the standard right-wing Republican.

And exactly like the media’s hero worship of McCain now, Bush in 2000 was presented as the sole figure capable of healing our partisan rift. He was a “uniter, not a divider,” who venerated solutions above partisan bickering. Bush would reach across the aisle, recruit Democrats to his side, and just as he changed the tenor of politics in Texas, so, too, would he bridge the partisan divide in Washington after eight long years of Clintonian divisiveness.

Here is how then-RNC chairman Jim Nicholson put it during his 2000 Convention speech: “My friends, this is going to be a different kind of convention for a
different kind of Republican
.” Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan mouthed a similar line during the campaign: “Gov. Bush has shown time and time again that he is
a different kind of Republican
.”

Replace “McCain” in 2008 with “Bush” in 2000, and the cliché-ridden script has barely changed. Both then and now, the GOP nominee, despite a virtually unbroken record of standard conservative orthodoxy, is depicted as far too honorable and independent to be considered an ordinary politician, let alone a standard conservative partisan. Both the 2000 Bush and the 2008 McCain were mavericks—inspiring, honest figures who transcend partisan warfare and piously float far above the muck of traditional politics.

Indeed, the central praise typically heaped by journalists on McCain—that no matter what one thinks of his views, he always says what he thinks, because he is a man of real conviction—is exactly the marketing package in which George Bush was wrapped, particularly when he ran for reelection. Just compare McCain’s media reputation as a plain-spoken, truth-telling maverick with the crown jewel of George Bush’s 2004 GOP Convention acceptance speech:

THE PRESIDENT:
In the last four years, you and I have come to know each other. Even when we don’t agree,
at least you know what I believe and where I stand.

[
applause
]

The depiction of McCain as a truth-telling, apolitical maverick is just about as accurate as previous similar depictions of Bush were. On virtually every policy issue of significance, McCain’s positions—not his rhetoric but his actual positions—ultimately transform into those held by the dominant right-wing faction of the Republican Party and, even more so, are identical to the positions that shaped and defined the failed Bush presidency.

In every way that matters, this exotic, independent-minded maverick is nothing more than a carbon copy extension of the Bush worldview, nothing more than a George W. Bush third term. One sees this most clearly in McCain’s view of America’s role in the world, whereby he channels the central, and indescribably disastrous, Bush mentality almost verbatim.

The central animating principle of the two Bush/Cheney terms has been that Islamic radicalism is not merely a threat to be managed and rationally contained, like all the other threats and risks the United States faces. Rather, it is some sort of transcendent ideological struggle—a glorious War of Civilizations—comparable to the great ideological wars of the past. As such, it will engage all of America’s military might and the bulk of its resources, as the United States navigates an endless stream of enemies and wars that subordinates all other national priorities and that assumes a paramount role in our political life. That was the central theme of George Bush’s presidency, and it is the central theme of John McCain’s worldview now.

In articulating a foreign policy at least as bellicose and war-seeking as that which defined the most radical and disastrous aspects of the Bush/Cheney years, McCain has even taken to using language almost identical to that repeatedly used by Bush. As the
Boston Globe
put it in September 2006:

McCain has nonetheless adopted Bush’s sweeping language in defining the war on terrorism: “I think it’s clear that this is now part of a titanic struggle between radical Islamic extremism and Western standards and values,” McCain said earlier this year.

McCain’s unfettered willingness to commit U.S. troops to the war in Iraq; his blithe acceptance of literally decades-long occupation of that country; and his extreme and often even joyous vows to wage war on Iran, if he perceives that they are close to acquiring the ability to develop nuclear weapons, are all part-and-parcel of the same Bush/Cheney emphasis on Middle Eastern wars and U.S. hegemony that has wreaked so much damage on our country over the last seven years. Whatever else one might want to call McCain’s worldview, “independent” or “unorthodox” or “a different type of Republicanism” is manifestly not it.

The preposterously simplistic and dangerously Manichean approach common to both Bush/Cheney and McCain—United States: Good; those who oppose us: Bad; therefore War Is Needed—manifests in a virtually indistinguishable approach to the world’s most complex problems. In the middle of the raging Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, President Bush, unbeknownst to him, was accidentally (and now infamously) recorded while speaking privately to Tony Blair at a dinner of European leaders. Bush, in between bites of food, made clear what the solution was to the war: “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to
stop doing this shit and it’s over
.” The Decider issues orders. Everyone complies. And problems are solved for the Good, regardless of complexities, obstacles, or realities.

Consider how identical—almost to the letter—was McCain’s prescription in the same year for how to solve raging sectarian tension in Iraq, in remarks addressed to a gathering of GOP donors, as reported by the
New York Observer
’s Jason Horowitz:

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’”
said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

That’s the thoughtful, insightful view of the highly experienced, profoundly serious maverick for whom foreign policy is a mastered discipline. Apparently, all Iraq needed for the last five years was some profanity-laced commands issued by the American President to the frightened sectarian simpletons, and harmony would have reigned. This is precisely the same belligerent, narcissistic pretenses that rendered George Bush one of the most despised, destructive, and impotent American leaders in modern history. John McCain seems to believe that all that was needed was just a bit more belligerence and a more imperious tone when dictating to our subjects around the world.

Particularly when it comes to foreign policy and war, McCain has been following in the Bush/Cheney footsteps as steadfastly and loyally as any American politician. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, McCain was not only one of the most unyielding supporters of the invasion, but also propagated the most extreme and misguided claims in justifying it. He repeatedly affirmed the false Bush/Cheney link between the 9/11 attacks and the need to attack Saddam, pronouncing in an October 2, 2002, speech on the Senate floor:

America is at war with terrorists who murdered our people one year ago.
We now contemplate carrying the battle to a new front—Iraq
—where a tyrant who has the capabilities and the intentions to do us harm is plotting, biding his time until his capabilities give him the means to carry out his ambitions, perhaps through cooperation with terrorists—when confronting him will be much harder and impose a terrible cost.

Every myth and exaggeration used to justify the invasion of Iraq came pouring forth uncritically from the maverick’s mouth. In mid-October 2002, McCain issued a statement on Iraq that began by quoting a think tank as follows:

The retention of weapons of mass destruction capabilities is self-evidently the core objective of the [Iraqi] regime, for it has sacrificed all other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim.

Thus, claimed McCain, Iraq was not merely developing weapons of mass destruction, but doing so was the “core objective of the regime”—its “singular aim”—and this fact was “self-evident.” As George Bush and his neoconservative ideologues spun a tale filled with exaggerations and falsehoods in the parade to Baghdad, John McCain loyally marched in lock-step behind them, rarely deviating from a single step.

In those instances after the invasion where McCain ended up criticizing the prosecution of the Iraq War, the criticisms were based in mere differences over military
tactics
, never based upon the view that the invasion of Iraq was misguided or that it was achieved through a slew of false pretenses. If anything, McCain’s complaint with the White House was that it was
insufficiently aggressive
when it came to the use of military force, using too few troops in too restrained a manner. Again, the sole differences between the Bush presidency and the one envisioned by John McCain is that McCain craves
more
of those aspects of the Bush tenure most responsible for the erosion of American power and credibility.

On the isolated issues where McCain did actually deviate in substantial ways from Republican orthodoxy, those deviations were largely confined to the 2001–2004 time-frame, when he was contemplating leaving the Republican Party because he believed, in the wake of his devastating 2000 primary loss, that it offered no path for him to the White House. But even with those deviations, the ones that earned him the drooling adoration of the press corps as a trans-partisan maverick, McCain ended up reversing himself completely after 2004, once he resolved to remain a Republican and concluded that he needed the support of the hard-core right-wing base if his presidential ambitions were to be realized.