April Fool's Day, 2006
McCain: A Strange Sense of Honor
McCain, hugging the man who slandered his wife and child as part of a smear campaign to derail McCain's strong candidacy for president, after trouncing George W. Bush in the first primary in New Hampshire in 2000, in defiance of the newspapers who were all buying the Bush spin that his success was assured because he had raised so much in campaign contributions.
The Bush team, under the direction of smarmy smear-master Karl Rove used its considerable bucks to set up a massive telephone slander campaign of McCain before the second round of primaries.
Though the story goes that McCain was strong enough to stand up to his Viet Cong captors, he doesn't appear to be strong enough to stand up to George Bush, whose team under Rove conducted a massive telephone smear campaign disguised as a poll, slandering McCain's wife and children. They called voters pretending to poll them, but actually feeding them lies about McCain, saying his daughter was a "love child" from Vietnam and telling a series of equally ugly lies about McCain, the work of the supremely evil imagination of Karl Rove. The machine launched vicious gossip about McCain's wife's use of antidepressants. It stopped at nothing, no matter how low.
McCain was furious at first when they destroyed his candidacy with a smear campaign, but later came crawling to Bush, virtually prostrating himself in front of Bush publicly, to enable Bush's campaign to recapture the White House, and I do mean recapture.
Bush clearly has the dominant mammalian body language in this shot. McCain is totally submissive, practically kissing Bush's ass, totally throwing himself at the feet of the man who slandered him, his wife and his child. What was the deal they struck? It's an odd code of honor McCain seems to be following. Doesn't bode well for what he would do as commander in chief, were he to achieve his aim.
What a disappointment McCain turned out to be. Someone who held out the promise of standing up with personal integrity against the machine, someone with the history to stand as a true hero who could viably go up against runaway military economics and corrupt politics too. Lately he don't look so good.
The Bush-Rove attack machine let loose on him, his wife and daughter, destroyed a viable underdog candidacy based not on massive corporate money as Bush's was, but on popular appeal, one that had proven a formidable threat to the Bush corporate machine mob, so it unleashed the full power of its massive money advantage, and pulled out a sudden death option based on its willingness to abandon any shred of honesty or integrity at any moment to achieve its objective. It destroyed him by scaring people into thinking he was a dangerous lunatic, a decadent whoremonger.
The Bushites viciously slandered McCain and his family and simultaneously destroyed the hopes of the broad constituency that was drawn to McCain's "Straight talking express", which was like water to people dying of thirst in a deeply corrupt political environment.
Then McCain, knowing what had destroyed him, knowing what lying, corrupt people they were who honor nothing but victory and force, then later threw his force behind them, aided and abetted their sleazy takeover of the government, their holding on to power after channeling the resources of America into an illegal invasion and occupation based on lies. McCain threw in with them.
What did they offer him? What is his game? (See "John McCain: The Sell-Out Express")