Wingnut Meltdown 7
John McCain is a conservative hack.
He’s probably one of the few conservative hacks with some integrity left, but his “maverick” reputation is sorely overblown.
It seems to have more to do with his willingness to actually talk to reporters while not reading from a teleprompter than with his voting record.
So why are the wingnuts so unhappy with him? According to Brendan, who is strong-willed enough to subject himself to right-wing talk radio, Glenn Beck went into full meltdown mode today.
Kojo Nnamdi promised to explore that question on his show today. From the website:
So I devoted 32 minutes of my evening to listening to that segment (Realplayer), and, when it was done, I had had a few chuckles and was 32 minutes older.
But there were no answers to the question of “Why is the Republican Party determined to devour its young (or, in McCain’s case, its old)?”
I do have a few stray thoughts, but they are not well-formed enough to stand on their own.
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Perhaps it is that he opposes torture, the wingnuts’ Viagra;
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or that he can see that illegal immigrants, in addition to being illegal, are also human beings (Oh! I forgot! He sold out on that one. Hack.);
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or that he thinks candidates should not necessarily be for sale to the highest bidder (whereas it is a principle of wingnutism that everything is for sale to the highest bidder).
It seems clear that, of the candidates for the Republican nomination, McCain is the one who has the best chance of winning the general election.
He’s a conservative hack, but he’s not an empty suit.
Let’s hope the wingnuts have their way, he loses the nomination, and, for the good of the nation, the Republican Party disappears from political discourse so that the nation can redeem its virtue and save itself from both moral and financial bankruptcy
February 6, 2008 at 9:27 pm
John McCain opposes torture because he knows more about it than any human being should. While his fellow Americans were smoking pot and dancing at Woodstock, he was a “guest” at the Hanoi Hilton.
February 6, 2008 at 11:00 pm
You haven’t done your homework, Frank. You omit that one of our biggest objections to McCain is his betrayal of the First Amendment via the McCain-Feingold censorship legislation.
February 7, 2008 at 7:14 am
Opie, I looked up the legislation, & all I found was a change to campaign contributions. What censorship?
February 7, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Karen: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7347&news_iv_ctrl=1021
February 7, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Ayn Rand. Power to the rich. Not a source for scholarly research.
It’s a wingnut tenet that money equals speech.
The founders would probably disagree, but, in the wingnut world, wealth equals virture. The more money you have, the more virtue you have. They fawn over the rich.
Corollary: Anyone who can afford it should be able to buy the electorate. If he or she is not permitted to buy the electorate, his or her freedom of speech has been abridged. (Then, again, Empty Suit tried, but he’s back on the rack now.)
Even though he or she is not speaking, but, instead, was spending.
Whoops! That’s it! The First Amendment referred to freedom of speech, not freedom of spend.
Oh, yeah, at the same time, the portion of the First Amendment that refers to establishment of religion–that’s not operative. In the wingnut world, establishing a religion is quite okay.
Ignoring the words and deeds of the Founders, they claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
It most decidedly was not. The Founders knew the bloodshed going on in Europe over religion. They quite determinedly wanted the government of the United States of America to be areligious.
(No one ever died for being a Deist or in promoting Deism.)
But, even as the wingnuts argue that spending equals speech under the First Amendment, they deny the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
In the wingnut world, it’s okay to send them all to Gitmo (at least, as long as they are brown, I guess) and give them a the water cure, while at the same time Richard Scaife can spend all the money he wants subverting elections.
Give it up.
Just as a literalist cannot take one verse from the Bible literally and take another one figuratively, you can’t take one sentence from the Constitution literally and ignore other portions of the Constitution.
February 8, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I don’t judge arguments by who made them; I judge them by their cohesiveness and relevance. There are plenty of things I wouldn’t agree with Ayn Rand about, but I would not then say that since I don’t agree with her on something, then any argument made by a person working for an organization bearing her name long after she is dead is automatically defective simply because of that.
But having said that, McCain-Feingold has no provision in it to limit only the speech (or spending) of the rich. It applies equally to everyone.
Even the ACLU, who doesn’t reflexively oppose every loss of free speech rights, sees McCain-Feingold for the travesty it is: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/cfr/11374leg20010320.html
Are they not a good source of scholarly research?
February 9, 2008 at 6:11 am
frank you hit the wing nuts on the nose with Mccain Fiengold. too much campaign reform and they will never win an election.