John "Just Say Anything" McCain Watch....
His latest attempt to convince people he's got the temperament for the Oval Office. Call me crazy, but one thing I'm looking for in a presidential candidate is assurance that if things get bad enough and this country loses its head, I won't wake up in the middle of the night with him in the room, wild-eyed and armed, chanting some variation of "cut down the tall trees." At least the major Republican candidates, particularly McCain and Giuliani, aren't trying to hide anything, so no one will be able to say the warning signs weren't there.
I'd been withholding final judgment on Giuliani until fairly recently -- I gave up on McCain at least a year ago -- but the Romney campaign's derisive moniker "the Mayor" seems increasingly and sadly appropriate.
I'd been withholding final judgment on Giuliani until fairly recently -- I gave up on McCain at least a year ago -- but the Romney campaign's derisive moniker "the Mayor" seems increasingly and sadly appropriate.
posted by The Cunning Realist at Saturday, September 15, 2007
7 Comments:
TCR wrote:
Call me crazy, but...
No, TCR, I wouldn't call you crazy, I'd call McCain crazy.
Plus Rush and Sean and the entire staff of Fox News, who have been foaming at the mouth about this MoveOn ad the whole week... every three minutes, they shriek about how it's "outrageous" and "despicable" and "beyond the pale" for MoveOn or Hillary Clinton or any Senate Democrat to so much as insinuate that a "decorated war veteran" who "risks his life to do his duty" might possibly be dissembling or promoting some kind of political agenda. Since war is a deadly serious business, they explain, to accuse a soldier of betrayal or falsifying facts is exactly the same as accusing him of treason.
Nobody has yet explained exactly how the "John Kerry Exception" fits into this patently obvious boundary of what constitutes decency and what doesn't.
TCR, thank you, thank you, and thank you again for being a fiscal conservative who doesn't buy into this rhetorical horsesh#t.
Interested parties should also check out Dave Neiwert (also known as Orcinus) and his blog. He has commented for years about "eliminationist rhetoric" from right-wing pundits, and the threat of how it crosses into the mainstream from the fringes.
(July '05)
What, really, is eliminationism? It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.
... But while eliminationism's most startling historical example was provided by the Nazis, it also has a long and appalling history in the annals of American democracy. It was manifest in the genocidal wars against Native Americans, when "the only good Indian was a dead Indian": in the many anti-immigrant campaigns waged by Nativists of many different stripes; ... and in the lingering far-right "militias" and related hate groups who scapegoat minorities and immigrants, gays and lesbians, government officials, and liberals generally, making them the targets of both hateful rhetoric and actual violence.
... It glories in violence, in action over intellect, and always insists, of course, that it represents the true national identity.
The big problem with eliminationist rhetoric, he argues -- based on historical examples -- is that it whips its audience into a frenzy which the pundits who use it cannot ultimately control. Once it starts, it really has nowhere to go but up; there's no way to back down, there's no outlet or amelioration until it leads to violence.
(July '06)
When we hear the drumbeat of eliminationism, we know where it always ends up. Those who join in may not conceive of themselves as fascists, but they join in anyway.
After all, the drumbeat feels good. It's about scapegoating, telling people that their problems, and the problems of the world, are not their fault -- it's someone else's.
Boom ba boom.
It keeps drumming, and the louder it gets, the more people join in.
Boom ba boom boom boom.
And when they name their enemies, they're just getting started. First it's "illegals." Then it's "homosexuals." Then it's "Muslim radicals." Then it's "liberals." Then it's "the liberal media."
Boom ba boom boom Boom ba boom boom
And it just gets louder and louder. And pretty soon no one knows how to make it stop.
Combine eliminationism with the growing executive powers that the Bush administration has established and you have a real witches brew that will one day poison our democracy; as Jay Rosen points out at http://tinyurl.com/2wqymb , citing Charlie Savage's Pulitzer winning analysis of Cheney's putsch against Congress and the Constitutional balance of powers, those augmented executive powers will not be leaving with Bush, they will remain for the next POTUS willing to wield them.
As Savage himself wrote:
"Suddenly, what the Bush administration had been doing across a huge range of issues made much more sense – not just the 9/11-related controversies, but Cheney’s fight to keep his energy task force papers a secret, the attacks on open-government laws such as FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, the use of executive orders instead of legislation to push the faith-based initiative, the decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting the Senate, the choices for Supreme Court nominations, unprecedented efforts to impose greater White House control over Justice Department lawyers and other executive branch bureaucrats, and many other things. These disparate controversies were all connected. The administration, from its very beginning, had set out to set precedents and take actions that would permanently expand presidential power for the long-term, even when such tactics brought them extra short-term difficulties. A quiet but sweeping constitutional revolution was well underway."
To John McCain's credit he was willing to argue against the POTUS's ability to sanction torture but Bush took care of that in one of his signing statements basically telling Congress it could set any laws it wanted to unless they prevented the POTUS from doing what he wanted to.
I have argued and will continue to argue that the only way to fully repudiate the royal powers established by Bush/Cheney and prevent their use by future administrations is to impeach now; it has far less to do with vindictiveness (although I confess I feel some) and much more to do with making Congress, supine Democrats and obscurantist Republicans alike, take back the responsibilities they cravenly and slavishly gave away.
Poor old John McCain. This once honorable man has become nothing more than a warmongering demagogue.
The entire Republican "base" is hiding behind the skirts of "our troops" like a bunch of scared little girls. They can't argue the merits of Bush's catastrophe in Iraq, so they have taken the last refuge of a scoundrel: phony, jingoistic, flag waving faux patriotism.
thomas daulton said... The big problem with eliminationist rhetoric, he argues -- based on historical examples -- is that it whips its audience into a frenzy which the pundits who use it cannot ultimately control. Once it starts, it really has nowhere to go but up;
I think Chris Rock put it pretty well...
"I'm American, man. I'm American, man, fuck all these foreigners." And that was cool. "I'm American, I'm American, man. Fuck the French." That was cool. "I'm American, I'm American. Fuck all these Arabs." And that was cool.
Then they went to: "I'm American, I'm American. Fuck all these illegal aliens." Then I started listening, 'cause I know niggers and Jews is next. It's like, any day now--that train's never late!
McCain visits "The View:"
BABA: So, Senator, what kind of tree would you be?
McCain: BABA, I'd be a baptistry.
If you've been withholding judgement on Giuliani then you don't know that much about him. It seems the more one knows about Giuliani the less one likes him. Aside from the obvious tastelessness of his necrophilic campaign for president atop the corpses of 9/11 victims, there are other even more disgusting and heinous things about Giuliani that bear mentioning.
For one thing, Giuliani has not only used his phony 9/11 mystique to advance his political career, he has also made a ton of money off of the event. An article in the Washington Post called "In private sector Giuliani parlayed fame into wealth" describes this well, saying: "On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich. The letter he dispatched to the city Conflicts of Interest Board that day asked permission to begin forming a consulting firm with three members of his outgoing administration. The company, Giuliani said, would provide "management consulting service to governments and business" and would seek out partners for a "wide-range of possible business, management and financial services" projects. Over the next five years, Giuliani Partners earned more than $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm's financial information is private. And that success helped transform the Republican considered the front-runner for his party's 2008 presidential nomination from a moderately well-off public servant into a globe-trotting consultant whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/12/AR2007051201270.html
An article in Time magazine, reprinted at the Giuliani Partners website, says: "After 9/11, anytime Americans encountered a really hard problem, someone would nominate Rudy Giuliani to solve it. There were calls for him to take over WorldCom, the SEC, the state, even the country. But by January 2002, Giuliani had already reinvented himself as a businessman. The experiment has been extremely lucrative. Giuliani Parnters, the consulting and investment firm that he started by transplanting key members of his administration into a dark wood paneled office on Times Square, is bringing in just over a $100 million a year in revenue, according to a source close to the company. That would mean the firm is collecting over $2 million per employee, which is phenomenal. (By comparison, Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking giant, takes in roughly $1.2 million per employee.)." http://www.giulianipartners.com/news_03.aspx
He has also gotten rich off the other, less-mentioned "terrorist" attack, the made-in-Fort Detrick anthrax scare. In an effort to make money off the anthrax cleanup, Giuliani Partners and Sabre Technical Svcs. teamed up to create a company called Bio-One which cleaned up the AMI building in Boca Raton: "Flanked by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Chairman and CEO of Giuliani Partners LLC, and John Y. Mason, President and CEO of Sabre Technical Services LLC, David Rustine, President of Crown Companies and the new owner of the American Media Inc. (AMI) building announced today that Bio·ONE™ has been selected to decontaminate and remediate the building –– site of the first recognized anthrax incident in 2001." http://www.giulianipartners.com/press_bioone_011304.aspx
Aside from getting rich off 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, Giuliani jeopardized the health of every rescue worker at Ground Zero and residents living nearby in helping make sure people were told only false estimates of the toxicity there. CNN has an article saying: "The city allowed people to return to Manhattan after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers even though officials were told the air was not yet safe, according to an internal memo from a New York City Health Department official." http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/07/nyc.air/index.html
CBS has an article that provided more detail, saying: "CBS 2 News has obtained documents revealing that Lower Manhattan was reopened a few weeks following the attack even though the air was not safe. The two devastating memos, written by the U.S. and local governments, show they knew. They knew the toxic soup created at Ground Zero was a deadly health hazard. Yet they sent workers into the pit and people back into their homes. One of the memos, from the New York City health department, dated Oct. 6, 2001, noted: "The mayor's office is under pressure from building owners ... in the Red Zone to open more of the city." The memo said the Department of Environmental Protection was "uncomfortable" with opening the areas but, "The mayor's office was directing the Office of Emergency Management to open the target areas next week." "Not only did they know it was unsafe, they didn't heed the words of more experienced people that worked for the city and E.P.A.," said Joel Kupferman, with the group Environmental Justice Project." http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_249164937.html
EPA spokeswoman Christie Whitman said Giuliani blocked her efforts to warn the public, which Giuliani of course denies: "Former Environmental Protection Agency boss Christie Whitman says she urged Ground Zero workers to wear respirators, but then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani blocked her efforts. She also said city officials didn't want EPA workers wearing haz-mat suits because they "didn't want this image of a city falling apart." http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/06/23/2007-06-23_christie_blasts_rudy_on_wtc_air-1.html
No wonder the people who are the GENUINE heroes of 9/11, the firemen, absolutely hate his guts. That and the fact that as soon as the gold and silver underneath Ground Zero was recovered he eviscerated the recovery-of-human-remains effort. Firefighting News says: "In November 2001, our members were continuing the painful, but necessary, task of searching Ground Zero for the remains of our fallen brothers and the thousands of innocent citizens that were killed, because precious few of those who died in the terrorist attacks had been recovered at that point... Nevertheless, Giuliani, with the full support of his Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, decided on November 2, 2001, to sharply reduce the number of those who could search for remains at any one time... In conjunction with the cut in fire fighters allowed to search, Giuliani also made a conscious decision to institute a "scoop-and-dump" operation to expedite the clean-up of Ground Zero in lieu of the more time-consuming, but respectful, process of removing debris piece by piece in hope of uncovering more remains. Mayor Giuliani's actions meant that fire fighters and citizens who perished would either remain buried at Ground Zero forever, with no closure for families, or be removed like garbage and deposited at the Fresh Kills Landfill. Our Local presidents at the time attempted to meet with the Mayor to stop this despicable treatment of those who perished, but he refused to even see them face-to-face. The scoop-and-dump continued... The fact is that the Mayor's switch to a scoop-and-dump coincided with the final removal of tens of millions of dollars of gold, silver and other assets of the Bank of Nova Scotia that were buried beneath what was once the towers. Once the money was out, Giuliani sided with the developers that opposed a lengthy recovery effort, and ordered the scoop-and-dump operation so they could proceed with redevelopment." http://firefightingnews.com/article-US.cfm?articleID=27125
This timing is confirmed elsewhere, including a CNN article from 1 November 2001 which says: "The number of firefighters and cops sifting through the rubble will be reduced to 25 police officers and 25 firefighters by Friday, said Frank McCarton, a public information officer in the NYC Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. The workers remaining on site will mainly consist of construction crews removing the debris. Firefighters will stay on the periphery of the recovery site and remove any human remains that are found, Giuliani's press office told CNN. It will be a far cry from the estimated 2,500 workers who have been assisting in recovery operations at any given time since the September 11 terrorist attacks brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center." http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/01/rec.wtc.recovery/index.html
The gold and silver were finished being recovered on 30 October 2001 according to the Mustang Daily: "Over $230 million in gold and silver was recovered from a delivery tunnel beneath 5 World Trade Center Wednesday. Canada’s Bank of Nova Scotia stored over $200 million in gold and silver in their vaults under the building. They are still unsure how much of the recovered metal was theirs. It is believed that there were other valuables stored in the vaults but there is no information on how much of it has been lost or recovered in the disaster. Officials finally reached the trove Tuesday after removing a 10-wheel truck and several cars that had been crushed by the debris." http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/evidence/reuters_international.html
Meanwhile, thanks to Giuliani's "scoop and dump" operation, the remains of 9/11 victims sit in a garbage dump called "Fresh Kills", where apparantly they have been used to fill in potholes!: "The pulverized remains of bodies from the World Trade Center disaster site were used by city workers to fill ruts and potholes, a city contractor says in a sworn affidavit filed yesterday in Manhattan Federal Court. Eric Beck says debris powders - known as fines - were put in a pothole-fill mixture by crews at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where more than 1.65 million tons of World Trade Center debris were deposited after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it onto tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts," Eric Beck said." http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/03/24/2007-03-24_911_remains_fill_potholes_worker_claims.html
Giuliani has such lack of respect for the victims that heavy pressure was put on the cleanup workers to finish the job way ahead of schedule and in the process they did a haphazard and cursory job of looking for human remains: "At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed... Although the cleanup was expected to last 30 months, the pit was cleared by June 2002, nearly two years ahead of schedule." http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/14/africa/zero.php?page=2
Because of this, remains continue to be discovered even now years later:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-19-remains_x.htm
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/15/remains_of_911_victim_are_identified/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15345694/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6070206.stm http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_354201037.html
Some remains found even in areas "already checked": http://wcbstv.com/911/local_story_297163513.html
Want to find out more about the real Giuliani from his mayoral records? No big surprise that he has taken possession of all his records and is in the process of sanitizing them: "More than five years after Giuliani spirited his papers out of City Hall in his last days in office - saying he would pay to have them privately archived - virtually all of the 2,118 boxes he took have been microfilmed and returned to the city, aides say. But the index offers little detail on specific files, and Giuliani's archivists have yet to deliver a more comprehensive road map to the voluminous collection, now housed in an old court building behind City Hall. "You would have better luck finding a picture of Rudy wearing a Red Sox cap than locating a meaningful accounting or record of his tenure as mayor of New York," griped one operative from a rival presidential campaign." http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/05/02/2007-05-02_mystery_man_rudy.html
Giuliani has also said that he is on par with the 9/11 rescue workers regarding time spent at Ground Zero, saying: "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them." http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/08/giuliani-says-h.html
It turns out Giuliani spent a total of 29 hours in 3 months at Ground Zero: "It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts." http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/08/report-giuliani.html
Giuliani is also a liar on other matters, and not a very smart one at that. In an interview with Peter Jennings he stated that he had been told that the Twin Towers would "collapse" soon on that morning of 9/11, saying: "I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse." http://www.wnbc.com/politics/13404578/detail.html?dl=mainclick
In that same article it says Giuliani was accosted by a protester at one of his fundraising events who confronted him with what he had said, and he denied having said it: "Afterward, a young woman claiming to be the relative of a Sept. 11, 2001, firefighter who died when the towers collapsed, asked Giuliani why he allegedly told Peter Jennings the towers would fall that day, but did not stop the rescue efforts of firefighters and police officers. The woman claims Giuliani knew the towers would fall, and allowed rescuers to go to their deaths. She asked him, "How do you sleep at night?" Giuliani was extremely polite, telling the young woman she was wrong and that he never said what she claimed. At that point, another protester from her group, a young man, interrupted Giuliani with the same allegations. Giuliani replied by saying, "I didn't realize the towers would collapse." He later added, "No one that I know of had any idea they would implode. That was a complete surprise."
Not very smart eh? Especially considering the Jennings interview was on t.v. And it brings up an even more interesting question: Since no steel-frame high-rises have ever before or since collapsed because of fire (and not on 9/11 either if you watch the video footage, as it's plain to see what brought the Towers down was massive use of demolition charges), how on earth could Rudy Giuliani or anyone else be able to "predict" that the Towers were going to "collapse" [read: be demolished]?
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