As a pedigree, the McCain family's stature rests on the status and prestige of its achievements in the military: rank, medals, and most importantly to John McCain's presidential campaign, the image of warrior masculinity: the straight talking maverick of the Republican Party, the 21st century rendering of Teddy Roosevelt.

Not exactly. In his current presidential campaign, he's cozying up to the hate-mongering Christian right he once criticized. He's reversed positions on so many issues that his Democratic rivals have assembled his contrasting statements into "The Great McCain Versus McCain Debates". Underlying the Jekyll-Hyde reversals is McCain's hidden past of collaboration. Somewhere in the unplumbed human part of John Sidney McCain III, he knows his POW experience contradicts the war hero image he projects. This essential dishonesty, this lie of the soul, is a sign of a larger lack of character...

McCain is not some principled leader, not a maverick cowboy fighting the powerful. He's a sycophant. He believes in nothing but power and will do anything to attain it. He explodes in anger when challenged because, when a criticism hits too close to home, it goes to straight his deep-seeded shame. [More] . . read more

McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked... His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite... McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator. McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. [More] . . read more

But wait a minute. During the Cold War, before it collapsed in a heap of rubble, the Soviet Union was a country of nearly 250 million people. Its mighty Red Army had defeated the German Wehrmacht in World War II. The USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and it had missiles bigger than ours, capable of lobbing 20-megaton bombs on American cities. It held half a dozen European nations of ancient lineage captive, and financed dreaded revolutionary forces around the globe. It had a nuclear submarine fleet that was better than ours, and that was equipped with sea-launched missiles that could be fired at U.S. targets from locations only minutes from our coastline.

Iran, in contrast, is a poor country of 70 million. It has no nuclear weapons. It has no missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, much less of carrying them halfway around the world to U.S. targets. It hasn’t conquered or even attacked another country in centuries, and seems to show little interest in doing so (it couldn’t even defeat Iraq, a country less than half its size, which attacked it in the 1980s). Its navy consists of little boats more suitable to towing water skiers than to fighting American carrier battle groups. Its air force wouldn’t last a day in a contest with the planes from just one U.S. carrier. Hell, Iran's leadership is afraid of its own women! But Big John is afraid, and he says we all should be too. [More] . . read more

In his first assertion, Senator McCain is claiming credit where credit is not due. In his second, that we are winning in Iraq, he fails to understand what “winning” means in a Fourth Generation conflict. The current reduction in violence in Iraq does not mean we are winning. Nor does al Qaeda’s incipient defeat mean we are winning. We win only if a state re-emerges, the state we destroyed by our invasion. A reduction in violence and the defeat of al Qaeda are necessary preconditions for the re-emergence of a state, but they are not sufficient to ensure it...

So McCain is wrong on both counts. The fact that a Presidential candidate is fundamentally wrong on so important a subject as the war in Iraq is disturbing. More disturbing is the nature of the errors. Both represent carryovers of Bush administration practices. [More] . . read more

Both are now in poor political shape, with contradictory strategies for rehabbing their fortunes. The president is saddled with an approval rating bumping along in the 20s. Each day he is served another platter of contemptuous stories about “the worst presidency of modern times”, the lack of any enduring “legacy”, the approaching Democratic landslide that will put the Republicans in the wilderness for at least two terms...

The White House made no serious attempt to upend Obama’s trip to Iraq or excessively ridicule the harmonies from the Democratic candidate and Iraqi prime minister Maliki on schedules for U.S. withdrawal. Indeed noises that could be construed as acceptance of an accelerated schedule emanated from the White House... As final testimony to the huge disaster for the McCain campaign of Obama’s trip to Iraq, the floundering Republican candidate managed to shoehorn himself into talk about a rate of withdrawal from Iraq a good deal brisker than the 100 years of occupation he was talking about, or even the 2013 deadline he subsequently settled on. [More] . . read more

McCain’s greatest purported asset is a heroic narrative as an airman shot out of the sky over North Vietnam, then imprisoned in the “Hanoi Hilton”. This tale seems impervious to inquiry; we’re supposed to salute his courage and endurance and go all misty-eyed...Part of the Hanoi story is how McCain refused an offer of release so he could stay with his fellow detainees. Yet that’s exactly where the Jet Ski Veterans for Truth work their greatest magic: McCain’s decision wasn’t valor. Some dare call it dereliction of duty...What the hell was McCain doing, refusing release from those enemy hands in the midst of a war he so strongly supported?... His fellow warriors were risking their lives down in the mucky, booby-trapped jungles and deltas, yet McCain chose to hang out in his cell with a few other PoWs. Why didn’t he jump back in the cockpit and do his job? You might say McCain refused to report for duty...

McCain pushes his “experience” as his most vaunted asset, but it’s the most easily demolished. For McCain could only acquire all that experience by growing so aged and feeble. The talk-show joke on McCain casts him as the mean old man chasing kids off his lawn. Yet this disease-riddled grouch probably can’t hobble that far - he’d have to dispatch his bodyguards to torment the kiddies. Though “only” in his early 70s, the pile-on of decades has been cruel. [More] . . read more

The ‘Big Lie’ theory comes from Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, and is this: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation… more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” So if Mr. Bush would have us believe that a new democratic Iraq is dawning, he is telling ‘the big lie.’

But perhaps neither of these explains the president’s apparent willingness to accept a troop withdrawal timeline (he calls it a time ‘horizon,’ apparently believing that the U.S. citizenry is too stupid to know he means timeline). The youthful, dynamic Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is ahead in the polls; his Republican opponent, the awkward, elderly and decrepit John McCain, has not been able to spark any excitement on the campaign trail. McCain is a stalwart supporter of war, any war it seems, and foresees the U.S. occupation in Iraq lasting for generations. Perhaps it has finally dawned on Bush that this is not what the American people want; perhaps someone has finally gotten through to him; perhaps someone has penetrated his inner circle of yes-men and women, and has made him realize that a campaign platform of more of the same death, blood and destruction, is not selling too well even in middle America. [More] . . read more

A depressingly large number of Americans... across the land from Maine to California, fall into this willfully stupid category. They are content to get their information from television programs that offer no facts — just propaganda and ratings-boosting rants. They don’t read newspapers. They reject facts that conflict with their prejudices. They’ll believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. They’ll believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They’ll believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago. They’ll believe the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio.

Certainly one cohort of voters that is keeping the leaky Clinton dirigible airborne is women, particularly older women, for whom her candidacy is a feminist milestone. That is understandable. But the other cohort, which Clinton has referred to as “hard working, white Americans” and as “whites who had not completed college,” is hardly something she or any candidate should be bragging about. And yet that is what she is doing: bragging that she’s got a lock on the stupid, racist white vote. She should be leaving that for John McCain. [More] . . read more

Whatever.

Just three weeks after the clouds have lifted, we can see just how bad it really was. When we were in the frame we could not see the whole picture. Now we are outside, it's hard to imagine how and why we put up with it. Their meanness, lies, narrow mindedness and divisiveness have put enormous pressure on the youthful, creative and egalitarian culture of Australia.

Let's all pick up the challenge. The new millennium starts here. . . read more