Holiday Gifts for the Cheney, Bush and McCain Families To Express Our Gratitude for Their Public Service

Wondering what to get those special federal office holders for Christmas? An outrageous apologia from Bill Kristol? NO! Try this framed photo of Sarah Palin!* Lots of laughs around the Christmas Tree! And some bittersweet thoughts about what could have, you know, been...there. You know.



Or click here to purchase Parables of Pop Culture, a book that will help your favorite "old style" Republican pol talk to the family about how "the power of the words on the Burma Shave signs pale in comparison to the power of God's words to us in the bible." Well, yeah! I think so! And maybe God will also explain where the regulatory agencies were sleeping when the CFO buddies of the Bush-Cheney administration were siphoning money from every possible corner of the economy into their own pockets! No, don't be mad, God -- that's a JOKE! There are no regulatory agencies any more! Ha! Ha!

Or click here to purchase The Politically Incorrect Guide To The Civil War, a book that reveals a bunch of great stuff about the War of Northern Aggression that I bet you never learned from that there terrorist-coddling, pansy-liberal history professor of yours. Like, you know, "why Robert E. Lee had a higher regard for African Americans than Lincoln did; how, if there had been no Civil War, the South would have abolished slavery peaceably (as every other country in the Western Hemisphere did in the nineteenth century); and how the Confederate States of America might have helped the Allies win World War I sooner." Golly, true knowledge is such a gift in itself! You can't go wrong with this little item, no sir!

And for only $15.95 -- 15.95 ladies and gentlemen, plus shipping and handling -- you can send a Sarah Palin "2009 calendar featuring never before seen photos of Sarah, with Todd, Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig Palin." Just call 1.800.247.6553; when they ask for a sales code, shout "EAGLE!" Your favorite former Republican Presidential candidate (whoever THAT was! No I'm JOKING!) will receive this lovely calendar celebrating the woman who "has re-energized the Conservative base of the Republican Party. As a front runner in the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination, she is showing America that she is willing to reform her own party and politics as usual." And here's the best part -- the photographer selling the calendar is Judith Patrick, the former Assistant Mayor of Wasilla! Well, yay! Or go here get a gift subscription to Townhall Magazine for that special soon-to-be-former White House occupant who may be in need of something to read -- and get a Sarah Palin Calendar for free! Double yay!

Merry Christmas, Republicans, and have a ton of fun around the Christmas tree! Don't let the door hit'cha on the way out!

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*The photoshopped portrait of Sarah Palin was received over the internet this morning, courtesy of the Mother Of The Radical (MOTheR). I was led to all other items by the regular marketing emails I get from Human Events magazine, ads that are also shilling products by Ann Coulter, Oliver North, Patrick Buchanan, and a bunch of financial advisors you have never heard of.

This Week in John McCain Land: The Case Against A Man Who Would Be President

So much has been going around the internet about Governor Sarah Palin's (dis)qualifications for executive office (and she is such an easy target for the Eastern Elite Eastablishment in all its tolerance for white people who are, shall we say, earthier, than your average Bostonian) that I do not think there has been a high enough focus on increasingly distressing news that is surfacing, and being documented, about Senator John McCain. There are a variety of facts emerging about McCain's character and Senate record that are far more disturbing in some ways than what we know about Palin's difficulty in telling the truth about her past actions (although what could be more disturbing than the fact that when Palin was Mayor of Wasilla the town instituted a policy of billing rape victims for their emergency room care and for the cost of the rape kits used to collect evidence that would theoretically put their attackers behind bars?)

But it is McCain who would be President, and it is McCain about whom we must ask the hard questions: although critics go on about his age, living until 76 or even 80 is not unheard of in this country, particularly if you have access to good health care, as Senators (although not all rape victimes) do. And I think military families ought to scrutinize his record particularly closely, a record that has been obscured by repeated references to his experience as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, having undergone torture and prolonged physical suffering, and his refusal to be exchanged early because he was the son of a high-ranking officer. All of these things have been cited as proof of his patriotism, his character, his judgement, and his concern for the men and women who make up our military.

This is a patriotism, or actions at least, of which McCain has a right to be proud. But there is another kind of patriotism McCain has practiced as a politician, and that variety might strike the families and friends of members of the armed forces as less conducive to their interests and concerns in the current crisis. That kind of patriotism is loyalty to the state, a loyalty that may override an ethical concern for soldiers and their families. It appears that McCain may be implicated as an integral player in aiding in the effort to suppress, along with several Presidents and several intelligence bureaus, credible evidence that POW-MIA soldiers were held back by the North Vietnamese government after the 1973 prisoner exchange (including 20 airmen downed in Laos who responded via an electronic signalling system but have not been heard from since) in an effort to obtain reparations and other concessions from the United States -- reparations that the United States has refused to pay. Read an article about it by Sydney Schanberg, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, here.

What did John McCain have to do with the suppression of such evidence? Well, as a member of the Senate committee investigating the POW-MIA question between 1980 and 1993, and as its only member who had been a POW and celebrated war hero, he was, Schanberg argues, uniquely persuasive in quashing subpoenas, opposing legislation that would have allowed further investigation and keeping evidence from the public domain that might have shed light on the issue for the many military families who still do not know what happened to their loved ones.

Perhaps because I am currently reading Linda Colley's Captives, a book which takes a fresh look at the British Empire from the perspective of those Britons who were taken prisoner by their imperial subjects, I found McCain's failure to side with citizens, particularly those who had made the greatest sacrifice in war, and his desire to side with the state, particularly awful, and the position that their families have been left in, for what seem to be purely political reasons, deeply poignant. Furthermore, these military families have been repeatedly kicked to the curb as they try to resolve the decades-long, unresolved, absence of family members. For example, in the face of a 1992 request made of the committee by Delores Alfand, the sister of a missing officer and chair of the national Alliance of Families, for electronic surveillance data, McCain bullied her until she wept. As Schanberg writes,

He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

I am not quite yet ready to celebrate John McCain's patriotic concern for our armed forces. Are you? Because if this is true (and Schanberg's article is compelling about something I haven't believed in for years) McCain's behavior is self-serving and unconscionable. There is absolutely no strategic reason for not telling the truth about those missing soldiers, except to conceal the collaboration of John McCain, and others, in the official abandonment of American prisoners. It is nothing more, or less, than a cover-up that has been given credibility by the most famous POW since Major Andre was executed by George Washington.

But let's say you want to forget about Vietnam, just like John McCain and his Republican cronies do. O.K. In other news, check out this piece in today's New York Times that details McCain's high-stakes gambling habits, the privileges he receives from casinos in return for his patronage, and -- far more important than this -- his actions as chair of the Indian Affairs Committee, which gives him a significant role in determining which tribes may establish casinos, and which Indian groups will actually be awarded the federal status that permits them the legal standing to bypass state and local gaming laws. The article details at least eight members of the campaign who have strong ties to the casino gambling industry, donations from the gaming industry (including Steve Wynn and Donald Trump, whose casinos McCain patronizes as a privileged guest) and muliple ties between the campaign and gambling lobbyists. The article also notes that the Abramoff investigation, in which McCain was an important player, succeeded in taking out important right-wing enemies who had implemented the dirty tricks used against McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary. If even half what has been reported is true, this one could make McCain's role in the Keating Five Scandal look tame. In addition to being on the payroll of the industry, apparently McCain was also able to help his pal Joe Lieberman reverse the tribal status of the Schaticoke Indians of Kent, Connecticut. The tribe, which was annoying a lot of very wealthy people in western Connecticut, wanted to establish a third casino, which would have cut into the Pequot and Mohegan casinos. These latter two tribes are big McCain, and Lieberman, donors.

And in case you are ready to write both of these articles off as the lying rants of a liberal press, I suggest you go here, for a collection of articles by conservative journalist George Will that raise the question of whether McCain's outbursts of rage and impulsive decision making are not cause for alarm in a potential President. "It is arguable," Will writes, "that because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"

Not at the age of 72, is my guess. Not with the best medical care in the world.

As Wall Street Tumbles, Herbert Hoover -- er, John McCain -- Claims That "The Fundamentals Of The Economy Are Still Strong."

Well, thank you Mary Sunshine.

Seriously folks, the economy hasn't been sound for a long time, making it even more bizarre that John McCain made this claim yesterday, shortly after Lehman Brothers went down the tube. Even if -- as at least one source correctly asserts -- this phrase was part of a longer speech that acknowledges the current situation as worrisome, how can McCain float this fantasy when economists of all political persuasions are asserting that the economy has not hit bottom yet? That the worst may be yet to come? (Even the Radical, who does not pray often, is praying for you, AIG. And for you, WaMu.) Click here for video posted by CBS News that shows Obama finally getting aggressive; click here for video posted by FP Passport, a web log published by the journal Foreign Policy, that shows a longer clip from the McCain speech than I have quoted above.

The Radical keeps imagining that she and other historians of the Great Depression will begin to have their phones ring off the hook, so eager will news organizations be to hear their wisdom about the current crisis and the comparisons between John McCain and Mr. Hoover. But I suspect it is not to be. The Lehrer News Hour will keep going back to those tried and true Presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith. Once more, stardom will elude me ("Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my close-up!")

Among those whose faith in the stewardship of the Republican party seems to have been shattered for the time being is conservative columnist David Brooks, whose piece in today's New York Times, "Why Experience Matters" seems to be a sincere attempt to bring the Republican base down to earth about what the "vote for the guy you want to have a beer with" attitude has bought for both the masses, as well as the classes. "The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there," Brooks writes. "This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom." Although Brooks acknowledges the critical importance of tension between elite conservatism and popular conservatism, he condemns the Bush administration for its ineptitude, and warns that votes for "ordinary people" are not, in themselves, a path to good government as populist demagogues claim. He continues:

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Nicely put, David, and a very gracious way of admitting that things have gone tragically, fatally awry under the Presidency of that guy a majority of voters actually did not want to have a beer with, but the oil industry and the financial industry did. And in case anyone has noticed, there is a growing movement of conservative intellectuals who are turning on the McCain candidacy because of his choice of Sarah Palin, her lack of seasoning, the ethical questions about her policies as governor, and the kind of cynicism about the electorate that the choice of such a person represents when there were so many better qualified people (many of whom were extreme social conservatives, many of whom were women.) Some of us might argue that this cynicism about the voting public is only the Reagan candidacy carried to an extreme, but as someone who is studying that period, I would say the jury is out on this one. Perhaps the great untold story of the first Reagan administration is how people around the president rejected social extremism, over and over again, while simultaneously pursuing the kinds of changes in the nation's regulatory structure that ultimately produced the crisis we are living with this morning. It is a complicated history to say the least.

Um, Jim -- I'm in the office all day if you want to give me a ring.

But let's get back to the Second Great Depression, and to its more local effects. Many of us stopped opening our investment report from TIAA-CREF over a year ago, although I am heartened to see they have not yet been mentioned in this collapse, difficult as it may be to imagine that they too are not implicated in the subprime mortgage market scandal. However, we in the academy can't begin to understand yet how the current crisis will affect us. One of the things I wonder is how many students will begin to find that their highly leveraged parents are unable to pay the bills? And do places like Zenith have anywhere near the resources to plug the gap for students who are suddenly in need of financial aid packages? And I am not just talking about the children of the super-rich, of which we have a-plenty. How about the children of the secretaries and administrative assistants and janitors and coffee vendors of the super-rich? We aren't seeing many photos of them leaving Lehman Brothers, are we? (Although, since those photos and video look more like a perp walk than anything else, that may be ok.) Their children go to Zenith too. And we are going to have to come up with the money to help all of them.

Some people are frantic right now about the future: I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I am healthy enough and young enough to work for a couple decades. And kind of fascinated that what I began thinking about as a dissertation field back in 1984 is happening all over again.

And hoping that the American people get out there in November and vote for Roosevelt, not Hoover.