McCain’s courage: gone
Here’s the thing that just stops me cold about John McCain. By the many accounts of his journalist-pals who, presumably, have it from the horse’s mouth, McCain wanted to run with Joe Lieberman as his VP candidate: in other words, the actual bipartisanship that he espoused last night. And from McCain himself, we have it that he’s heroic and country-first ever since his captivity in Hanoi. So why didn’t the courageous, country-first hero pick Lieberman? Because as a politician, he’s not that gutsy.
Instead, he plucks Sarah Palin from obscurity and tells us that she — in his opinion — is the person best-suited to take over as president if he’s elected and his health fails. That was his stated criterion for a VP selection, after all — the best-qualified person to lead the nation. And we have it on his say-so that he’s always country-first and would never do the wrong thing.
Well, either McCain really thinks Palin’s prepared for the job, in which case his judgment is awful; or else he blinked when Karl Rove told him he couldn’t have sort-of Democrat Lieberman (who’s pro-choice) because the right-wing would go crackers on him. Either way, that heroic experience of his from four decades ago is looking pretty irrelevant to his current self. In that vein, I’m putting up — below — a book review I just finished of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, by Thomas Franks. Franks also authored What’s the Matter With Kansas, also about how the conservative movement tries to make us look over “here” — to the culture wars now embodied by Sarah Palin — while they wreck the government and enrich themselves back in D.C.
Frank will be in the Triangle Raleigh at Quail Ridge Books & Music on Wednesday, September 17 at 7:30 pm. The review is below:
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The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank
(Metropolitan Books, NYC 2008 $25)
Fresh off Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s acceptance speech last night, it was cathartic to visit with Thomas Frank’s “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule” (Metropolitan Books, 2008).
McCain pledged, you will recall, to clean up the “country-second, me-first” culture of corruption in Washington. Frank reminds us, in bitter detail, just who’s responsible for the corruption and the putrified state of U.S. economic and foreign-policy interests: It’s McCain’s Republican Party, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Plutocracy Inc.
Keep your eye on the pea, or as Frank frames it, the liberalism and spirit of compromise that spawned the healthy middle-class America of the mid-20th century, as it comes under attack from the right:
* Conservatives declare war on it, denouncing government as the enemy.
*Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, upon winning office, put incompetents and thieves in charge of government agencies, which—ta da!—produces often spectacularly incompetent government performance, or else no government performance. (Think FEMA/Katrina for the former, the U.S. Department of Labor for the latter.)
* Meanwhile, they “outsource” government functions to friendly corporations which may not be any good at what they’re getting paid to do, but are very good at kicking back (excuse me, contributing to) the vast array of right-wing groups and allied lobbyists that collectively constitute the “conservative movement.”
* Best case for the movement: These contractors do a lousy job at hugely inflated costs (think: Fannie Mae), producing both disgust with “taxes” and more kickbacks to the movement. Unfortunately for the GOP partisans, Democrats aren’t shy about taking the kickbacks too, but that just leads to—
* Republican candidates who can point the finger of blame for all the blundering at Democrats, whose hands aren’t clean either and who are, after all, in the party that still believes in government’s efficacy.**
So where’s the pea now? According to McCain, the one thin shell that can still protect it is the McCain-Palin ticket, which will be corruption-fightin’ and bipartisan—except, of course, that heroic John McCain didn’t have the political guts to actually run on a bipartisan ticket with the VP candidate he wanted, former Democrat-turned-Oddity Joe Lieberman. No, McCain’s running with a right-wing zealot whose disdain for “community organizing” (think: the common good) is matched only by her utter lack of preparation to be the nation’s chief executive.
But there I go again, criticizing Sara Palin for standing by her pregnant teenage daughter.
Which brings me around to Frank’s most important point, in this book and in his earlier, and frankly, more seminal, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
That point is, movement Republicans consider themselves at war, and they are determined to win using any means necessary. This includes—well, lying is such a harsh term, so let’s call it … no, lying is what it is.
You say, for instance: Gee, Sarah Palin seems to have spent most of her adult life in a small town being mayor and raising her children; and she has little familiarity, let alone experience, with national and foreign policy issues. And the movement immediately denounces you and Barack Obama, with whom you are presumably in league, for saying that a mom can’t be president.
See how that works?
Now, you say: No, I was just commenting on …
And they say: Whoa, now it’s an all-out assault on women’s rights, not to mention family values and the valiant teenage daughter you’ve attacking.
You and the “liberal media,” that is—which is another complete fiction they’ve concocted while simultaneously defanging the Federal Communications Commission and turning over the nation’s airwaves (and, if given enough time, broadband too) to the highest corporate bidders.
Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest.
Similarly, “The Wrecking Crew” is Frank in high dudgeon, getting off his chest all the sleeze that he’d collected in his reporter’s notebooks over the years that didn’t make it into the earlier “Kansas.” Stories about the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff and disgraced U.S. House Minority Leader Tom DeLay; about the Native American corporations scam, and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ hand in it; about the American protectorate, Saipan, that’s a virtual slave colony for U.S. manufacturers; and the whole movement gang from Grover Norquist to New Gingrich to, well, Sara Palin.
Actually, Sarah Palin’s not in this book. But her Gingrich-, GOPAC-trained spirit is.
Oddly, there’s not much here either about Iraq, or Paul Bremer’s kid-viceroys, or the Blackwater mercenaries, which all together form the quintessential example of what Frank says is the conservatives’ two-part mission: (1) enrich themselves and their movement; (2) discredit government by proving that it can’t change a light bulb.
In “Kansas,” Frank showed how the conservatives take voters’ eyes off the pea of their own economic self-interest using culture-war sideshows about abortion rights, gay rights and how the civilization will perish if we teach our kids about contraception.
In “Wrecking Crew,” he’s all about what DeLay & Co. have been up to while our attentions were thus distracted.
But his fundamental point is, liberalism can’t survive much longer if liberals continue to expect that conservatives will play fair and debate the real issues with them. And democracy can’t survive in a plutocracy, which is what we’re becoming while Cindy and John pile up the houses.
Liberalism, Frank says, is at heart a set of compromises attempting to balance individual and private-property rights with our common, public interests. But movement conservatives have no interest in compromise (regardless what John McCain says or thinks) or in confronting reality either. As a McCain aide made clear the other day, the GOP wants the ’08 campaign to be about personalities, not issues. Frank gets that sentiment: “What I did not understand,” he says of his early reporting days, “was that beating liberal ideas wasn’t the goal. This wasn’t about ideas at all. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not be debating but by erasing it.”