Bill Gallagher: John McCain and his campaign ship of fools sink

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bill Gallagher

The USS McCain is way off course, the captain is strategically scattered, tactically inept, and his crew of misfits is desperately trying to keep the sinking campaign ship afloat. They'll do anything to survive.

Watching them drowning in these final days of the presidential campaign provides steady waves of mirth, pity, and gratitude that the America people are rejecting these scurvy swabbies.

The McCain campaign looks like a cross between Captain Queeg and his crew on the USS Caine, the film based on Herman Wouk's fine novel, "The Caine Mutiny," and the deck hands from McHale's Navy, the zany television series from the 1960s.

McCain's wacky crew includes frauds, liars, manipulators, paranoids, fear mongers, grog soaked right-wing pundits, and a vice presidential candidate who calls herself a hockey mom while dressing like a polo mom.

McCain's 2008 presidential campaign will forever besmirch his reputation. His voice is increasingly shrill and his attempt to morph himself into the savior of that scatter-brained, phony plumber is laughable. Working people who still think the Republicans are on their side should get their brains unplugged and, if that fails, drink some Drano before Election Day.

For the next painful week, McCain will froth at the mouth over the "spread the wealth around" phrase Barack Obama used in explaining his tax plan. Of course, all government taxation spreads the wealth around but don't tell that to Captain McCain. He's as obsessed with the remark as Captain Queeg was searching for the missing strawberries on the Caine.

McCain actually has vast experience in spreading the wealth around. During the savings and loans failures, the taxpayers picked up the bill for the corruption of McCain's pal and big campaign contributor, Charles Keating, and the other thieves who used their banks for wild real estate speculation.

As the S&Ls went belly up, studies show the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Association covered the depositors for as much as $500 billion. Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $3.4 billion and President Bush's brother Neil's Silverado Savings and Loan stuck the U.S. Treasury with a $1.2 billion tab.

McCain admits using "poor judgment" in promoting Keating's business interests before federal regulators as they tried to restrain his yahoo banking practices. Keating provided his jet for the McCains' use and gave them free Caribbean vacations. Cindy McCain had investments with Keating.

At the time, the savings and loan bail out amounted to the greatest transference of wealth in U.S history. States in the east and upper Midwest generally had strong state regulations, while those in the South and West did not.

Essentially, people from the progressive states paid for the sins of those in the underregulated states. The assets of the failed banks, of course, remained in place benefiting those communities courtesy of federal taxpayers.

McCain also supports tax policies that are tied to debt and the disproportionate obligation of wage earning people to pay it back. McCain has gone through a profound metamorphosis on taxes.

In 2000, while running in the South Carolina primary against Texas Governor George W. Bush, McCain had a sane and sober approach to taxes, opposing Bush's trademark fiscal recklessesness and the inequity it creates.

"I want a balanced approach, a working families tax cut, " McCain argued. "Governor Bush has 38 percent of his tax cut to go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans -- pay down the debt, Social Security and Medicare. If we're going to save the Social Security system, because we all know that it's going broke."

Even after Bush's election, McCain remained steadfast. When Bush's tax proposal -- creating unconscionable debt to further enrich the already rich -- came before the Senate, McCain was the rare Republican voice of reason.

In a courageous speech on the Senate floor, he said, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief."

But then McCain drank the Bushevik salt water, deliriously swallowing borrow-and-spend madness and belching failed fiscal slop. McCain now wants to take the same tax policies he once rightfully denounced and magnify the mistake.

He wants to make permanent Bush's redistribution of wealth to the rich plan and do even more by adding another $4 trillion to the national debt with his own tax cuts that would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of the American people.

The delusional McCain keeps on ranting about pork barrel spending and how his commitment to end Congressional goodies will salvage the federal budget. Even Captain Queeg had a firmer grasp on reality. Earmarks account for $18 billion in a $3 trillion federal budget.

McCain never even mentions out of control military spending, the debt enabled tax cuts, and the service on that debt that account for the biggest chunks of the growing annual federal budget deficits.

He has shown himself incapable of coming to grips with the fundamentals of our economic weakness and insane dependence on foreign counties, especially China, to finance the debt needed to fund basic U.S. government services. We are going to be forced to change that course, yet Captain McCain refuses to admit the nation is heading right into this rising storm.

McCain, and his mates in the right-wing commentariat, are flogging Obama for his commitment to ease the tax burdens on middle-class Americans and more fairly spread debt obligations.

They're lashing out at Obama calling him a "socialist," "communist," "Marxist," and "Swedish" in their desperate campaign to protect the wealth of the few, themselves included, and continue the pain of the many.

The New York Post tried to brand Obama's wife, Michelle, as an elitist with a gossip column story claiming she ordered two lobsters, caviar, and champagne from room service while staying at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

Rush Limbaugh held onto the story like it was an oxycondin prescription. The coxswain for the radical right bellowed "hypocrisy" and his rowers on shout radio and TV and the blogosphere followed Limbaugh's command.

It was a perfect story for them. It showed Michelle Obama to be an uppity black woman, living high off the hog while Joe, the plumber, can't afford to pay his taxes. Even better, it exposed her opulent taste and preference for products produced in those notorious socialists regimes in France, Russia, and New England.

But the truth swamped the story. Not a word of it was true. Michelle Obama did not even stay at the Waldorf. The Post apologized, blaming a bum "source." But just like those stories that Barack Obama is an alien, a terrorist, a Muslim, a drug dealer, and a -- well just fill in the blank -- the story will live on and be repeated as McCain's truth deprived crew stays the course.

Sarah Palin's self portrait as just your average, hard working, middle-class American won't pass the hypocrisy sniff test. The Associated Press reports Palin and her secessionist husband, Todd, own property and investments valued at $1.2 million.

Unlike Joe Six Pack, the AP reports, " The Palins' assets seem enviable: a half-million dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock, two vacation retreats, commercial fishing rights worth an estimated $50,000 or more and an income last year of at least $230,000. That compared with the median income of $64,333 for Alaskans and $50,740 for Americans in 2007, according to the Census Bureau."

And I'll betcha silly Sarah thinks the media is picking on her for reporting the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 outfitting the vice presidential candidate and her family. Instead of dumping all that cash at Saks Fifth Avenue, you'd think the GOP would offer to pay Joe, the plumber's taxes.

Palin will finish the campaign without appearing on a single Sunday morning news show. She has poisoned the campaign trying to tie Obama to domestic terrorists, calling Republican states " pro-America" and challenging the patriotism of those who live elsewhere.

Captain McCain's selection of the manifestly unfit Palin as his first mate -- the presidential candidate's most important decision -- was irresponsible and fool hardy. No one whose fundamental judgment is that seriously flawed should become commander-in-chief.

John Newton, an 18th century British slave ship sailor, who wrote the lyrics for the Christian hymn Amazing Grace, found his faith in a terrible storm at sea. Moments after he left the deck, the crewman who took Newton's place was swept overboard and drowned.

John McCain's last quest for the presidency is lost, blind and wretched, his campaign utterly graceless.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Bill Gallagher is a Peabody Award winner and former Niagara Falls city council member. He works as a television reporter in Detroit. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@aol.com.

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