If John McCain weren’t the darling of the media, he would be in BIG trouble after this past week. I cannot remember a politician having such a disastrous string of mistakes, missteps, and misstatements in so short a time. Yet, it's almost being completely ignored by the media.
First, McCain promised to balance the budget by the end of his first term from all the money he would save by winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though he has said in the past that there’s no reason to bring troops home if they’re not getting killed anymore. Of course, he has also said that we can’t bring the troops home as long as they’re getting killed. In other words, we stay if we are getting killed and we stay if we’re not getting killed. So where does the money being saved come from?
He then attacked Barack Obama for not voting for something he didn’t vote for, either - the Kyl-Lieberman amendment.
He claimed to have a record with veterans that he really doesn’t have. It was Barack Obama who supported the G.I. Bill and John McCain who refused to vote for it. That just backs up all Veterans’ groups overwhelmingly scoring McCain’s support of soldiers among the worst in the Senate.
McCain ignored the Iraqi Prime Minister calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq even though McCain had said before that if the Iraqis wanted us to leave, we would leave.
McCain joked about wanting to kill Iranian civilians by giving them lung cancer.
On Monday, McCain described social security as a total disgrace, not saying that it needed to be fixed, but saying, “We are paying present-day retirees with the taxes being paid by young workers in America today.” That just happens to be the entire premise of social security, which he has stated he wants to privatize.
McCain’s top economic advisor, Phil Gramm, who largely caused the mortgage crisis in America by creating the Enron loophole while a Senator, called Americans a bunch of whiners for an economy he said was only in a mental recession. Despite this, he got to keep his campaign co-chairman position.
Another top economic advisor, the formerly ousted Hewlett Packard CEO, Carly Fiorino, told reporters that McCain was just as upset as she was that insurance companies cover Viagra for men, but not birth control for women leaving McCain befuddled and bewildered on his campaign bus when reporters asked him about it.
Finally, McCain lied about his own life story just to pander to a Pittsburgh TV morning show. When McCain was held in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese, he had always said he gave false information under torture to make the torturers stop. He even stated it in his autobiography and the film that was made about it. Instead of naming his squad mates and squadron commander, he named the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers - the best team in football in the 1960s.
At the time, the Pittsburgh Steelers stunk. They were completely insignificant with no outstanding players although they would later become the best team of the 1970s well after McCain left Vietnam.
In talking to this Pittsburgh TV reporter, McCain changed his life story by saying he named the Pittsburgh Steelers famous defensive line of the time just to show what a great Pittsburgh fan he was. Too bad the famous Steel Curtain defense didn’t exist yet!
Furthermore, he formerly used this Green Bay Packers story to illustrate how ineffective torture is. A victim generally says anything just to end the pain. Of course, McCain completely changed his anti-torture stance under the direction of the Republican dictatorship who used incorrect information gleaned under torture to justify the irresponsible spending of American blood and taxpayers’ dollars in Iraq.
It’s a good thing for McCain that the media is the lapdog of the Republican machine or else he’d never hear the end of this week’s gaffes.
