After Hillary, Voting With Conscience and Pride

Joel S. Hirschhorn

This general election more than most will test the courage of voters to avoid lesser-evil strategic voting that has propped up our two-party plutocracy. People with intelligence and conscience must resist peer pressure and the temptation to vote against John McCain by voting for Barack Obama.

Happy Saturday, everyone!

What's new?

On the McCain front, there's this tidbit:

McCain Pushed Land Swap That Benefits Backer

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, May 9, 2008; Page A01

PRESCOTT, Ariz. -- Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers].

[...more at link in title...]

Hat-tip kubla000 of DailyKos.

What a surprise, a land deal benefitting a backer, courtesy of Mr. Keating Five himself. Nothing like consistency when it comes to the GOP SOP.

Speaking of "consistency" in terms of the GOP and Bush Republicans, there's more:

I first met Neghin Sobhaini last year while doing an interview on the subject of Darfur. There I learned of her heritage as an Iranian American, and of her work in Iran with the U.N.
When McCain started touring the country with Joe Lieberman and continued to hint at another War - this time with Iran, I knew Neghin would be a good person to discuss how these type of actions are affecting politics in Iran, specifically by undermining the moderates in the country who want reform and diplomacy with the West.

until Hillary Clinton is out of the Democratic Primary Process.

What do I mean? Read the following:

We must have our eyes WIDE OPEN, wit in check, and counter punches ready for November.

While many are worried, or not worried (I am not) about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the GOP should be deathly worried about the MSNBC/Wall Street Journal Poll.

Bush is the albatross, the elephant in the room, the oxygen sucker for the GOP and John McCain.

A vote for McCain is a vote for Bush...gotta love Comedy Central. :)

You can find it on the ePluribus Media Katrina Timeline handily enough -- perform a search where "summary" contains "McCain" and see what record pops up. When I tried it, the record found provides a brief summary and links back to the source article on the White House website: a wonderful photo essay of John McCain and George Bush, celebrating a birthday and having a party...just where you'd expect the Commander in Chief to be, instead of paying attention to one of the biggest natural disasters to strike our nation in years.

What does Mr McCain have to say about it? Well, he appears torn on the issue.

McCain, in New Orleans today:

_____

"I want to assure the people of the Ninth Ward, the people of New Orleans, the people of this country: Never again, never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way it was handled. Never again."
_____

McCain, during the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when the government failed to respond and people were drowning:

McCain and Bush responding to the Katrina disater

Two dKos links where this was brought up today and inspired this post, in case the link above to the White House website happens to stop working:

Blue Intrigue and BarbinMD

J. Sydney "Let Them Eat Cake" McCain: this man wants to be president in mold of George W. Bush. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

by Jeff Huber

I have to say it again: If the Bush administration put a fraction of the effort it spends on spinning its wars into winning them, it wouldn’t need to spin them.

The current clash between Iraqi Shiite Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s security forces took root last year when Sadr told his forces to take an operational pause for resupply and recuperation. That reduced violence levels enough to allow U.S. commander David Petraeus to claim his surge strategy was working even though it didn’t accomplish its intended political objectives. One might have expected a supposedly smart guy like Petraeus to leave well enough alone, but no. George Bush’s “main man” had to poke his pistol into the hornet’s nest, raiding selected elements of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad’s Sadr City and Shiite population centers in southern Iraq.

The Sadrists warned for months that they would retaliate if the harassment didn’t stop. Petraeus must have been too busy escorting John McCain and Lindsey Graham on shopping sprees in Baghdad to listen, because he kept at it, using both U.S. forces and elements of the Badr organization, one of Sadr’s rival Shiite political groups whose members dominate Iraq’s security forces.

It was not too long after Dick Cheney’s surprise visit to Baghdad on March 17 that Maliki launched his offensive against the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and in the southern city of Basra. The big media were strangely silent about the implications of the timing of the two events. Sadr’s people responded to Maliki’s push with a rocket and mortar attack on the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Petraeus blamed the Mahdis’ retaliation on Iran, but said nothing about why he and the best-trained, best-equipped military in history were powerless to defend the Green Zone well over a year into his “successful” surge, and nobody in the press asked him about it.

“The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.” – Quadrennial Defense Review Report (February 6, 2006)

“No nation has ever profited from a long war.” – Sun Tzu (long ago)

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report noted that it was “imperative” for the Department of Defense to “hedge against uncertainty over the next 20 years.” The DoD will have to hedge a sight longer than 20 years if John McCain gets himself elected in November. McCain has “no objection” to American troops staying in Iraq for a hundred, a thousand, or heck, make it an even million years. He’s not likely to meet a lot of resistance to that policy from the Pentagon. Ten thousand centuries’ worth of job security doesn’t grow on trees.

Our old playmates Russia and China won’t object to McCain’s plans for a million-year replay of the Cold War either. The only concern they have on that score is McCain’s penchant for either changing his mind or forgetting what he said in the first place.

Here are the stories that got my attention this week.

1. Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, “U.S. Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan,” Washington Post, Thursday.
Wright and Warrick note that U.S. strikes on al Qaeda sites (i.e., “villages”) in Pakistan are taking place in accord with “a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan.” My question is, and has been, who in the U.S. is ordering these operations and under what authority? I’ve also asked this question about Somalia, where we’re also bombing selected al Qaeda villages.