The Left Anchor

Well, here we go, eh?  The New York Times jumped to be first in what I imagine will be a long-term media relationship with up-and-comer John McCain.  After their squabbles last year, when the media declared him dead, it must feel good to come home again.  After all, make-up sex is the best sex there is.

In what may be an all-time speed record from relevant analysis to complete irrationality, the Times starts out with these two paragraphs in quick succession:

We have strong disagreements with all the Republicans running for
president. The leading candidates have no plan for getting American
troops out of Iraq. They are too wedded to discredited economic
theories and unwilling even now to break with the legacy of President
Bush. We disagree with them strongly on what makes a good Supreme Court
justice.

Still, there is a choice to
be made, and it is an easy one. Senator John McCain of Arizona is the
only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing
from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe.

Okay, so by the own admission of the Times — an admission they felt important enough to lead off the editorial with — they clearly state that all the leading candidates will carry on Bush’s egregiously unpopular war, follow the same economic policies which produced our current crisis, and continue the conservative assault on the Supreme Court.

And yet, somehow McCain won’t be governing from the same small, angry fringe as George W. Bush.  Exactly what bi-partisan compromises McCain will spearhead as president is less than clear.  The first paragraph takes Iraq, the economy, and the Supreme Court off the table, which is basically like taking the turkey off the table at Thanksgiving, and then raving about the availability of cranberry sauce.

So, if the Times take foreign policy, the economy and the Court off the table in the space of a mere fifty-seven words (and I even counted "a" as a word, which wouldn’t even be playable in a game of Scrabble), what has McCain himself taken off the table?  It seems he’s had plenty of time and space to tell his side of the story.  If the Times can take three of the top issues out in less than sixty words, I can only imagine how many more issues McCain can take out with the thousands upon thousands of words he’s spoken on the campaign trail.  Let’s see, here’s McCain on the environment.

Ronald Reagan was an environmentalist.

I believe that America did the right thing by not joining the Kyoto treaty.

Both statements are visible here on John McCain’s site here.  I urge you to watch the video, because I’m taking the second statement out of context.  But here’s why:  while if you watch that video, McCain’s rhetoric on the environment is more sane than most conservatives, whether his leadership on the issue will be is quite doubtful.  Though he’s rated "highly" by the League of Conservation Voters, it should be noted that his high rating is a miserable 26 on a scale of 100.  The worst Democratic candidate on the issue, John Edwards, still clocks in at 59, more than double McCain.  McCain’s rating is only "high" among Republican presidential contenders.  And the League of Conservations voters have no scores for Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani, as they’ve not registered any relevant votes on the environment.  Fred Thompson comes in at a pathetic 12 on the scale, while Ron Paul leads it with a whopping score of 30.  Being ahead of the pack of Republicans on the environment is hardly a ringing endorsement of one’s environmental record.

And calling Reagan an environmentalist is either a colossally stupid statement, or a colossally obvious pander.  Reagan was okay on the environment as governor of California, but then, Mitt Romney was okay on privacy issues as governor of Massachusetts — it’s easy to be okay, when your positions are dictated to you by those running the state.  And just as Romney has abandoned his sensible policies in his bid for the presidency, so too did Reagan abdicate any place he might have had among environmentalist during his tenure in the White House.  From a piece by Amanda Griscom:

The list of rollbacks attempted by [the Reagan administration were] as sweeping
as those of the current administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean
Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards "on everything
from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took
Congress two years to defeat," according to Clapp [president of the National Environmental Trust]. Moves to weaken the
Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when
Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto
overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so
hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

So, whatever few accomplishments (and I’m not sure there were any) achieved by Reagan on protecting the environment, were basically shoved down his throat by a Congress controlled by Democrats and moderate Republicans (who are nearly an extinct species today).  And his director of Super-fund, the agency set up to deal with environmental disasters caused by pollution, was so corrupt that she actually went to jail for six months on perjury charges.

Now, for the second point regarding McCain’s statement.  In the above video, McCain does actually advance some scenario wherein the U.S. would join Kyoto (and defends the failure of the U.S. to do so yet):  McCain claims that he’d support Kyoto if China and India would join.  And yes, we do need China and India to join a global agreement to halt the flow of greenhouse gases, but to hold-out support for Kyoto until they come to the table is like being on sinking ship and saying you won’t pail out the water until those other assholes do.  Joining the Kyoto treaty would compel the U.S. to rapidly advance it’s eco-friendly technology.  And as that is likely to be the technology of the future, I’d think it best to place the U.S. in the Kyoto camp, and get this ball really rolling.  If China and India want to continue to build their economies on a limited resource, and against the wishes of the rest of the world, well, then, so be it.  They’ll come to the table sooner rather than later.  With oil topping $100 a barrel, nobody has any choice.  And we won’t score any victories following them down that rabbit hole; we’ll just eliminate our ability to get a good head start.

So, McCain’s record on the environment, and the possibilities of progress in a McCain administration are shaky at best.  He can talk a good game, but his votes don’t really match the rhetoric, and his Reagan idolization doesn’t reflect too well on him either.  So, what else might be on that table?  Let’s see McCain on health care (again, from his own site):

[McCain seeks to] reform the tax code to eliminate the bias toward
employer-sponsored health insurance, and provide all individuals with a
$2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for families) to increase incentives for
insurance coverage. Individuals owning innovative multi-year policies that cost less than the full credit can deposit remainder in expanded health savings accounts.

Okay.  Not horrible, but his plans to tamp down the costs that cause the rapid increase in health care costs are pretty murky at best.  They appear to have something to do with promoting more competition, but specific proposals don’t seem to be there, except that people should be allowed to buy health care at a nation-wide, rather than state based system.  He’s also got some notions about allowing the re-importation of drugs.  What’s missing is any indication that he intends to pay for any of this, or for that matter has any idea how much it will cost.  Needless to say, the Democrats have very concrete notions of how much their programs will cost and how they will fund them (ending ridiculous tax cuts for people making more than a quarter of a million dollars a year).  I figure if you don’t have some idea what your plan costs, then you really haven’t thought about it all that much.

At any rate, granting that McCain has some form of a health care plank out there, I’d say the biggest flaw in it is the fact that it falls about $7,000 dollars short of what the average family actually pays.  Needless to say, employers make up the difference much of the time.  But then, I’m not so sure that employers wish to keep that system up.  Health care costs are tanking GM profit margins.  Beyond that, if you work a job which doesn’t provide health benefits (which is not so uncommon), then you’re basically screwed.  I live in a family where neither parents nor any of the children qualify or can afford health care.  When I meet someone who can, I consider them to be "wealthy."  The gap between incomes may not be that much, but the gap between one’s ability to pay verses the other’s inability to pay is enormous, and it’s based on whether their employer offers health care benefits.  God forbid you’re self-employed, as my father is, who runs his own business.

Seeing that McCain is at best weak on the environment and murky on the details of his "health care plan," whose costs and source of revenue are questionable, and which regardless is unable to assist those who do not already receive health care via their employer, let us now return to the Times piece to see what other McCain myths are still rearing their ugly head.  Concerning integrity:

We have shuddered at Mr. McCain’s occasional, tactical pander to the
right because he has demonstrated that he has the character to stand on
principle.

So, here, McCain has integrity even though he’s pandered to the right
in ways that have made the editors of the New York Times shudder.
Well, let’s see how much integrity McCain has displayed on principle, and whether these were tactical "panders":

Here’s McCain in 2000:

The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They
are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who
practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our
country… Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer
reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis
Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell
on the right.

And here’s McCain today:

I believe that the “Christian Right” has a major role to play in the
Republican Party. One reason is because they’re so active and their
followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our
party.

Yep, just good ol’ straight-talkin’ John McCain.  He’ll change from an Episcopalian into a Baptist to win South Carolina, but still — somehow — the editors at the New York Times know that he’s really not who he says he is.  He’s more principled than the John McCain we’re seeing now.  There’s much space between his views and those of the nation’s or the Democratic parties, but if only we could just come to his terms on Iraq, the environment, health care, economic policy, and the divisions between the Catholic and Protestant movements, we’d see that he’s really a good fellow ready to cross the aisle to move this country forward.

Yeah, and if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’. Did it not occur to the Times they need not necessarily nominate anyone from the Republican party?  Or that doing so, especially in such a fawning fashion as this piece does, grants legitimacy to ideas which have been proven demonstrably false?