McCain Denies Validity of John Lewis's Prophetic Words: Does McCain Know What He is Doing?

From TURNING POINT--The URGENCY OF NOW:

If anything else was needed as evidence that McCain and Palin seem utterly incapable of recognizing the dangers of the passions they are stirring up through the fear-mongering message of their campaign, the last week of terrorist-baiting language from the McCain campaign--even to the point of provoking hate-filled questions and howls from their own audiences when McCain dared to correct a woman who called Obama an "Arab"-- should be the final straw.

And while the corporate media are mostly too timid to call McCain and Palin out on the amazingly Orwellian specter they are raising-- of Obama as an "enemy of the country" and threat to the nation--even as the media offers apologies for McCain, and allows McCain to get away with criticizing the words of John Lewis for "going too far" (ie, for saying what needed to be said, what the media has been too timid to say), the words of Rep. John Lewis posted this weekend have hit the prophetic nail precisely on the head by naming the dangers of the passions that the McCain-Palin campaign is unleashing with its fear-mongering, terrorist-baiting rhetoric:

And while McCain himself remains obstinately unwilling to recognize or accept responsibility for the potential violence his own campaign is threatening to stoke up among crazy fringe elements in this country--through its desperate terrorist- and fear-mongering approach to the last weeks of the campaign-- Even some Republicans have been criticizing the dangerous tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. But rather than recognize the danger and renounce any further descent into this hell, McCain has chosen instead to criticize the prophetic words of warning uttered by Rep. John Lewis this past weekend--

Instead of recognizing the truth of the warning uttered by John Lewis, McCain has chosen to accuse Lewis of uttering absurd and harmful accusations against McCain!

We can find nothing more evocative of the ways the unjust kings of biblical Israel would condemn the prophets in order to justify their own oppression of their people than this kind of response from McCain: When the prophet speaks truth to power, condemn the prophet in order to cover your own injustice:

SHAME ON YOU JOHN MCCAIN AND SARAH PALIN! HAVE YOU LOST ALL SENSE OF HUMAN DECENCY?

You wish to deny that there is any justice to John Lewis's comparison of your campaign's rhetoric and tone with that of George Wallace?! Perhaps you need to take some time to refamiliarize yourselves with the kinds of language and rhetoric that Wallace and other fear-mongering and terrorist-baiting politicians of the past used to stoke up the hatred of individuals and crowds that ended up bombing and lynching blacks in the South, even as Wallace and politicians like him always denied having any such "intent..." Turning the blind eye to injustice, with a wink and a nod, has always been the way of white racist power in this country, as in many others!

But John McCain and Sarah Palin, you have been called out and warned--not only by John Lewis, but by decent and honorable Republicans in your own camp, of the potentially violent consequences of the approach you have taken--
And while you may deny you have any "intent" to stir up such violence, and we may all pray that the terrorist-mongering rhetoric of your campaign does not provoke violence, there can be no excuse for the way you and Sarah Palin are so unapologetically using the specter of terrorism in association with Obama to stir up the worst fears and passions of your followers.

Are you both truly so devoid of honor and decency as to stoop to this lowliest and most despicable of political tactics, and to refuse to reign in people in your crowds who shout such violent slogans as "kill him," and "bomb him"?!!

Any decent human being, hearing words such as these coming from an audience to which he or she is speaking, would do nothing less than immediately RENOUNCE and REJECT such sentiments and expressions! Yet only silence seemed to greet these expressions when they were uttered by people in the groups to which you and and Palin were speaking! Are you so in love with power at any cost that you have lost all sense of human decency and honor?!

I beg of you to demonstrate that you have not lost all sense of decency, by turning away from the terrible course you have taken your campaign in the last week. And please restore some basic sense of human decency and honor to your campaign by renouncing all such terrorist- and fear-mongering language for the rest of the campaign--

It's transparently clear from your speeches and ads that your campaign's fundamental goal has been to create the impression that Obama is not like most Americans, but is other, and is therefore to be suspected of all kinds of dark and shadowy things, including terrorist associations, and selfish intentions..... You seem to have studied the fear-mongering devices of the worst anti-semitic campaigns in setting up this kind of suggestive attack on Obama as the "strange Other," who is not to be trusted. Would you actually deny that this is the intent of your desperate campaign strategy? If so, then do not simply deny this is your intent, but show us you mean it by eliminating these kinds of fear-mongering tactics and rhetoric from your campaign!

And if you admit this is the intent of your campaign's strategy, can you not see how despicable and devoid of honor such a strategy is? If you need to take this kind of despicable approach to win this nation's most noble office, do you really think you deserve to hold the nation's highest Office? Is not this kind of Orwellian logic of denial and distraction precisely what has driven the Bush administration into such depths of darkness and failure? And while you seek to distance yourself from the Bush administration, every step your campaign has taken along these lines has only worked to confirm how a McCain administration would be even more desperately and darkly Orwellian, devoid of truth and honor, than the Bush administration has been!!

Power at any cost, words that deny and twist the truth at every turn of phrase, to the point where policy loses all grounding in reality, and the result is--as current reality is demonstrating--that reality itself rebels and turns against the system of lies by threatening to bring the entire false deck of cards crashing to the ground!

And to all those who listen to the words of McCain and Palin and say nothing or simply smile and let them get away with their dispicable accusations and lies, we ask: When will YOU begin to respond, and to ask, and to DEMAND that McCain and Palin respond, by asking them repeatedly, insistently, and constantly, until they respond--

"John McCain and Sarah Palin, What will it take for you to recognize the dark passions you are stoking? Will it take a bomb, or a hate-filled shot fired from a gun, before you recognize the dangerous consequences of the fire you've been playing with by constantly suggesting, over and over again, that Obama is someone who associates with, or accepts, terrorists, in the face of Obama's firm and repeated denunciations of all terrorism and terrorists?

Sarah Palin, and John McCain, What will it take for YOU to recognize the horror of what you are suggesting by this terrible and disgusting game of false association, in a political and war context that over the last eight years has constantly evoked the image of terrorists being killed?!

What kind of Orwellian game do you think you are playing by denying any respsonsibility for stoking violence by your version of the "big lie" that seeks to associate Obama with terrorists and terrorism?!

Far from being in any way outrageous or unfair, the words of Rep. John Lewis precisely hit the mark of the dangerous and violent passions your campaign has been working to stir up, whether you "intend" it to do so or not? Your personal "Intention" here is irrelevant, even if we were to believe you, since it is the FACT of the potential IMPACT of your campaign's approach and the passions it evokes that we all have to deal with. But when will YOU accept responsibility and uphold the honor and responsibility of "Country First" that you say you admire by restraining the dogs of personal violence and hatred that your campaign has been directly working to unleash.....

We at Policybusters thank John Lewis for his prophetic words, and unreservedly second them, and hope that all responsible and humane media outlets will do the same, for as Lewis concludes, "The American people deserve better."

Indeed we do deserve better! And if you--McCain and Palin--want to be treated seriously as people worthy of leading the American people, you must first recognize that we all deserve better, and reject and renounce the fear-mongering approach to politics in favor of something more honorable and decent, during the last weeks of this campaign.

Instead of rejecting and condemning Rep. Lewis's words, you should be thanking him for offering them, in prophetic warning, as the just kings of Israel thanked the prophets of old that warned them of the dangers of transgressing the laws of justice to which all nations and political leaders must ultimately be held to account--

Rep. John Lewis Responds to Increasing Hostility of McCain-Palin Campaign 10/11/2008

"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing today reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

"During another period, in the not too distant past,
there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."

*****

So which approach will your campaign take, John McCain and Sarah Palin?

--the way of the unjust leaders of the past who condemned and sought to silence their prophets?

--or the way of all just leaders, who HONORED their prophets by CHANGING THEIR WAYS in accord with prophetic words?

This is the choice before YOU and the entire nation: Will you choose justice or injustice; Orwellian obfuscation, or the prophetic truth?

The choice is yours, and the consequences are those that YOU and all the American people will have to grapple with.....

[John McCain and Sarah Palin should watch Ted Koppel's one hour review of the history of lynching in the US being broadcast this week on the DISCOVERY channel]

Who Will Pay the Bills for Iraq War and Financial Bail-Out Under the McCain/Palin Plan?: A TIME FOR QUESTIONS

From Great Crisis of 2008:

This past week, as the financial system teetered on the verge of collapse because of the Republicans' anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax laissez-faire ideology, we were offered the spectacle of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin underlining the irrationality of this Republican ideology by arguing that raising taxes on the wealthy would be both unpatriotic and harmful to the nation.

According to the Republican logic of Palin and McCain, asking the wealthy to pay more taxes (as Joe Biden proposed) "is not patriotism," but is "about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse." (And McCain said the idea of asking the wealthy to pay more taxes was "dumb.")

It must be nice for those like Palin and McCain to think such things, as the Republicans continue to uphold a policy of protecting the wealthy from taxation while the middle class and poor are burdened with the explosive growth of the national bill for fighting unnecessary wars and providing gigantic trillion-dollar bail-outs to pay for the consequences of failed Republican economic policies.

In response to these revealing comments on taxation and patriotism by Palin and McCain, the corporate media needs to be shamed into asking serious questions about the Palin/McCain-Hoover vision of tax policy and government finance, since we now know these questions will be at the center of the next administration's attention:

If taxation of the wealthy is now unpatriotic, how will the Republicans propose to pay the tremendous costs of fighting their wars and bailing out the financial system that has been brought to the brink of collapse under their watch? How will the Republican ticket of Palin/McCain pay the gigantic bill for the bail-out of the entire financial system that their own failed economic and war policies have now forced us into, as a new phase of the Republican "shock doctrine" is applied to the national economy?

And we would also like to ask the corporate media when they will begin to uphold their own patriotic duty by asking the Palin/McCain Republican ticket some fundamental questions about patriotism, taxation, and basic economics (since Palin has raised this issue for discussion, and the financial health of even the corporate media depends on the maintenance of an ordered national financial system):

--If taxation of the wealthy is now unpatriotic, how do the Republicans propose to pay for their 3 trillion-dollar war in Iraq? (Answer: continue to charge the cost to the Chinese-financed national credit card for the next generation to pay back!)

--If taxation is unpatriotic, is paying for the war in Iraq also unpatriotic? If it's unpatriotic for the wealthy to pay more taxes, is it not even more unpatriotic to be placing ever greater burdens of taxation on the next generation, and on the middle and lower classes?

Republicans like Palin and McCain would like to continue to avoid any responsibility for answering questions about how they expect the nation to pay the gigantic debt-load of the failed policies the Republicans have imposed on our country. (This involves, after all, some "looking backwards," which Palin and McCain would like to avoid at all costs, for obvious reasons.) And unfortunately the corporate media often seems completely willing to allow them to continue to avoid answering questions that require some "looking backwards" in order to understand how their past beliefs and decisions would influence future policies.

According to the logic of Palin/McCain, if it is unpatriotic to ask the wealthy to pay more taxes, guess who will end up paying these gigantic expenses under another Republican administration--even as the corporate CEOs are allowed to continue to walk away with million dollar salaries for running our financial system and country into the ground!

Palin/McCain would love to continue to get away with calling taxation of the wealthy unpatriotic, even while they continue to ignore the gigantic tsunami of expenses that Republican policies have imposed on the American people.

Republicans like McCain and Palin would like to separate themselves from the Bush legacy by claiming they will now come to the rescue of the middle class they have helped to destroy, even while they would also love to continue to be seen as the ones who will protect the wealthy while the middle class and poor are burdened with the ever-growing cost of paying for the failed Republican policies of the past.

Actually, the Republicans would like to be able to get away with having no one pay for the disastrous economic policies of the past eight years, which was also Hoover's strategy after the Crash of 1929--a do-nothing strategy that drove an economy in crisis into a great economic depression:

As John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his book The Great Crash 1929,

"In November of 1929, Mr. Hoover announced a cut in taxes ... [while he] asked business firms to keep up their capital investment and to maintain wages ... [both measures that] were largely without effect....

And, like McCain in the first debate, the Hoover policy insisted that there should be a major cut in government expenditures, to go along with the tax cuts....

As Galbraith summarizes, this combined commitment to tax cuts and decreasing government expenditures amounted to a fundamental rejection of the use of fiscal policy, and thus

"amounted precisely to a rejection of all affirmative government economic policy," and a disavowal of "all the available steps to check deflation and depression."

And it was this "triumph of dogma over thought" that turned the economic crisis of 1929-30 into the decade-long great depression of the 1930s (Galbraith, pp. 182-186).

In October 2008 the American nation faces a clear choice between a Democratic candidate who at least acknowledges and understands that the policies of the past have failed, and that we need a fundamentally new approach to things (even if he cannot yet be clear about what that approach will be (even Roosevelt was not clear about what he would do until AFTER he took office in 1933), and a Republican candidate who, up until a week or so ago, was still declaring--like the Bush/Hoover administrations--that the "fundamentals of the US economy were sound," and who would solve this crisis by applying the depression-creating policies of the Hoover administration: tax cuts and decreases in government spending.

And of course the Republicans rely on the silence of the corporate media and the stupidity of half of the American public to get them into office again in the face of their continuing commitment to burdening the middle class with the bills of failed policies favoring the superwealthy.

Why are the corporate media not asking the most fundamental questions about failed Republican economic policy? These media corporations (even FOX News) should recognize that the failure of the US and global financial system will also bring about the bankruptcy of much of the corporate media structure (while their CEOs walk away with whatever remains)??!!

It is precisely the corporate media's silence and lack of critical attention to the fundamentally irrational and unsustainable approach of Republicans to taxation, regulation, and economic policy that has allowed the country to fall into this mess, and even now--as things fall apart-- the corporate media continues to ignore the many ways the Palin/McCain team would simply like to continue this same absurd economy-killing set of Hooverian policies toward national finance and taxation!

When will the corporate media begin to challenge the way Republican policy is fundamentally undermining the future of this country and of their own corporate jobs and future?!--along with the ability of the vast majority of the people of this country to live decent lives?!! When will the media begin to challenge directly the fundamental lack of patriotism in Republican policies that continue to destroy the foundations that support national finance and economy?

What is more unpatriotic than a national media that continues to pass over the ways Republican policy has destroyed our national economy during the last eight years?

And so we need to challenge and shame the corporate media into asking these critical questions by challenging those in the corporate media: If you care at all about patriotism, why aren't you asking these kinds of critical questions of the Republicans, to make clear to the American public how utterly absurd is so much of what the McCain/Palin ticket is offering to the American public?!! If Palin/McCain think that taxing the wealthy is unpatriotic even in the face of this gigantic meltdown, what principles will guide another Republican administration when they are elected?!!

At a time when the entire economy of the nation and the globe is teetering on the edge of the abyss, the U.S. media continues to be facile and stupid in the face of the destructive irrationality of ideas and policy that the Republican candidates, and often also the Democratic party (since Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and now apparently an Obama advisor, is almost just as bad as the Republicans!) continue to dish out to us.

ENOUGH!!! When will the individual citizens and taxpayers who are part of the corporate media rise up against the destructive stupidity of their bosses and the policies that have been destroying our country? When will all members of the media, across the nation, get mad enough at what the Republicans are proposing to continue to do to our country, and begin to raise these fundamental questions in public, for all to hear??!!

The McCain/Palin ticket survives only because they think they can continue to get away with dishing out bullshit to the American people. When will the corporate media reveal the absurd emptiness of the Republican campaign as the bullshit it really is-- protecting the wealthiest while piling the expensive burden on generations to come of the middle class, until all but a small corporate and government elite in this country will be reduced to poverty (as in the last days of the Soviet Union)?

Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden made a clear, straight-forward and rational statement about the responsibility of ALL American citizens, including the wealthy, to take on a fair part of the burden of paying for the privilege of being a citizen of this country. Biden was making the point that the wealthy have not been asked by the Republicans or the Democrats to pay their fair share of the costs of war and failed economic policies that benefited the wealthy. (And intelligent and patriotic wealthy people like Warren Buffett would agree with Biden's point, and would favor higher rates of taxation for the wealthy.)

Paying taxes is the way we all support our country and our government. If this is unpatriotic, what does patriotism mean? And this is why we all have a stake in using our powers of citizenship to determine the character and quality of our government, since when it fails, we all end up paying the costs of this failure.

So it's high time for all people, and especially those in the corporate media, to ask the Republican candidates: if they think raising taxes on the wealthy is unpatriotic, how do they propose to pay the exploding costs of the gigantic failures of war and financial policy that their eight years of rule have imposed on the people of this country!!!?

When will the so-called "fourth estate" of the media begin to uphold its responsibility and patriotic duty by asking these basic questions of those who would have us elect them to continue to run the country into the ground by continuing the same irrational policies that have guided the Bush administration?!

If the corporate media cannot be responsible for patriotic reasons, they might at least realize they need to ask these questions for the sake of their own survival. For if there is a great crash of 2008 or 2009 (the crash of 1929 did not occur until several months after Republican Hoover took over from Republican Coolidge, on the promise of "change" that never came), employees of the corporate media will suffer right along with the rest of us.