John McCain Doc

Discussion in 'West Mall' started by OUBubba, Jun 11, 2018.

  1. OUBubba

    OUBubba 5,000+ Posts

    I watched the documentary on McCain that has been running on HBO. Say what you will about his politics but that guy is an American hero.

    I didn't realize the fork in the road back in 2000 that saw him lose to W. in South Carolina. The irony of the South Carolina flag issue being part of what was going on along with his adopted baby from Bangledesh. In 19 years we're really come no where at all on race.

    I'd like to think that if we had a bipartisan-y guy at the helm when 9/11 happened we might not have created such a poop show in the middle east. Bush/Cheney played right into OBL's playbook. Our Clinton/Bush/Khardashian/Trump culture is going to be the death of us.
     
  2. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    The root of all problems...gerrymandering by both parties. This division of our population into "safe" Congressional seats at the National and State level have created a environment safe for the extremists because they no longer need to worry about tacking back to the middle for general elections.

    We need a new party focused on the "middle".
     
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  3. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    He is. Politics really has nothing to do with it. Ditto for Charles Rangel. He was a corrupt wingnut as a politician, but anybody who has read up on what the guy did in Korea has to acknowledge that he was a true war hero.

    We haven't gone no where. We've gone backwards. Race relations are better than they were 50 years ago but worse than they were 20 years ago.

    Nevertheless, the 2000 election was probably the one I was most involved in during the course of my political activism. I was a Republican delegate and was basically around Republican primary voters and activists constantly (including some in South Carolina). I never heard McCain's adopted daughter mentioned by anybody - literally not a single time.

    Barry, your memory is pretty shabby. First, Bush was considered very much of a "bipartisany" guy. It went back to his time as governor, when he worked with the Democratic Texas Legislature better than Ann Richards did. And of course, he frequently reached out to the other side as President - did so on education, the tax cuts, and yes, both wars. Those were the most significant parts of his agenda, and they were all bipartisan efforts that had significant Democratic support.

    Second, are you at all familiar with McCain's foreign policy record? He is a bigger neocon than Bush and pretty much supports war every chance he gets. Yes, he criticized the Iraq War at times - for not being aggressive enough and not sending enough troops. McCain is probably the biggest war advocate in politics today and one of the biggest in the last 50 years.

    All four of those figures represent very different cultures.
     
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  4. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    Trump has busted up the republican establishment. It’s time someone busted up the dysfunctional democrats too.
     
  5. theiioftx

    theiioftx Sponsor Deputy

    And McCain is a hero, but a terrible Senator.
     
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  6. militaryhorn

    militaryhorn Prediction Contest Manager

    Probably the best thing to do is draw up districts that try to split the demographics and leave it alone forever. This might create that middle candidate for all to vote on.
     
  7. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    Unfortunately you can't leave districts alone. Redistricting is required to keep the districts at least approximately the same size. If the states (legislatures or designated boards) don't redraw them, then the federal courts will.
     
  8. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    Let computers draw the boundaries. Sure, they have bias inherent in the coding but if can agree on the model that takes the more biased politicians out of the mix.
     
  9. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    Two problems. First, we'll never agree on the model. Second, even if we did, federal courts are going to screw with the model, and the Voting Rights Act is still going to encourage gerrymandering.
     
  10. OUBubba

    OUBubba 5,000+ Posts

    I wasn't there but the Rove crew pushed out the question "“Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

    W. was bipartisany. Rove was not. Dick Cheney was not. Rummy were not. Cheney drove the bus that we're still riding down the cliff with.

    That's a very good point that I considered. The difference was that, at least in my mind, McCain wanted to come back a little from the partisan divide. He was friends with Biden and, if elected in 2000, his willingness to work to compromise might have made a big difference. He really wanted to make Lieberman his VP. That's a great example. They didn't even think there was a way for it to happen. Instead, he chose numb nuts and he inadvertently injected the GOP with a small dose of whatever the hell we call it that gave rise to what we have now.

    This video says so much about that man. He could have played along and nodded and accepted her support. He needed every bit of support that he could get. W. was polling as low as any President in history (at that time) and he was, effectively, running as the third W. term. He didn't. He did a very honorable thing. http://time.com/4866404/john-mccain-barack-obama-arab-cancer/
     
  11. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    Of course, you assume Rove did this. You don't know that, and he denies it. Nevertheless, I wasn't referring to what the politicians did or cared about. I was referring to what Republican activists and primary voters did and cared about. I never heard one mention the alleged "love child." Keep in mind that the media made a drastically bigger deal out of that than it actually was (because it reinforces a political narrative they like). It was a push poll question and on some fliers. 98 percent of South Carolina voters probably never saw or heard about any of it, and keep in mind that McCain got his *** kicked in South Carolina. It's not as if it was a close call in which one poll question that virtually nobody heard or flyer that virtually nobody saw was going to be decisive.

    So what did the voters and activists I heard from say about McCain that they didn't like? That he bashed and distanced himself conservatives (whom he had previously eulogized and exploited back when he a was a political nobody). Well, doing that in a Republican primary is like walking into a Democratic primary and calling black voters "stupid, lazy n-bombs" and referring to gays as "perverted queers." It's bashing the people who will decide the outcome of your election. It's a stupid-*** thing to do.

    If that's true, then why did he do a bunch of "bipartisany" stuff? Why pass a tax cut that got 12 Democratic votes in the Senate? Why have Ted Kennedy and George Miller carry his education bill, which got huge numbers of Democratic votes? Why lead the Iraq War, for which more Democrats voted in favor than in opposition? Why pass Medicare Part D, which was a Democratic policy priority?

    What you (and a lot of others) miss is that Rove (and the rest of these guys) was partisan in elections for the same reason that guys like David Axelrod was partisan in elections. He doesn't like to lose, and he's not a big candy-***. He'll defend himself and the Bushes when they're under attack and fight back hard. However, he wasn't partisan when it came to policy advocacy and legislative strategy, because he wasn't an ideological conservative. He's a political hack who latched onto the Bush family (which at the time had a lot more in common with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP than it did with the Goldwater/Reagan wing) and did so to promote himself. He didn't give a crap about policy.

    I worked for two Texas state legislators before law school and during the height of Bush's governorship (1995 - 1999). They were staunch conservatives. Do you think they liked Karl Rove or didn't? They didn't. Why not? Because he generally advised Bush to associate with them as little as possible and not to care about their policy priorities. He wanted to associate with corporate, moderate Republicans and Democrats, because Rove already had his eye on the Presidency. This was before political strategists really understood how polarized the electorate was, so Rove wanted Bush to do things that would give him a broad appeal and make him look good even in states like California. He actually thought that was on the table in 2000. So you didn't hear about things like illegal immigration, substantial property tax reform, abortion (except on the most broadly favorable issues like parental notification), etc. You heard about education reform, children's health insurance, busting sex offenders, racial and ethnic tokenism, and other things that play well with soccer moms and moderates. Well, that was Rove's and Bush's whole rap as governor and as President. He governed as a center-Right guy who appealed to suburbanites.

    Barry, I honestly think you're a decent guy, but it's like you had no political knowledge before about 2006. McCain is a compromiser on some issues (especially those prized by ideological conservatives), but he's not a compromiser on military strategy and foreign policy. Biden wouldn't have backed him down from the Iraq War for two reasons. First, though Biden is one of the more knowledgeable people on foreign policy, a few senators were significantly more so. One of those was McCain (another was Dick Lugar), so it's not likely that he'd defer to him. Second, Joe Biden voted for the Iraq War with Bush in charge. Where the hell were you in 2003? Have Democrats bashed the War so much that they've made you forget that most of them supported it?

    Few have bashed Sarah Palin as much as I have (though she is hot for a politician), but she didn't inject anything into the GOP. She's too dumb and incompetent to do something like that. What drove her appeal was already there and on the rise. She is a symptom of something much bigger than she, not a cause. Having said that, I would have preferred Lieberman to be on the ticket. He was a very honorable guy, though that ticket still would have lost just as badly.

    He did do an honorable thing, and I prefer that kind of politics, but unfortunately it's also naive. One of the big reasons why we got Trump is that for years, Democrats and stupid political pundits called Republicans who were decent family men (like the Bushes and Mitt Romney) Nazis, racists, haters, evil, and other things that were at least as bad as what this woman said about Obama. Did Democrats and media figures correct those people like McCain did? No, they nodded along. How many Democrats corrected Kanye West when he said Bush didn't care about black people? None. In fact, they loved Kanye back then. Eventually people got sick of the double standards and ******** and chose the flailing hammer looking for a nail. It's a bad thing, but I understand why it happened.
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2018
  12. OUBubba

    OUBubba 5,000+ Posts

    I was fairly unpolitical prior to 2004-ish. I voted for W. twice. I think he handled Afghanistan correctly. He let his people walk us into Iraq. At the time I supported it along with most people. You weren't a patriot if you didn't. I also pointed out at the time that we wouldn't know for 20 years if it was the right call. I think we know now and the most troubling thing to me about the whole mess is that we've opened a land mass for Iran to have direct access to Syria and Lebannon. I think on the big whiteboard in the room, after looking at a map circa 2003, that would have been written on the "Cons".

    I'll defer to much of your responses. I will say that the alternate history with that guy over W. is interesting to ponder. Also, Palin (yes, hot...in the way that the golf cart girl is most always hot based on the relative supply/demand) was kind of the first person on the national scene to be anti facts, anti science, etc. It's a disease that is taking over. Sad.
     
  13. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    I supported the war too, but I never understood this. Do I think most who opposed the war were partisan hacks? Yes. However, there were plenty on both sides who were patriotic people with a true difference of opinion. Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, and Lincoln Chafee weren't unpatriotic for opposing the war. They were decent, principled guys with a different vision of American foreign policy.

    Yep, that's a definite downside, albeit in hindsight. Of course, to a great extent the war against ISIS and Assad is intended to prevent this.

    It's interesting to ponder. In all likelihood, the tax cuts would have been a little smaller but not dramatically. I think we still would have gone into Iraq but with a much bigger force. McCain would never have bought into the "light footprint" garbage. I think there's a very good chance he would have struck other nations as well, such as North Korea or Iran.

    She is uniquely dumb. I'll give you that. I think McCain went along for two reasons. First, he wanted to "make history" like the Democratic ticket did. Second, he wanted to motivate conservatives who had soured on him. A Lieberman pick would have made history, but being the first Jewish VP isn't a big game changer in that respect. Furthermore, Lieberman wasn't an overture to conservatives. As a good friend of mine once said, "Lieberman is a liberal who doesn't hate America." What he meant by that is that Lieberman is Left-leaning but isn't a big liberal culture warrior.
     

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