Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Why we should fear a McCain presidency... or English bloke thinks McCain is Bad News so how come Jon Stewart doesn't?

Why we should fear a McCain presidency

McC has the potential to be a worse president than Bush.

I can't believe I just wrote that, but at least that's what this British bloke over at the financial times wrote yesterday. I quote:

The problem that Mr McCain poses stems from his ideology, his policies and above all his personality. His ideology, like that of his chief advisers, is neo-conservative. In the past, Mr McCain was considered to be an old-style conservative realist. Today, the role of the realists on his team is merely decorative.

Anatol Lieven is a British journalist and policy analist. He studies U.S. global strategy and the war on terrorism (war on terror is incorrect!) at the New America Foundation in Washington.

His writing reads moderate, he calls forth valid examples. Being inmersed in American MSM, we may think he's got a Cassandra complex, but then again, Cassandra's prophecies were true, were they not?

Lieven has studied so called American patriotism and he wrote a book about it, America Right or Wrong. He calls it an optimistic "civic creed" rooted in respect for America's institutions, individual freedoms and constitutional law. The American way, the American thesis.

But every thesis has an antithesis, a soft, dirty white underbelly. In this case it's "a jingoistic, militaristic, Jacksonian nationalism that sees America as the bearer of a messianic mission to lead a Manichean struggle against the savages."
"I’d institute a policy that I call ‘rogue state rollback’. I would arm, train, equip, both from without and from within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments and install free and democratically elected governments"

So said by McC in 2000. Walmart meets the CIA. Wasn't this precisely what they did in the the seventies and eighties with guys like Bin Laden? Gave them weapons and carte blanche to make war on nations the U.S. didn't feel like sharing their toys with, for example Russia?

So despite his Senatorial efforts in campaign finance, environmental law, budgetary overspending, the Abu Ghraib scandal, McCain has a potentially very dark side. He may not start wars for Chevron / Blackwater / Halliburton, but he can retaliate against a perceived slight.

And these Manifest Destiny types are dangerous anytime, anywhere, but I think there couldn't be a worse time for this type of Commander in Chief.

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