John McCain: Gambling With Your Future
John McCain is once again rolling the dice for a high-stakes win. Having demonstrated his capacity for self-contradiction at any turn and suffering in the polls as a result of his past positions and current confusion with the state of our economy, he’s ditching the issues in favor of a risky and flawed attempt to turn the conversation back to culture wars and personal attacks (something he swore he’d never do, of course, but what else is new?)
In the meantime, there are two issues which McCain cannot address adequately. The first is the economy, which he neither understands nor supports. I encourage you to watch the video below to see how McCain, in his own words, falters when he first tries to argue for the value of deregulated financial markets and then, when confronted with the product of those same unregulated markets, turns it around and says he supports regulations to protect citizens.
Here’s reality. Reality is that under a McCain/Palin presidency, any regulatory authority would largely be ignored anyway. McCain has deep ties to Freddie Mac, including large monthly payments to his campaign manager for his lobbying efforts on behalf of Freddie Mac through last month,
This is not new. In the 80’s McCain was one of the Keating Five, the man in the middle of the last financial/real estate scandal of our time — the Savings and Loan meltdown. And then, just as now, it was McCain’s agreement to push for little to no regulation of Savings and Loans that brought down many property owners and small community Savings and Loan Associations.
McCain also doesn’t understand health care and the current issues facing this country in that regard. His plan proposes that we all take a gamble with our health and our homes, a topic I will cover in a separate post.
Watch the video and ask yourself how willing you are to allow John McCain to gamble with what little you have left. On a personal note, I am fairly certain that my father was a compulsive gambler in his later years. When he died in August, he had next to nothing and was dependent upon others for everything. Is that the future we see for our country?
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This post by Hugh Hewitt, who claims McCain will close and win:
Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time.
A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed.
The world’s financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times.
The cost of energy has soared and will continue to climb. The entitlement trap has only grown worse in the three years since George Bush asked the Democrats to work with him on Social Security and they said no. The corrupt, self-dealing culture of the Beltway has poisoned the decision-making of many bureaucracies and in ways only the burdened know, and the credibility of the big media is shattered even as their audiences shrink and many of their news rooms come close to shuttering.
So, despite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years.
I feel the need to remind Hewitt that John McCain is the gambler, not Barack Obama. He gambled with Sarah Palin, he gambled with his grandstand non-play of the week last week when he said he was suspending (but not really) his campaign, and he wants to gamble with the lives of our sons and daughters in a zero-sum foreign policy game.
John McCain’s campaign has been an erratic array of ups and downs, mostly based on high-stakes grandstand plays like the Palin gambit. Those plays have resulted in lagging polls and lackluster response to his policies, his presence, and his candidacy.
The bottom line is that we are where we are because we elected Bush and handed him a firm majority in the Congress through 2006. Those chickens are coming home to roost, and now is no time to gamble what future we have on the shoulders of a man who chose a completely unqualified neocon as his running-mate. As a gamble for the women’s vote, I might add.
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