John McCain's No Holds Barred Book

While I have often disagreed with his positions, I have always had respect for the man and still wish that he, rather than George W. Bush, had been the 2000 Republican presidential nominee. So much tragedy and needless deaths might have been avoided in Iraq and elsewhere.  And compared to the current occupant of the White House - who I never give the title of "president" - McCain has always tried to maintain a level of moral decency and "American values" if you will.  Now, leaving Congress and with likely not much time left on this side of life, McCain's new book, Restless Wave, seems written with a view of how McCain will be viewed by history and he confronts not only some of his own biggest mistakes but also the moral cesspool the Republican Party has become as best symbolized by Der  Trumpenführer.  A review of the book in the Washington Post gives a brief summary of points in the book.  Here are highlights: 

Unlike the previous six books McCain and Salter have composed together, this one wasn’t written for voters. It was written for history. In an era of all-caps tweets and angry denunciations of supposed “witch hunts,” the Arizona Republican’s final book, published Tuesday, casts him as a profile in courage. McCain highlights his advocacy for the Iraq troop “surge” when it was toxically unpopular in 2007 and his decisive vote against repealing Obamacare in 2017. He finally tells his side of his 2008 Sarah Palin partnership. With what time he has left, the “maverick” — an appellation he has worn throughout his career, at some times more comfortably than at others — is going to put country first and tell the truth.

He expresses regret that he did not pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate 10 years ago. His best friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), “enthusiastically endorsed the idea” of bringing their colleague, who had been the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, onto “a national unity ticket.” But everyone else in McCain’s circle told him it would fatally divide the GOP.

McCain attributes the insufficient vetting of Palin, 44 and two years into her first term as Alaska’s governor, to his sulking about not being able to tap Lieberman. Taking the blame for her stumbles, he writes, “She was a skilled amateur performer asked to appear on Broadway twice a day.” I wish he had grappled more fully with the mayhem Palin’s selection created inside the GOP. It laid the groundwork for the ascent of Donald Trump a few years later.

Trump emerges as a bete noire in the book. When McCain after the 2016 elections received a copy of the “dossier,” detailing unverified allegations about the president compiled by an opposition researcher, he immediately turned it over to James Comey so the FBI could explore whether Trump was compromised by the Russians. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,” writes McCain.

But he also portrays [Trump] the president as an outgrowth of tectonic shifts in a party for which, just 10 years ago, he was the standard-bearer. Now he sometimes struggles to recognize it. “Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing to just not caring about it,” he frets. “And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States.”

McCain repeatedly criticizes conservative “talk radio blowhards.” He calls the House Freedom Caucus “the say-no-to-everything crowd.” He says nativists “need to be confronted, not ignored or winked at or quietly dismissed as kooks.” He mocks his 2016 primary challenger, Kelli Ward, for attacking him as “a champion of compromise.” “You’re damn right,” he responds. Former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are “self-proclaimed nationalist radicals.” “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub,” he writes.

All politicians self-mythologize. This book is an effort to codify McCain’s maverick brand. He puts extra emphasis on his work across the aisle, including a 38-page chapter about working with Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion from Massachusetts, on health care and immigration. He has kind words for other leading Democrats, too, including Hillary Clinton.

McCain says he’s a proud Reagan Republican. “Not a Tea Party Republican,” he writes. “Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican. Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican. Not, as I am often dismissed by self-declared ‘real’ conservatives, a RINO, Republican in Name Only.”

McCain’s maverick-iness has ebbed and flowed. He’s mostly been a reliable party-line vote since getting elected to Congress in 1982, but he’s broken with Republicans on a few key issues. He earned the enmity of appropriators in both parties by battling earmarks before that was in vogue, and he clashed with his own party leaders by agitating for campaign finance reform. 

He admits to some big mistakes: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong,” McCain writes. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

But the senator’s critique of [Trump] the current president is more sustained than any other. “For all our disagreements I never doubted President Obama shared the seventy-five-year bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity,” he writes. “I’m not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions.” . . . . “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” McCain writes. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

McCain does not want to be defined by opposition to Trump, . . . . He would, however, like to be remembered for his long crusade against torture. He devotes a meaty chapter to the topic and recounts apologizing personally to someone who suffered at the hands of his American captors while in Libya, over the objection of the CIA station chief. 

McCain wants to hold that moral high ground, and he’s peeved by any suggestion that he’s not worthy of claiming it. The senator tried to run an honorable campaign in 2008. He forbade his staff from mentioning Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor. In many ways, this gesture seems much more impressive now — after Trump spent years insisting that Obama was born in Kenya and demanding to see his birth certificate.

“I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last 10 years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door to the era of the American-led world order,” McCain writes. “I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded.”

McCain is one of the few remnants of the GOP I was proud to be a part of.  Sadly, those days appear to be gone forever as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into a complete moral cesspool.  From my own experience in the GOP, it is no surprise that the Christofascist have lead the way towards the GOP's moral bankruptcy. 

Moderate Republicans are an Endangered Species - If Not Extinct

The extremism of the Republican Party is growing even as more Americans describe themselves as socially liberal.  How can this be some might ask?  Three words answer the question: Christofascists, Tea and Party.  Of course, the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd are largely interchangeable with some 85% of Tea Party loons saying they are "conservative Christians."  These individuals have infected the GOP base like a virus and have pushed the GOP into crazy land as moderates have either been driven out or have chosen to flee the insanity.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing GOP extremism and the fact that it is Democrats, not Republicans who are the moderates.  Here are excerpts:

Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, "Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition."

The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on voting developed by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats.
Here's another way of looking at it: How many moderates are in each party? Here's another interesting chart from the Poole-Rosenthal data, showing the number of House members in each party who are not centrists -- that is, whose ideological scores put them on the more extreme ends of the partisan scale.

[N]early 90 percent of Republican House members are not politically moderate. By contrast, 90 percent of Democratic members are moderates. It's quite difficult to square a chart like this with a claim that Democrats are abandoning the center faster than Republicans. As the chart shows, there are plenty of centrist Democrats left in the House -- but hardly any centrist Republicans.

The Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins are a cancer on the GOP and a cancer on society.  Oh, and I saw a great Virginia Tea Party license plate yesterday.  It said "Dum Dum", with the coiled Gadsden flag snake separating the words.  Had I not been on the Interstate in traffic, I would have taken a photo.  It sums up the status of the GOP all too well.

Is the Chamber of Commerce Trying to Kill the Frankenstein Monster It Created?

I often condemn the GOP establishment for allowing the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd to infiltrate and then largely take over the base of the Republican Party.  As these insane individuals moved in like a metastasizing cancer, sane and rational people - at least those willing to open their eyes to reality - fled the party in shock and disgust that embracing ignorance, open racism and religious fanaticism were now pillars of the GOP agenda.  In more recent years one of the groups that helped fuel this take over of the GOP by outright crazy people and extremist was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  As a piece in the New York Times reports, the Chamber seems to belatedly realized that it helped create a monster that will be difficult to kill.  As the piece notes, better late than never, perhaps.  Here are highlights:

As Edward Luce noted this week in The Financial Times, this Congress won’t countenance any of the things that business — and the chamber — care about. Immigration reform is dead. Congress won’t raise the gas tax to fund the Highway Trust Fund. Revamping the corporate tax rate can’t even get a hearing. And on, and on. 

It is possible that the chamber didn’t quite realize what it was getting when it helped elect those Tea Party freshmen in 2010 — few people did until they began to flex their muscles. But it is equally possible that it didn’t care.  (“The chamber is not an arm of either party and is not ‘aligned’ with either party,” a spokesman told me in an email.)

In the 16 years he has run the Chamber of Commerce, Donohue has turned it into a potent force, in no small part by making it more partisan. But by being so blindly pro-Republican, the chamber “unleashed a Frankenstein that has spun out of control,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, which monitors the Chamber of Commerce. That became most clear during the debt ceiling and deficit fights of the last few years — when the Tea Party Republicans seemed so determined to shrink government that they were even willing to default on the government’s debt. The chamber reacted in horror.

I’m told that after the 2012 election, at yet another Committee of 100 gathering, a former Democratic congressman, Dave McCurdy, who now runs the American Gas Association, stood up and criticized Donohue for his “all-in” Republican strategy. He told Donohue that everybody in the room was pro-business, but they weren’t all Republicans, and that if the chamber really wanted to be effective again, it needed to take on the Tea Party and the right wing of the Republican Party in favor of more moderate candidates of both parties.

As the 2014 midterms near, that seems to be the approach the Chamber of Commerce is taking. It has gotten involved in Republican primaries, siding with the more moderate Republican in a race — though perhaps it is more accurate to say the less radical Republican. At the most recent Committee of 100 meeting, Rob Engstrom, the chamber’s national political director, told the group that the chamber planned to support Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who is running for re-election to the Senate.

Better late than never.

The Real Problem with the GOP: Aging, White Radicals

In the wake of Mitt Romney's loss in 2012, supposedly the Republican Party did a post mortem and concluded that certain things needed to be done to enhance the party's attractiveness to younger voters and those outside of the party's typical base: angry white, far right Christian males.  Over a year later, little or nothing has changed in the GOP and more tellingly, the party elected officials continue to prostitute themselves to the same narrow demographic which is literally dying off with each passing year.  Can the GOP somehow reinvent itself?  As I have indicated before, my vote is a resounding "No!"  At least not until more crushing electoral defeats are handed to the GOP.  A piece in Salon looks at this apparent inability to change - some might even might call it a death wish.  Here are highlights:

The Republican Party’s total failure to make even cosmetic changes to its image and policy agenda last year has at this point become the kind of cliché-cum-running joke that often attaches itself to accepted truisms in American politics.

But the observation of these symptoms is less crucial than the diagnosis. Why are Republicans so stuck?

When it became clear about a year ago that Republican leaders would have a much harder time advancing immigration reform than they realized — that GOP activists and conservatives were livid about the idea that Republicans were going to help illegal immigrants gain citizenship — it started to look like the party had an insoluble problem on its hands.
For a long time now, people have argued that the solution to the GOP’s problems will resemble the slow, painful, but steady moderation process Democrats went through in the 1980s and through the Clinton presidency.

If the theory were correct, you’d think repeated election defeats would have set the process in motion already. Maybe a third defeat, in 2016, will catalyze a more rapid transition. But over time, I think the important differences between the Democrats’ old challenge and the challenge Republicans now face have started to show.

Democrats didn’t have an easy go of it, exactly, but they were able to modify their positions across a range of issues without, for instance, creating a left-wing-primary perpetual motion machine, or giving rise to a permanent population of resentful protest voters. Maybe Republicans can do the same. But the 2013 experience suggests they are so in hock to aging, white, conservative reactionaries that taking on new debts with minorities, gay people, single women and so on entails the risk of defaulting on the old ones.

Another way of saying this is that Republicans have depleted most of their crossover potential. 

It’s manifest in the GOP establishment’s pusillanimous relationship with conservatives. They didn’t cry “Hallelujah” when “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson preached a bigoted sermon about gay people and the Jim Crow South, but they also notably didn’t treat his remarks as an opportunity to instigate a Sister Souljah-style confrontation with the right. To the contrary, they rallied to Robertson’s defense and to a defense of conservative revanchism in general.  . . . . they haven’t cut the Gordian knot by admitting that these people’s motivating beliefs have failed or been rejected by the public. 

Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Republican Party will only change when people begin to leave the party en mass and the party experiences repeated electoral defeats.  Given the Christofascist/Tea Party take over of the GOP grassroots, the GOP is incapable of being reformed from inside any time in the near future.  Hence, the best way to speed reform is to do everything possible to defeat GOP candidates.  

 

Former GOProud Founder Slams Republican Party's "Cultural Disease"

As many readers know, I was once, many years ago now at this point, an active Republican serving on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP for over eight years.   That's where I got to know the now indicted Bob McDonnell.  But when the Christofascists takeover of the Republican Party of Virginia in earnest, I resigned from the GOP in disgust over the ongoing fusion of far right Christian religious belief with the GOP platform and, worse yet, reforming the civil laws to enforce Christofascist goals.  Many gays in the GOP did not figure out the full toxicity of the GOP or the futility of trying to "reform the party from the inside" as quickly as I did.  A case in point is Jimmy LaSalvia, a co-founder of GOProud.  In an interview with Michelangelo Signorile, LaSalvia lets loose on the religious extremist swamp fever that grips the GOP.  I wish more Republicans - both gay and straight - would open their eyes and walk away from the GOP which deserves to wither and die.  Here are highlights from the interview:

In a fiery interview, the co-founder of the conservative gay group GOProud, which made headlines in recent years after it was banned from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), lashed out at the GOP days after announcing he's left the Republican Party, having registered as an Independent.

Jimmy LaSalvia said that among the reasons why he fled the party was that the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Preibus told him that he was afraid of getting “a phone call from Tony Perkins [of the Family Research Council]” if the party spoke out against anti-gay rhetoric. LaSalvia charged Preibus, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and other Republican leaders with lacking “the backbone to say to the forces of intolerance, ‘You either change or you can’t come with us on this journey.'”

LaSalvia said the GOP suffers from “a cultural disease that can’t be fixed,” and charged that the recent crop of GOP potential presidential contenders, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), refuse to confront the problem. He also spoke out on the recent controversy over attempts at outing GOP Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL.), saying if Schock is gay, he has "lied about it repeatedly."  

“Intellectually, they know that the party has to change and modernize,” LaSalvia said in an interview with me on Friday on SiriusXM Progress. “It’s kind of like the drug addict who knows they have a problem, who knows the drug is not good for them, but can’t [get off the drug].”

“I did say I was embarrassed to be a Republican,” he said. “The 2012 election is when I really came to the realization that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how fast support grew, there were still the anti-gay forces in the Republican Party. While I thought they would dissolve over time, the truth is they’re tolerated. They tolerate anti-gay people and that shows a cultural disconnect and they’re so out of touch that I think you can’t fix it.”

“They cannot win the presidency with the cultural problem they have,” he said. "The problem all of those people have is that they’re not willing to stand up and say, 'The forces of intolerance in our party are wrong.' Chris Christie has the best ability to connect with people and people trust him, but he does what everyone else does and says,’Well that’s not me.’ And honestly, if you’re going to win elections, that’s not enough. You have to say, ‘Those people are wrong,’ because bigotry is something different from everything else. If you have people demonizing gay people, you have to say,’That’s wrong,’ because everyone in American knows that’s wrong. If you can’t acknowledge that, if you only say, “That’s not me, they don’t speak for me,’ that’s not enough. Because their bigotry will stain you.”

LaSalvia also addressed the recent controversy over the alleged outing of Congressman Schock (R-IL), who has voted with, and supported the positions of, anti-gay conservatives for the past several years.

"I have no idea if Aaron Schock is gay or not," he said. "And frankly, I think he's wrong on all those issues. And he's free to be wrong. The problem that Aaron is going to have if in fact he turns out to be gay, is that he's lied about it repeatedly. "