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This Is What Democracy Looks Like
www.NationalView.org's Note From a Madman
June 12, 2008
SCRUTINY Vs. scrutiny
The very first headline on The New York Times website today was, "Obama Aide
Quits Under Fire for His Business Ties". The article referred to James A.
Johnson, a former chief executive at Fannie Mae who received favorable loans
from CountryWide, a mortgage company associated with the current mortgage
crisis. Johnson was on the Vice President search team in a similar position that
he held with John Kerry in 2004.
The McCain-McBush campaign is gleeful with the prospect that there is trouble in
Senator Obama's camp, especially the kind of trouble which portrays any sort of
impropriety at all.
“The American people have reason to question the judgment of a candidate who has
shown he will only make the right call when under pressure from the news media,”
-McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds
But should the public judge Obama's removal of Johnson as weakness or as someone
who will do the right thing? When pressed with similar situations (as in more
than one), John McCain has resisted changing those on his campaign with
conflicts of interest, and that includes registered, paid lobbyists.
One of those lobbyists was former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, a Republican
would-be presidential candidate himself from years past. Gramm, known in some
circles as Enron Phil, and his wife Wendy were not only tied to the current
banking crisis, with then-Senator Gramm writing and pushing much of the
legislation, but also the Enron scandal. Mrs. Gramm was an Enron director.
Lobbyist Gramm, while working for the McCain campaign, was also registered as a
lobbyist for UBS, the European Banking concern hit badly by investing in the
current mortgage crisis partly orchestrated by none other than Senator Gramm.
McCain calls Gramm, the former chairman of the powerful Senate Banking
Committee, one his chief economic advisors. He feels he needs Gramm because the
economy is an area which McCain admitted to not knowing much about.
Having Gramm take control of the US economy is like having General George
Armstrong Custer, had he survived Little Big Horn, to be his generation's Chief
Indian Affairs advisor...
... Or like President Bush naming Dick Cheney to lead his Vice Presidential
search team.
Here are just a few more of Senator McCain's advisors with, shall we say,
certain conflicts of interest:
-Rick Davis, campaign manager AND co-founded a telecommunications lobbying firm.
Among Davis' clients were Verizon and SBC Telecommunications
-Charles R. Black Jr., chief political adviser AND chairman of powerful
Washington lobbying firm BKSH and Associates. Their clients include AT&T, Alcoa,
JPMorgan, U.S. Airways, General Motors and United Technologies.
-Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon, senior advisers AND lobbyists who counted as
their clients Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae
By the way, that's the same Fannie Mae who the McCain campaign have decried
Johnson's association with.
And let's no forget the "former" relationship McCain had with Vicki Iseman, a
lobbyist with some questionable personal ties to McCain. McCain's chief advisors
actually asked Ms. Iseman to put a little distance between she and the
candidate. There are still many questions which remain to be answered about that
one.
But the point of the matter is this: When Obama, or any of the other former top
Democratic candidates say, do or act in some NeoCon-defined questionable manner,
even the "Liberal" New York Times treats it as the main story. McCain's
relationships, as news about other GOP officials, are either buried or
considered less newsworthy.
From the time Bill Clinton claimed the White House, and, not so coincidentally,
since Fox News came on the scene, there has been this double-standard in regards
to ethics and scandal. Every infraction, major or minor, by a Republican
official is treated seemingly as no big deal. McCain, himself, certainly has had
his second chance even before this newest double-standard began: It wasn't that
long ago that the Arizona Senator was a ranking member of the Keating Five
involving the savings and Loan Scandal of the eighties; a scandal which cost
millions of Americans their life savings.
Sounds a bit like the current mortgage crisis and the recent Enron scandals,
doesn't it?
Obama's campaign responded to McCain's "question the judgment" statement with a
perceptive remark of their own:
“We don’t need any lectures from a campaign that waited 15 months to purge the
lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a
‘perception problem.’ ”
-Senator Obama's campaign statement
After all, the McCain campaign learned from the best - George Bush.
-Noah Greenberg
In response to, "I would be overjoyed to vote for a woman for president in the
future, if she represented my politics and values, but unfortunately Hillary did
not," Victoria Brownworth responds:
Then perhaps Ms. Schwartz can vote for Cynthia McKinney in November. She was in
Congress for 14 years, and unlike either Clinton or Obama, she voted against the
war. She's the candidate for president for the Green Party. Oh and an added
bonus--she's also African American and led the battle to impeach Bush-Cheney.
Now that Clinton is out of the race, McKinney has gotten my support. After all,
she asked for it, while the Obama team is still busy dissing the Clinton
supporters.
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-Noah Greenberg