The Double-Talk Express

As we’ve seen time and time again since his run for president in the late 1990s, John McCain refers to his campaign and his euphemistic bus and airplane as the “Straight Talk Express.” In his run for president in 2000, having listened to him on the stump and on numerous talk shows, I believed the label. I actually felt at the time that if McCain changed his position on abortion, he’d be a pretty appealing candidate. He seemed to have a vivacious personality, a tremendous resume and was definitely the intellectual superior to his rival, George W. Bush.

Now we jump eight years later to this election, and there is no doubt that McCain has learned from his prior run for president, when his campaign was outmaneuvered and literally crushed by his previous opponent, the Bush machine. The sad thing is what he learned was how to mimic the negative aspects of the Bush/Cheney regime and now feels that it is more successful to label or characterize issues how he wishes them to be perceived, not what his actual position is.

John McCain has already had his Hillary Clinton moment when he described his experience walking around Baghdad as if he was walking around Paris. Just like Hillary, McCain forgot that all events are videotaped. He has actually become the king of flipflop, and this video is as good as any to demonstrate that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

I actually got the term “Double-Talk Express” from my favorite talk show host, Randi Rhodes, who is on Nova-M radio, found at www.novamradio.com. She apparently has numerous postings on this double-talking propensity of John McCain.

John McCain’s recent campaign has tried to convince us that he’s on the side of the people, but his campaign is completely run by lobbyists who represent corporate interests from gas and oil companies, insurance companies, communications companies, but even more disturbing, they represent the interests of Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and one previously represented Ferdinand Marcos. When pressed on this, McCain either says that the American people don’t care or challenges Barack Obama to check his staff for conflicts of interest.

Although he promises to run a negative-free campaign, he seems to consistently mention Reverend Wright and his link to Obama, yet his religious affiliations that he actually publicly seeks are far more frightening and demonstrate tremendous hypocrisy. His wife will not release her tax returns, although we know that he flies around on her private jet. We can only assume that he doesn’t want us to know what additional conflicts of interest exist pertaining to her investments.

John McCain has been confused on the political players and religious sects involved in the Middle East, but he claims that national security is his strong suit. He claimed to be proud to cast his vote against the Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the rich because they were discriminatory against the middle class and now calls for them to be made permanent as part of his campaign platform. He has several times declared that he must receive more education on the economy and has proven it several times, but at other times pronounced that he will be the better candidate on economic issues.

He has responded to questions about whether most Americans are doing better or worse under the Bush regime that he feels they’re doing better, but when pressed on the issue equivocates or actually disagrees with his own assessment and acknowledges that the American middle class is suffering under the Bush Administration over the last seven years. He was the first candidate to propose the tax amnesty on gasoline for the summer, but he seems to have no economic foundation to back up his assertion that it will dramatically benefit the driving American public. Let’s not forget that he originally said that it would be acceptable to him to have troops in Iraq for another fifty or a hundred years, but last week changed his mind and said that he’d have most of them out by 2013, the end of his supposed first term.

It has become painfully obvious that we can’t take the words “straight talk” seriously. Like his predecessors, George Bush and Dick Cheney, we must from now on view all McCain statements with extreme scrutiny, and when he promises to protect our environment, we have to presume that he means he’d ease regulations on gross polluters. When he says that life is improving in Iraq, we should realize that means that all hell is breaking loose, and when he tells us that he will run a clean, transparent and completely positive campaign, we should expect that he’ll play old-time politics, do all of his mischief behind the scenes and encourage all of his cronies to do his dirty work while he smiles at the camera and says that he’s asked them to behave themselves.

The bottom line is that the next few months are going to be a challenge, but if we prepare ourselves with all the ammunition that we can and ready ourselves to fend off the barrage of hit pieces, unsubstantiated attacks and unfair references that will come our way, we’ll soundly defeat McCain and the Neocons and Right Wing in the fall.