Pretend moderate John McCain and George Bush, made for each other.

[Harry Hope]

From The New York Times, 3/13/06:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/opinion/13krugman.html?hp

The Right's Man

By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain.

He isn't a moderate.

He's much less of a maverick than you'd think.

And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former
opposition to the Bush tax cuts.

In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in
which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us."

But now -- at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war,
when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger -- Mr.
McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate.

He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains,
an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting
people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate.

During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state
rollback," anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war
unveiled two years later.

Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes
even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled
out Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed
willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas,
explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of
neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly
Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading
Iraq?

We'll never know.

But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects
any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire.

"If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he
wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there."

He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to
find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat
Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Reverend
Falwell late last year.

Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the
religious right.

Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed
South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the
appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and
incest were excluded.

But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law
has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits
abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the
hard right.

How far right?

A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available
at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative
member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick?

This comes from the fact that every now and then he seems to declare
his independence from the Bush administration, as he did in pushing
through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo.

President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in
effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose.

Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at
the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively
praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain.

Every once in a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr.
Bush, but he always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed
against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker.

His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have
to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion
legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that
legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as
slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate.

Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at
the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the
right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts.

When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen
striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House.

But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do
whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.

It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W.
Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as
a straight-shooter.

As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me
-- you can't get fooled again."

____________________________________________________________

Republican savior John McCain and George Bush, made for each other.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y156/stef406/1-mccain_bush_hug.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y156/stef406/mccain_bush-hug-713122.jpg

Harry