John McCain is whining about the Warner/Levin amendment that opposes Bush’s plan to send more troops to shore up the occupation of Iraq. McCain made his remarks on today’s “This Week.” With his performance today, along with his vote to abolish the Federal Minimum Wage, he has placed himself out of the mainstream of American political thought and into the political fringe.
John McCain’s opposition to any kind of Minimum Wage and his support of sending more troops to Iraq to shore up the occupation amount to a demoralizing vote of no confidence for the judgement of the American people, whose support for these positions are even lower than their approval of Dick Cheney. His support of sending more troops to Iraq is a vote of no confidence in the judgement of our troops, who themselves want out of Iraq. And his support of sending more troops to occupy Iraq is a vote of no confidence in the judgement of the Iraqi people, 90% of whom want us out of Iraq.
Back in 2005, John McCain’s exact words when asked about how many more troops were needed for Iraq were, “I’m not that knowledgeable.” Not only is John McCain not knowledgeable about how many more troops are needed, he is not knowledgeable about what the American people want. So, if John McCain is not knowledgeable, then what the hell does he think he is doing polluting the TV airwaves every Sunday morning whining about the plans that people who are more knowledgeable than him are pushing?
McCain used the right-wing extremist tactic of conflating opposition to the President’s plan to opposition to the troops. This is revealing – this shows that for the right, they are using Iraq as a do-over. One of the most common complaints that the right has about Vietnam was that we lost because we did not try hard enough. Now, they are using Iraq to “prove” that they were right.
If John McCain wants to fight the battles of the past, then let him steal electrical transformers from a local electric company like a group of teenagers once did (for real!) and build himself a time machine and go back to the 1970’s and bring the “Straight Talk Express” to that time. Go and tell people to “stop the bullshit” back then and let those of us who are more knowledgeable about this conflict to sit down and figure out a way to end this conflict.
We have an alternative plan for Iraq – it is called the Murtha Plan. Redeploy our troops from Iraq to places where they are more needed to stop the real terrorists responsible for 9/11 – Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. We have done our job in Iraq – we toppled and executed Saddam and we killed Zarqawi. Now, it is time to let the Iraqi people decide what their future is going to be and bring all the leading players together to prevent this from turning into a regional conflict and turn to the question of how to capture Bin Laden and bring him to justice for the crimes that he has committed.
The one thing that I agree with McCain about is when he said that if we believe that this is doomed to failure, then we should do what is necessary to prevent it from happening. That is exactly what Senator Feingold is doing, pushing for the defunding of the occupation and forcing its end rather than just merely throwing up resolutions that accomplish nothing.
McCain also seeks to pander to the Left Behind crowd when he engages in more apocalyptic language about the consequences of failure. But it is clear that John McCain does not believe his own rhetoric. If this were really the disaster that he says that it is, then he would have been pushing for a restoration of the draft and pushing for placing this country on a WW2 footing to make the Middle East safe for democracy. That is what FDR did when we were faced with a real crisis back in World War II. He foresaw our involvement and did everything he could to get us ready for it. It is easy to tell that Iraq is not nearly the type of crisis that World War II was, given the refusal of the right to do the hard work to place us on a similar war footing.
John McCain is so transparently dishonest with his Left Behind apocalypitcism that Chuck Hagel, on the same show with him, called him out:
He called McCain’s proposal meaningless because it offers benchmarks but does not spell out what the U.S. government will do if the Iraqi officials fail to meet them.
“What are the consequences? Are we then going to pull out?” Hagel asked. “Are we going to cut funding? Now, that falls more in the intellectually dishonest category.”
This shows that the divisions within the Republican Party are becoming poisonous. They have gotten to the point where people like Hagel are starting to question the intellectual honesty of people like McCain. These divisions are only likely to magnify in the coming weeks as the situation continues to spiral out of control.
But it is not merely a matter of there being a personality conflict between McCain and Hagel. The problem is that they are both clinging to a dead ideology that is becoming more and more out of the mainstream of American political thought. Conservatism is inherently rigid and dogmatic, meaning that anyone who does not hold your views on a certain topic becomes automatically suspect. McCain and Hagel may be friends in public, but in private, they seem to be seething with rage at the other’s refusal to see the light. Hagel’s question of McCain’s honesty is strong evidence of that. At the rank and file level, we see that at such places as Red State and Free Republic, where people who express dissenting views can be banned immediately.
This sort of intolerance and political correctness among the Republicans is par for the course. If you do not support my plan (which I am not knowledgeable about), you do not support the troops. If you do not agree with me, you are intellectually dishonest. Of course, they are simply carrying out the wishes of their lord and master, who said you are for us or against us. The problem is that now, Republicans are applying this sort of intolerance to themselves. The Republican Party is as divided as it has ever been since Reagan took over.