“GENTLEMAN JOHNNY MCCAIN, PART 3.”

(TPJ 182)

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – March 05, 2008           

In this third installment of this series of columns on McCain, we’ll consider the question of just why the Right Wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like McCain (which has also been covered in his usual detail and with his usual passion by my good friend Mickey Walker in this space on Feb. 17, 2008).  It has to be noted that it is remarkable that the most right-wing major party, in relative terms, ever to appear on the American political stage, the current proto-fascist Republican Party, can actually have within it its own Right Wing.  But then again, there was a “left” within the German Nazi Party at the time the Hitler Regime took power on Jan. 30, 1933.  Its nominal head was a man named Gregor Strasser.  He actually believed that the word "socialist” in the full name of the Party, the “National Socialist German Workers Party,” had political and programmatic significance.  Strasser was murdered, along with other potential challengers for power to Hitler within the Party, on the “Night of the Long Knives,” June 30, 1934.  If the Rush-Coulter-Hannity Wing of the Republican Party ever takes full control, John, watch out for your back.  What the Republican Right publicly says it doesn’t like about McCain is well-known.   

They don’t like that: he did not originally support the Bush tax cuts (because he thought that would lead to massive deficits --- how irresponsible can you be?); he was outspokenly critical of Rumsfeld (arguably the worst Secretary of Defense since James Forrestal jumped out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949); he supported Pres. Bush (!) in trying to do something reasonable about the undocumented aliens problem; he has not been constantly outspoken on the matter of freedom of belief as to when life begins; agreeing with several of the major oil companies (other than the most profitable one. Exxon-Mobil, of course) he thinks that something more than lip-service should be paid to the problem of global warming; he thinks (or thought) that there should be some kind of vague controls on political campaign contributions; he was until very recently against the use of torture by any branch of the US government; he has been against a Constitutional Amendment to levy permanent second-class citizenship on all persona identified as homosexual (although who knows, he might just change his mind on that one any day now too).  That he was one of the few outspoken supporters of the so-called “Surge” and has actually a years-number on the Bush heretofore not clearly stated but clear-as-a-bell-to-anyone-who-bothered-to-look policy of Permanent War counted for naught in the eyes and loud mouths of Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Ingraham and their countless clones in the Right-Wing Radio Scream Machine.

First, isn’t this all so deliciously revealing about what the real agenda of the self-styled “Conservative” wing of the Republican Party really is:

(Ah yes, if only the principal demonizes, the Democrats, could get up the nerve to put this agenda front and center in an election.  Dream on, MacDuff.  But back to McCain.)

And so on and so forth.  However, and this is the main point of this column, I don’t think that McCain’s disagreements on some of these issues are the real reason why the Right-Wing of the Right-Wing Republican Party has lined up against him.  On most of them the differences, even before he has begun to back down from his so-called “principled” positions as on torture and what the Christian Right is all about, are mainly on details.  Despite his carefully cultivated public persona (remember he first ran for President when he was eight years younger than he is now) the man is a long-time right-winger as many liberal and progressive political analysts are pointing out now with regularity.  He has a very high rating from the Right-Wing vote-rating organizations. 

I think that the Scream Machine’s opposition runs deeper than that.  I think that it is absolutely convinced that McCain cannot win, even should he end up running against the current all-time uniter-of-Republicans Hillary Clinton.  And why?  Not because of his policy stands.  McCain first won elective office because of his supposed suffering at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors during the War on Viet Nam.  This is a profile that has been very carefully maintained for all the years that he has been in the Congress. 

Somehow, getting shot down fairly early (1967) while bombing civilians over North Vietnam and then supposedly having been tortured regularly over a five-year period, has qualified him as a “war hero.”   (Funny.  Somehow John Kerry, who really was a war hero and really was decorated on a number of occasions by the United Sates Navy, ended up being disqualified as such by the same Right-Wing Republican Scream Machine.)  This story has formed the political foundation for John McCain since he first entered politics.  But this foundation is beginning to crack and I think that that’s what the Screamers are really afraid of: their party having its nominee forced out sometime later this Spring and then being left with whom?  The Christian Reconstructionist Mike Huckabee?  Or the “tell-me-what-you-want-me-to-be-and-I’ll-be-it” Mormon theocrat?

The stuff about his real behavior as a prisoner-of-war in North Vietnam is already out there, and not on secret, unsigned, unattributed emails like those accusing Barack Obama of being a secret adherent of Osama bin Laden because he went to a secular school on Indonesia and their names rhyme.  No the McCain stuff is on, for example, Ron Paul’s website.  At the Hanoi Hilton McCain was not known as “Gentleman Johnny” but rather as “The Songbird.”  Just consider the following:

“A former Vietnam veteran with top secret clearance says he has personally spoken to numerous POW's who dispute John McCain's claim that he refused to provide information after he was captured and tortured in Hanoi, saying that in fact McCain's code-name was "Songbird" because of his willingness to tell all to avoid torture.

“Jack McLamb served nine years in secret operations in Cambodia and other nations before going on to become one of the most highly decorated police officer's in Phoenix history, winning police officer of the year twice before taking a role as a hostage negotiator for the FBI.

" ‘I know a lot of Vietnam veterans and a few POW's and all the POW's that I've talked to over the years say that John McCain is a lying skunk,’ McLamb told the Alex Jones Show.

" ‘He never was tortured - they were there in the camp with him and then when he came in....he immediately started spilling his guts about everything because he didn't want to get tortured,’ said McLamb, contradicting the official story that McCain only offered his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.

" ‘The Vietnamese Communists called him the Songbird, that's his code name, Songbird McCain, because he just came into the camp singing and telling them everything they wanted to know,’ said McLamb.” 

This quote is here doubly sourced: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...r_tortured.htm; http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=115304.

If this kind of thing is already up, even though it has yet to receive the kind of mainstream media coverage that the totally false charges against Kerry did, one can just imagine what hasn’t come out yet about McCain (in addition to his supposedly vile temper and uncontrollable impulsiveness).  It may well happen that he will not be the Republican nominee or if he is, he will be totally crippled in the campaign.  This, it seems to me, is the only valid reason why the Republican Right-Wing vultures are after him before he is even dead meat.