Madonna Is Right, & Other Thoughts On McCain, Bush & Company

 

It wasn't until I came across some persuasive evidence that John McCain's youngest son had spent some time in rehabilitation  trying to break a drug habit similar to his mother’s that  I began to fully contemplate the full reality of  the upcoming elections.

 

At first I got a rush of journalistic adrenaline upon learning something new about the mysterious McCain son now deployed in Iraq.  But then I decided not to investigate further, because in truth most people are kinda bored by  who is screwing whom, and who is taking drugs. Most people figured out a long time ago that sex and drugs are a part of life, for better or for worse. 

 

Republicans, as hopefully a majority of Americans have finally figured out, are for the most part a collection of hypocrites, thugs and pious thieves. That is why they verge on being not old-fashioned conservatives, but American fascists.

 

Sinclair Lewis wrote about fascism in America in his great Depression-era novel “It Can’t Happen Here.”

 

Today’s Bush Republicans harken back to those dark days. They represent the Know Nothingism that has always been a component of the Republican Party.

 

Mind you, a few individual Republicans of the old-fashioned kind, are honest, decent human beings, who even played the game with a strong sense of justice and fair play.

 

In “It Can’t Happen Here,”  such a man is the skinflint old Republican New England newspaper editor who is the protagonist  of the novel.  He becomes the hero of the novel as well. Despite being a conservative Republican, Doremus Jessup  ends up in the concentration camps along with trade union leaders , socialists  and Jews because he has that elemental sense of decency.

 

The GOP’s mantra has always been about lower  taxes and letting the market decide most things. Despite their pious denials, they have hated Social Security ever since Roosevelt created it during the Great Depression. Every campaign, they talk about how Social Security is such a failure and ought to be replaced by people investing in the Stock Market, which is a great way of making the powers that be on Wall Street richer than they already are, mostly at the expense of old-age pensioners. 

 

As much as I always found this offensive as a political policy, you still could find old-fashioned Republican here and there who believed such economic nonsense, but still had a genuinely  real commitment to the grand experiment of individual liberty and real democracy that the American Revolution was all about.  These old fashioned Republicans also  idolized the founders of the Revolution, men like Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who were the furthest thing from the Know Nothings, the Pilgrims, the religious fanatics who  were this country’s earliest occupiers and missionaries.  The deists who later wrote the Constitution knew of what they spoke, and had many  very good reasons for going to such great pains to separate religion and state. 

 

In the last decade, American politics has been transformed maybe forever by the ascending branch of the Bush-McCain wing of the Republican Party.  Such decent men as some of the traditional  old-fashioned Republicans were  have been banished. Without the constraints of decency and enlightenment, the GOP has turned brutal and ugly,  in disrobing the terrifying reality of American fascism. McCain may be a bit senile, but then so was Ronald Reagan, and it never seemed to hurt him.  So it is not impossible that McCain could complete the total disrobing of America’s fascist state by giving it a signature perverse and ill-tempered turn, as the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and no one better complain.

 

When the pop singer Madonna linked McCain to Hitler at the beginning of a concert tour, you couldn’t tell it from the media, but behind that linking was a very valid intellectual question about the true nature of the beast we are facing.

 

I won’t presume to understand why America, with early leaders like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, also had such a strong anti-intellectual side of its culture, a Know nothing movement that worships ignorance over human intelligence. At the same time, America has racked up some of the greatest literary, scientific and musical accomplishments of  mankind.  I think it’s probably the struggle for the soul of the nation between the Enlightenment and the Dark Ages that still forms the dynamic of our society. While the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution were deists, the original pilgrims were religious fanatics from the Cromwellian wars of England.

 

At a religious forum at an Orange County megachurch, Obama offered a brilliant analysis of the question of when life begins, consistent with the best thinking of science and theology. Without thinking at all, McCain quickly offered a Know nothing answer that pleased only the simple minded and Know nothings in the audience. Thoughtful politicians are antithetical to the their mentality.

 

This is why the nation is at such a crossroads. Will it be a totalitarian society run for the convenience of the rich, or still a democratic society in which all people have a stake?

 

When you consider it, Bush has done an amazing thing. He has started a war, made everyone but the rich pay taxes for for it,  and caused a Depression all at the same time. The situation President Roosevelt inherited from Republican Herbert Hoover was simply the result of decades of thieving and stealing on Wall Street, which ushered in the Great Depression.

 

Bush has gone one further. He privatized his Iraq war -- making his political cronies in the private army businesses multibillionaires by creating unregulated militia unanswerable to the Constitution or even to God.  But most of all he has created an economic collapse while the country is at war.

 

McCain will just continue the same policy.

 

It is clear that the next President will face a nearly insolvable mess. Obama will face a situation not unlike that which Roosevelt inherited from Hoover.  McCain is constitutionally incapable of doing that job because  it was his kind of thinking which created the problem in the first place. The notion of  McCain, who subscribes to the same bogus economics as Bush, would be a tragedy.

 

I mean wasn’t it Lincoln who said you can only fool most of the people some of the time and never all the people all the time. 

 

I am a bit of a cynic, so I broke  out in a cold sweat. What if Bush’s chosen successor gets re-elected as the result of an October Surprise. Say Bush decides it’s time to bomb some convenient foreigners somewhere.  What if on the domestic front, they are able to  use their Diebold voting machines again, which are still around in some key states. You might remember that the machines left no paper trail in contested votes. They were purposely designed not to be double-checked. They  were manufactured by an avid supporter of Bush by the name of Diebold who vowed to do everything he could to make Bush president. They are still in operation, although under a less embarrassing brand name—and apparently did their dirty work by undercounting metropolitan centers.  Then there were other vote stealing methods perfected by the Republicans in Florida and Ohio. These could be put into employ again, I realized.

 

Despite the caterwauling by the Cheshire cat grinning right wing as it proclaims how “liberal” the media is, the main stream media can be counted on to support whatever the right wing does. But mainstream media is losing its mojo, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced the same problem when he took over a collapsed economy from the Republicans—a fanatically right-wing press.

 

You can fight those feelings of despair that the forces of dark will once again successfully steal the election by keeping in mind what Lincoln said about how you can’t fool all the people all the time. 

 

A McCain victory will mean America has descended to the level of a “Banana Republic,” an irony of sorts which might provide a bit of humor but for the fact that for that moment of hilarity, we will be living in the kind of chaos which almost always is an excuse for the iron hand.

 

I don’t know McCain personally, but it would appear that McCain has a dysfunctional family, not surprising considering that he obviously is a difficult old man. It is sickening to contemplate the possibility that the putrid candidate of the Republican Party could still somehow win in November—and complete the downward spiral of the American Empire begun by the most venal and corrupt administration in our short history.

 

I sometimes wonder if McCain and Bush were diabolically planted as Manchurian candidates to defeat this country? The Republican Party is their cover. I sometimes wonder about this, but ultimately reject the notion.   McCain was, as is famously known, a prisoner of war at the “Hanoi Hilton.” Everyone knows he came from a family of military aristocracy: his father, Admiral John McCain Jr., was commander of the Pacific Fleet during the Vietnam War and his grandfather, John McCain Sr., had commanded the aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II.

 

No one could have resisted the torture used against him. He ultimately signed a document saying he was a war criminal, but when he got home, he used that torture he had tried to endure to promote himself as a military genius of some sort.

 

When a famous general, Wesley Clark, suggested the obvious, namely that having been a prisoner of war does not make you a military strategist, the press acted as if he had verily proclaimed the righteousness of the Devil himself.

 

If I were in a conspiratorial mood, I would further weave McCain’s VP choice into the scenario. One of her classmates in Wasilla, Alaska, 8000 denizens, claims Sarah Palin was a pothead who got Jesus, and then was elected mayor by the members of her church. She first made her mark by successfully leading a campaign against the town’s beloved librarian because she had books that described evolution. “Sarah Palin can’t stand scientists, whether they are trying to protect polar bears or spreading the ridiculous notion that the world is more than 4000 years old,” he said.

 

I did not find Palin any more attractive when I learned that in the year 2000, the ambitious young lady, a former beauty queen contestant, also strongly supported the candidacy of Pat Buchanan, a Hitler praiser and an open anti-Semite whose ideology is clearly sympathetic to fascism in all its forms. You can excuse me if despite her superficial attractiveness, she seems to me to be a brittle, hardened creature, who along with her fellow candidate, represents the dark side.

 

How pathetic a notion that the country that was once the leader in technology and science would be led by such a person? It almost makes you wonder if she is as well part of a Manchurian Candidate scenario, with the express purpose of bringing down the Empire.

 

But let’s be generous, and assume that the Bush-McCain ticket is not a very sophisticated “Manchurian Candidate” operation, merely the result of unusual massive corruption of historic levels, along with a corresponding amount of brutality and ignorance worship. This will leave you no choice but to pull the lever for Obama and Biden, for the sake of our souls and for the sake of our nation.

 

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   PALIN THE IMPALER

 

America’s latest manufactured celebrity, Sarah Palin, is intriguing for at least two reasons to  those who are easily swayed by the mass hysteria the mainstream media stirs up from time to time over whatever nonentity it chooses to coronate at the moment.

 

In one way, she is like Vlad The Impaler, also known as Dracula, a Romanian ruler in the 1500s who dealt with his enemies in extremely cruel ways.

 

Her vengeance against those who disagree with her is known to be terribly swift and intense. Then there’s a tawdry quality that emerges from her narrative. While Vlad the Impaler has lasted as a legend over the centuries because of the scope of his legendary madness. Sarah’s battles seem more like those that occur mainly in the squabbles of white trash trailer parks.

 

Her voice, for one, sounds a false note, with a barely suppressed hysteria just beneath the surface. Sarah’s voice is too grating for her to become, say, another Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in the Great Depression. When she began her meteoric political career as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, with the support of the most fundamentalist of its 8,000-strong denizens, she tried to get the city librarian to ban some books. Rumor has it that the books she objected to included the Hobbit tomes, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. But the librarian would not be moved and despite several threats to fire her for disloyalty, Sarah moved on to bigger and better things.  McCain’s Republican operatives downplayed the incident, saying Palin was only asking hypothetically if certain books could be banned.

 

Be that as it may, the pattern continued. When she next became governor of Alaska, a state with fewer than 700,000 souls, many of them poor, ignorant and fanatically religious who are also disturbingly gun-prone, she fired one of the state’s top officials.

 

He had committed a terrible offense against the people of Alaska, it seems. He hadn’t fired Palin’s ex brother-in-law who was involved in a messy divorce with the governor’s sister. It was such a messy divorce an Alaskan judge  felt forced to issue an injunction against Sarah Palin, telling her to stop trying to tormenting the poor man. Apparently when she became governor, she felt that the judge’s injunction was overruled by assumption of an exalted new position.

 

The second way she intrigues—her looks. It probably is appropriate that Sarah has a certain commonplace beauty queen look—she was a runner up in an Alaska beauty contest—combined with a kind of tawdry dominatrix demeanor.

 

An acquaintance of mine, an attorney who has  a finely tuned appreciation of female sexuality, said after she gave her acceptance speech at the Republican convention, he began to think of not voting for Obama after all because it would be more fun to have a president he could fantasize about and masturbate to. He figured if he voted for McCain, Palin would end up being president soon enough, for obvious reasons. 

 

A tall, shapely woman with a pronounced Amazon physique, my friend said as he listened to her, he found himself wishing  she would pop out of her shirt. “Those magnificent boobs need to be liberated,” he said.

 

But he admitted that if he actually found himself in bed with her, he might grab for his manhood as much to protect himself as to unsheathe his prowess.

 

Now probably if Palin hadn’t had such a curious disregard for the problems of female rape victims, I wouldn’t dare venture into all this. But I figure by insisting that female rape victims pay the costs of solving their own rapes - which she did as the new Mayor of Wasilla - that makes her fair game. Perhaps she believes boys will be boys and girls gotta to understand the superior sex. Maybe, even maybe, Sarah Palin is secretly an Elizabeth the Great. 

 

The National Enquirer is no doubt as scummy a tab rag as there ever was. But the truth is it investigates gossip with an aggressive vigor that often hits paydirt—just ask former presidential candidate John Edwards. And besides, where do journalists get off denying that their trade is gossip.

 

Some time back, a female friend of mine abandoned her job as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times and went to work for the Enquirer. “Not only do they pay  a lot better, they investigated stories far more thoroughly than we ever did at the Times,” she said.

 

So it was with considerable interest I opened my latest edition of The Enquirer and read  how Palin had had an affair with a business partner of her husband’s, which ended only when her husband broke off his business relationship in order to save his marriage.

 

And  you thought the Clintons had some of their own white trash problems!

 

The newspaper also confirmed what was rather obvious by appearances—her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy was embarrassing the governor. At first she wanted to marry off her teenage daughter to her barely legal stud, a local hockey star, before her selection as vice presidential nominee was announced. But the daughter refused to go through with her mother’s feeble efforts to lie. Mother and daughter had harsh words, resulting in the sulky, angry girl appearing in public with her mom, but giving the whole thing away by her demeanor.

 

Her mom, meanwhile, covered her magnificent posterior, by telling everyone Bristol was going to marry her paramour soon, a young man who described himself online as a dude who didn’t want to be fucked around with or become a dad.

 

Poor kid never had a chance.

 

It seems that Bristol is pissed off by her mom always putting career in front of her children, and then being a hypocrite about it. 

 

When Sarah finally did his first actual interview—a soft interview by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who definitely has a tendency to go easier on Republicans than Democrats—it was clear she knew nothing about anything on the world stage, except to repeat like an automaton how pro-Israel she was. If Israel decided it needed to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, she said, America would have no choice but to play a supporting role. 

 

She also seemed to be advocating that the United States must be willing to go to war with Russia over Georgia if that former Soviet republic became a member of NATO, and asked for military help.

 

The Europeans have a bit more reticent about going to war against Russia. If she knew a bit about history, she would know that no one has ever successfully marched an army land against the Russians—not Napoleon, not Hitler, and nor would we more likely find success in doing this.

 

It was a strange sight, this woman who comes out of a background so steeped in anti-Semitism she probably doesn’t even understood it herself.

 

Perhaps this Stepford Wives enunciation of her pro-Israel stance might make more sense if you consider she was never heard to utter a word about Israel or even Jews before she was picked to be McCain’s vice presidential pick.

 

Indeed, her background suggested quite the opposite.

 

In the days leading up to her pick, a gentleman named David Brickner, the head of Jews for Jesus, held forth in the Wasilla Bible Church which the governor has attended for the last seven years, and carried on about how Israelis were on the receiving end of terrorism because God has had made some harsh judgments on Jews because they had failed to embrace Jesus.

 

Although Palin’s pastor there, one Larry Kroom, said Palin wasn’t in the audience at the time Brickner was carrying on against the Jews like a crazed Imam, he liked what Brickner had said and would be inviting him back. There was a glimpse of Palin’s own unfamiliarity at least with ecumenicalism during her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Quoting from an anonymous “writer,” she proclaimed, “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”

 

The line came from Westbrook Pegler, a notorious anti-Semite from the Great Depression, a luminary among the lights of others such as Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith, who had mentored at the feet of Huey Long, and H.L. Mencken, a brilliant writer but still a virulent anti-Semite.

 

Pegler believed that Eastern European Jews could not be trusted, because they were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.”

 

Palin has so little knowledge of Israel and Jews you can almost excuse her for employing Pegler, and the like, in her descriptions of things as they are. While her husband was involved with the Alaska Independence Party, apparently a part of the larger American Independence Party movement, where all kinds of nativist, fascist folks found their true home, Palin herself avoided registering as one. She kept her Republican party membership card intact.

 

But recently as governor, she told members of the group to “keep up the good work” and wished the party luck on its “inspiring convention.”

 

There’s also been an argument about whether or not she was a supporter of Pat Buchanan when he ran for president on the Republican ticket in 2000. It’s apparently true  at the time she was in bed with her main man in the Republican Party, Steve Forbes, but still wore a Buchanan button when she officially greeted the then presidential candidate. Was it just a flirtation, or something more?

 

Buchanan himself remembered their meeting with fondness, and proclaimed her as one of his best warriors.

 

My concern about Buchanan is that he is a Hitler-praising fascist sympathizer very much in the Westbrook Pegler mold.

 

That she would use a quote from Pegler, but consciously decide not to credit the writer because that might have proved embarrassing, suggests something sinister to me.

 

I say this as one of Pegler’s “East European Jews,” so I could be dismissed as a paranoid old leftist.

 

Perhaps this is the case, but Palin genuinely scares the shit out of me. And apparently she scares the shit out of Ed Koch, the former New York Mayor, a Democrat who endorsed George Bush in the last election because of his fear of Islamic fundamentalism, but this time is going full hog for Obama. Of course Pegler, if he were still around, would no doubt make much of the fact that Koch was a Jew.

 

Before Palin joined the more mainstream Wasilla Bible Church, where they were apparently happy to teach that Jews were getting killed because God too wanted Jews punished for not accepting Jesus, she spent 20 years as a Pentecostal.

 

Palin and her large extended family joined the Wasilla Bible Church about the same time she decided to pursue a political career. Before that, for twenty years, she had been reared in a far more eccentric Christian fundamentalist church—the Pentecostals. Like the Mormons, the Pentecostals make most Christian fundamentalists nervous.

 

They look with disdain on Pentecostals, whose most sacred rites make them easy targets for satire. There’s certainly a strong sexual component to their carryings-on that wouldn’t wash well with more respectable believers.  Pentecostals  were the people who talked in tongues and solved their health problems with a laying on of hands,  Weird shit like that.

 

When it came time to be interviewed by chosen members of the Mass Media, Palin was trying not to be not such a religious wingnut. She tried to modify past statements in which she had credited God for Iraq, an oil pipeline in Alaska, and making Alaska a safe haven where Christians could flock in the End Days.

 

Still, there it was on You Tube. Speaking at a meeting of the Pentecostals, she said “that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending (U.S. soldiers) out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for -- that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.”

 

At the time she said this, she admitted she wasn’t up to speed on minor matters like conducting wars and the like. “I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the in Iraq.”

 

In another You Tube video, Palin is seen nodding her ascent as a minister on the stage with her talked about tapping into Alaska's natural resource wealth to fulfill the state's destiny of serving as a shelter for Christians at the End of Times.

 

And last but not least, it should be mentioned that Sarah Palin carves up and cooks moose, hunts down wolves with rifles while flying in a helicopter, believes women should be forced to carry children even if they were placed in that position by rape, and that the world is only 6,000 years old, and creationism should be taught alongside evolution courses in science classes.

 

Palin can believe whatever nonsense she wants to—apparently Alaska likes its crazy governor. But this is a woman who believes that the Apocalypse is a good thing, not something to avoid. The Apocalypse might even be a good thing because it will reward the true believers and punish the rest of us sinners. Such a person should not have her fingers, no matter how lovely, on the nuclear button.

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Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, such as “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” “Literary L.A.” and “Fat Man on the Left.”