Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (33 page)

Hatch argued that “pornography and obscenity consumption harms individuals, families, communities.” Unfortunately, Hatch said, the DOJ has a “terrible record enforcing adult obscenity law”—such enforcement stopped during the Clinton administration, and while it increased substantially during the Bush administration, it has not been enough to satisfy Hatch.

The problem, Hatch contended, is that the DOJ is prosecuting only “extreme” obscenity—not what he calls “mainstream obscenity.” Since most consumers access only “mainstream obscenity,” not “extreme obscenity,” this strategy is misguided—it prosecutes “too narrow a range of obscenity.” Also, warned Hatch, there are far too few FBI resources being devoted to what he called “mainstream obscenity prosecutions.”

In response, Mukasey promised to review the policy of prosecuting only “extreme” rather than “mainstream” pornography, and intoned, “I recognize that mainstream materials can have an effect of cheapening a society, objectifying women, and endangering children in a way that we can’t tolerate.” And virtually every time Bush’s previous attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Hatch demanded—even in the midst of what his party claims is the Epic War Against Islamic Terrorism—that more FBI agents and DOJ resources be devoted to prosecuting and imprisoning Americans who consume and produce consensual, adult pornography.

This desire to exert government control over virtually every facet of the private lives of Americans is now a defining trait of the limited-government Republican Party. Even today, the official platform of the Republican Party of Texas—the party of George Bush and the most influential state Republican Party in the country—explicitly opposes “the legalization of sodomy.” They want it to be a
criminal offense
for gay adult Americans to have consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. They want governmental power to extend into adults’ bedrooms and, with the awesome force of criminal law, regulate and control the type of sex they have and with whom they have it. Those are the same people who, come election time, prance around paying homage to the need to keep politicians out of people’s lives.

The Texas Republican Party also opposes “custody of children to homosexuals.” They want the government, through the powers exercised by its courts, to take away from gay parents their own children. Numerous other state GOP platforms contain similar provisions.

In the face of this endless expansion of government power over the last seven years, even some on the Right are now tacitly acknowledging that their movement no longer has anything to do with limited government power. In 2006, fervent Bush supporter Fred Barnes wrote a Bush-revering book titled
Rebel-in-Chief.
In that book, Barnes actually
celebrates
the fact that George Bush has dispensed with any notions of a restrained federal government and has, instead, converted the federal government into an instrument for imposing a “conservative” vision on America. This transformation was described in a review of Barnes’s book by Christopher Wilcox in the
New York Sun,
who expressed oozing admiration for both Barnes and his book:

One of Mr. Barnes’s most important points is how unhappy many conservatives are with Mr. Bush’s big-spending ways. This certainly has been reported elsewhere, but Mr. Barnes goes further, claiming that
Mr. Bush is deliberately transforming the conservative movement from its small-government orientation to a more activist approach.

What does it even mean to say that Bush is “transforming the conservative movement from its small-government orientation to a more activist approach”? What is left of “the conservative movement” if one guts from it its “small-government orientation”? Isn’t that somewhat like transforming the peace movement away from its opposition to war or the environmental movement away from its opposition to pollution?

It is virtually impossible to imagine a political party that has less to do with principles of limited government than today’s Republican Party. Every time they are in power, these Great American Hypocrites greedily expand the control that the federal government exerts over the lives of American citizens in literally every area. And while a few rare souls on the Right have begun honestly acknowledging that their movement no longer has anything to do with such principles, the campaign tactic of the GOP is still grounded in the deceitful effort to persuade Americans that Republicans are devoted to protecting the average American against the ever-expending power of political officials.

CHAPTER SIX

John McCain

T
HE
S
AME
O
LD
P
RODUCT
W
RAPPED IN THE
S
AME
O
LD
P
ACKAGING

T
he GOP nominee for 2008—John McCain—is, in virtually every important respect, a completely typical Republican presidential candidate. He relies upon character mythology far more than substantive positions on issues to sustain his appeal. He endlessly claims to uphold personal values that he has chronically violated in reality—including his vaunted apolitical, truth-telling independence; his devotion to “traditional family values” his Regular Guy credentials; his supposed hostility to the prerogatives of the elite; his honor-bound integrity; and his commitment to limited government and individual liberty. One finds, in McCain’s actual life, rather than in his rhetoric and media-sustained mythology, one act after the next that directly violates each of these relentlessly touted principles, and in that regard, he is a standard, run-of-the-mill Republican hypocrite.

The electoral dynamic discussed in this book applies to McCain most vividly when it comes to the reverence that most of our nation’s establishment political journalists harbor for him. The vast bulk of the establishment press, as many unashamedly admit, are blindly enamored of McCain and swoon in his presence—probably more so than any modern political candidate in many years, if not decades. As a result, just as was true for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before him, McCain has been permitted to construct a public image that is unscathed by any critical scrutiny from an adoring, even intimidated political press corps.

There is, of course, one sense in which McCain is quite atypical for a modern Republican politician: Rather than strutting around as a pretend warrior, he actually did volunteer to serve in combat. By all accounts, his behavior once he was captured by the North Vietnamese forty years ago was both brave and honorable.

Thus, while McCain is as casually receptive to war as any other politician in the American mainstream—perhaps more so—that thirst for war does not seem to be grounded in a perceived lack of actual courage. When viewed in the context of his conduct forty years ago, McCain’s personal “toughness” is beyond question. His love of war, though, must have some other motive, and whatever that is, it is both destructive and dangerous.

It is difficult to imagine how McCain’s war service four decades ago could or should play much of a role in the outcome of the 2008 election. After all, he is the nominee of a party that, in the last two elections, vigorously supported a President who avoided combat service and a Vice President who avoided military service altogether while viciously demonizing two consecutive Democratic nominees who volunteered to serve in Vietnam. The GOP even depicted the combat-avoiders as conquering war-hero, tough guys while depicting the actual military veterans as effete and subversive cowards. Having spent the last eight years insisting, along with our press corps, that one’s war service (or war avoidance) is irrelevant in one’s fitness to serve as President, it is hard to imagine how they will suddenly elevate McCain’s war record into a vital issue of “character”—though they will undoubtedly try.

Revealingly, once McCain’s nomination seemed increasingly likely in 2007 and early 2008, the dominant right-wing, war-loving faction of the Republican Party began expressing intense opposition, even contempt, for McCain—not merely
despite
his status as a war hero, but in part,
because
of it. Unceasingly, the leading right-wing pundits and political leaders have demonstrated they value the
mirage
of the traditional masculine warrior virtues far more than the reality.

The leaders in their party who actually have fought in combat, and who thus seem to have a
genuine appreciation for the horrors of war,
are often considered unreliable heretics (Chuck Hagel, Colin Powell, and even Bob Dole and Bush 41 are excellent examples). And the most vicious Republican contempt is reserved for those Democratic politicians who have exemplary records of military service, such as Jack Murtha, Wes Clark, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter.

All of those individuals, Republican and Democrat alike, having been exposed to the realities of combat, exhibit a reluctance and even hatred for war that is completely anathema to the chicken-hawk, war-seeking faction of that party. That faction views war as a harmless video game and believes that only those who are weak-willed or lacking in character would be the slightest bit hesitant to send others off to foreign lands to fight and die. A reluctance to wage wars is, in this twisted perspective, a sign of Chamberlain-like cowardice. Churchillian courage is demonstrated only by the belief that war is a glorious and honorable instrument for securing one’s interests. Thus, those who view war with dread—as actual veterans of combat typically do—are considered suspect among this strain on the war-loving Right.

Despite this, one can expect the hard-core, war-crazed Limbaugh-Kristol-Coulter wing of the Republican Party to fall into line behind McCain. That’s because John McCain exhibits virtually none of the reluctance over wars that most real warriors do. Quite the contrary, McCain has become one of the most relentlessly war-advocating American political officials over the last decade. And ultimately, what the modern GOP Right cares about more than anything else is that their Leader be willing to wage new American wars, and there is no question that John McCain fits that bill completely.

John McCain has merrily sung in public about bombing Iran, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ famous classic
Barbara Ann
(“Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran…”). When most of the Republican Party was beginning to accept the necessity of following the will of the American people and bringing about an end to the disaster in Iraq, McCain vehemently argued that we should send still more combat troops, go hundreds of billions of dollars more into debt, and indefinitely prolong the war. When asked how long he envisioned the U.S. occupation of Iraq continuing, he replied that he would find fifty years acceptable, or even one hundred years, assuming that the United States was not sustaining “significant casualties,” whatever that might mean.

McCain’s America is one where we manage, run, and rule the world with our superior military force; endlessly occupy and interfere in countless other countries; and, whenever we perceive it as vaguely desirable, commence new wars. Like the post-9/11 George Bush, McCain is at the very far end of the militaristic spectrum, viewing the use of American force not as a “last resort” but as a preferred instrument in achieving U.S. goals. In short, the vision that John McCain has of the United States is entirely alien to our constitutional traditions and the warnings of the Founders: not a Republic, but an Empire waging Endless War.

Former
Los Angeles Times
editor Matt Welch, author of
McCain: The Myth of a Maverick,
delivered a speech at the Cato Institute in January 2008 in which he explained that McCain’s “whole career, his life, his training, his family background has been to be a member of…the Imperial Class” that McCain is motivated by an “inspiring trust of America’s governance of the world” and that “he would be the
most imperial-oriented President, most militaristic President, since Teddy Roosevelt,
at least.” McCain himself has acknowledged that the war-loving Teddy Roosevelt is his role model, remarking, “I return to kind of the Teddy Roosevelt outlook toward things.” As a February 2008
USA Today
article noted, “McCain has long identified Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, as a political idol.”

After five years of a failed and discredited war in Iraq, and an even longer period in a protracted and increasingly unsuccessful occupation of Afghanistan, the American public is war-weary. The U.S. military is dangerously overstretched, and American resources simply can no longer sustain the Bush/ Cheney course of U.S. military domination of the world, which McCain plainly wants not merely to maintain, but to
escalate
.

The Iraq War is one of the most unpopular wars in American history, if not the most unpopular. By itself, that war has all but destroyed the Bush presidency, rendering the President both disliked and distrusted across the political spectrum. In a minimally rational world, McCain’s front-and-center advocacy for that war—and his desire that America remain in Iraq
indefinitely
—would be a devastating, even fatal, flaw for his candidacy.

Beyond Iraq, McCain is as pure a warmonger as it gets in the American political mainstream. He is supported by the most extreme neoconservative ideologues, such as Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and Joe Lieberman, precisely because they perceive, correctly, that he would be the candidate most likely to enable their paramount dreams of unending Middle East war. The virtual certainty that McCain will ensure the endless occupation of Iraq and, worse, will inevitably provoke more wars, ought to be considered his greatest political liability, not his strongest asset.