Mr. Dickey, let's talk a moment about John McCain's own "despicable moral character"[Oct. 2 Pioneer Journal]. Many people testify that in public Cindy McCain just joked around about McCain's getting a little "thin up there." McCain's reply was, "You [expletive deleted], at least I don't have to go out in public covered in layers of makeup." I won't use the word he used on his wife in a public forum. McCain has a penchant for rape jokes, too. So let's not play the old Republican game that "we're holier than you are." If your presidential candidate is guilty of some of this same stuff, do you really have business pontificating about Franken?
Now concerning McCain's poor imitation of Batman at the House of Representative's vote for the bailout. Tell me exactly what he accomplished there? The bill he supported was largely defeated by Republicans, 12 of whom had given their solemn promises to the Republican minority leader to vote for the bill. I wouldn't even mention the futility of McCain's ineffective "leadership" in this case. The results do not show he was needed there.
You accuse Congress of ignoring the McCain-Greenspan warning about deregulation. If I'm not mistaken, that was a Republican Congress that was warned. They could have created a deregulatory bill at that time if they truly wanted to without any Democrats' support. Even in the deadlocked Senate, Cheney could have come in to break the tie and get it passed. I can find no record of even an attempt at their doing so, nor can I find any record, of course, of any Democratic filibuster if the Republicans never tried to produce a bill. Why didn't they? Most likely because the mother of all deregulation bills had been authored by one of their own mentors, Phil Gramm, in 1999, pushed through a Republican-controlled Congress, and signed by Bill Clinton, who should not have signed that bill because it completely ignored an inherent human trait that makes the laissez faire and trickle down economics advocated by Republicans ever since Hoover an absolute disaster: greed. Phil Gramm is now one of McCain's chief economic advisors.
To talk about McCain as a champion of regulation is an incredible and willful skirting of his actual record in Congress and in his personal life. Until its current unpopularity, he has always been a Reagan "keep government out of business" laissez faire Republican. His voting record shows it and, even more so, his implication in the S&L scandal of the 80s proves just how far he went with that philosophy in his private life. Along with Frank Keating, McCain was actually a member of the Keating 5, the group that secretly worked to get regulation out of some very lucrative S&L loans. So was W's brother, Neil. It was still illegal because of laws written and passed by FDR and Congress after the Great Depression. All of the Keating 5 were implicated but only Keating was prosecuted and sent to jail because he said McCain had "wimped out" of the illegal stuff. People who now want to smear Obama with an absurdly minimal acquaintance to Bill Ayers and the radical Weathermen terroristic acts that took place while Barack was 8 years old and in grade school never mention or, strangely enough, never also want to discuss McCain's relationship with the sewer rat Keating, who gave the great "campaign reformer" McCain $112,000 for his Senate campaign. Further proof of McCain's appetite to let business always control economics is reviewable in his ardent work with Bush to privatize Social Security. As a matter of record, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal 6 years ago, McCain wanted to go even farther than Bush in gutting federal support for the bill. At the time, a Republican Congress had passed a totally unproductive and unjustifiable tax cut for the Donald Trumps of America, and McCain was contending that the government could not afford a program for the dignified retirement of Mr. and Mrs. Average America. How can some people still believe we'll get anything different from John McCain than we've had for 8 horrendous years of Bush-Cheney?
By the way, Obama went to Bush's man who was really supposed to be the on-the-job watchdog over lending practices and warned him at approximately the same time McCain did, perhaps before, and McCain copied him just as he has with so many other Obama ideas as he falls farther behind in the polls.
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Greg Van Hee
Perham
