Adam Blatner

Forgive me, but this is a pro-Obama piece in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Still, it presents some interesting perspectives that haven’t sufficiently been addressed in the news:

One of the major elements in actual political life involves the choice by the winning politician—especially in the election of a United States President—of members of cabinet, the nomination of Supreme Court Justices and Federal Judges, and numerous other offices. These roles have in the past been taken by associates of the winning candidate. G. “W.” Bush’s cronies have been as disastrous as his adminstration, including Rumsfeld, who was grossly incompetent in his management of the Iraqi war; Cheney, who supported torture, and his lawyer, Addington—not enough people appreciate the nefarious influence of this shadowy figure—google him, or see article about him—, who came up with justifications for it; Gonzales, who passed along Cheney’s demands for a politically “loyal” set of lawyers and engaged in likely criminal behavior in doing so; and on and on.

Now aside from McCain’s rhetoric, if one looks at his actual associates: Such as noted on one website, or another , McCain as self-proclaimed “maverick,” in order to obtain Republican support, felt he had to hire on the kakocrats—i.e, lobbyists and ex-lobbyists, various “insiders and the like—who have generated much of the trouble we’re in now. (‘Kakocracy’ is defined as governance by the worst elements of society exclusively in their own interests and to the permanent detriment of all other classes.) (There are tens of thousands of Google hits about McCain and his lobbyists—millions, in fact.)

I have at times noted that our evaluation of historical figures ranging from Napoleon to Stalin to Hitler to Yassir Arafat should take into consideration not only the person himself, but equally to his “yes-men,” his sycophants, his supporters without whom he might lose confidence and momentum. Who, then, are the people McCain has chosen as his cronies? These are the people who will be appointed to cabinet posts, commissions, ambassadorships, offered positions as justices of district and even the Supreme court, and so forth. Bush’s cronies led to one disaster after another—such as the inadequacy of response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans! Why should we expect any better?

It’s pretty scarey, because the McCain campaign is appealing to a somewhat pervasive overt as well as latent racism; to superficial image-mongering (“Oh, but Sarah Palin is a soccer mom just like me, and she’s a woman!!); to a widespread inclination to believe in mythic labels such as the warrior virtues of “fighting” and “winning”—semantically loaded emotional-linguistic complexes that suggest that it would be tantamount to weakness, cowardice, or surrender to even hint at any kind of diplomacy or retreat,  no matter how corrupt the allies may be whom we are trying to keep in power. In summary, if McCain is able to win because of his negative campaign and innuendos, his appeal to the aforementioned motives, I fear that people will get a political administration run by the same folk who have profited hugely from the war and deregulation of the economy over the last eight years. (By the way, what ever happened to the term, “war profiteers”?