MC CAIN’S REVERSAL ON HIS LONG TERM POLICY RELATIVE TO ANWAR AND OFF-SHORE DRILLING
Republicans, under the influence of the giant oil companies, have argued since the 1960’s that we open up drilling in the Artic refuge known as Anwar.
It is projected to hold large reserves of oil, however, the problem is that it is in the heart of a wild-life preserve and it will take up to ten (10) years from the time drilling is approved for oil to be delivered to our gas stations. In that period of time, hopefully we will be well on our way to curing our addiction to gasoline and relying more heavily on alternative fuels.
June 17, 2008, John McCain reversed himself on this issue. For years he has opposed drilling in the Alaskan wet-lands. However, with his presumed Republican nomination for the presidency, has called for off-shore drilling on all of the U. S. Coasts. He stated with all of the simple-minded mendacity that he can muster to even suggest that by drilling in these off shore locations we will make ourselves energy-independent and brings the price of gas down, is only a game fools would play.
Those of you who have been paying attention know that this pronouncement is a reversal of everything John McCain has stood for all of his years in the Senate. I have never seen a man reverse himself on so many critical issues to our nation’s future simply because he thinks these duplicitous views will sell his way into the White House.
John McCain is the most hypocritical man I have seen running for the presidency since George Bush ran in 2000. I wonder if Mr. Bush recommended that if he was interested in becoming president he better reverse his position on a number of key issues favorable to the more conservative wing of the Republican Party, or he came to this ludicrous conclusion on his own, I do not know, but he has alienated himself from an army of environmentalists who have supported him throughout his political career.
Can anyone want to be president so badly that he is willing to sell his soul to the highest bidder? Apparently!
When I see that nearly 25% of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are so disenchanted with Hillary’s defeat by Barack Obama that they are taking into consideration the possibility of voting for McCain, I begin to wonder if these women have any principals or any intellectual veracity. These women cannot in honestly vote for a man who opposes every issue vital to women in the 21st century. He opposes the right to choose. He opposes birth control. He opposes rectifying the harm that humans are doing to the environment! He is now touting off-shore drilling in place of investments in alternative fuels. He favors keeping our troops in Iraq as long has it takes for them to be victorious—even if it takes decades and trillions of dollars.
I am sorry, but John McCain appears already in the throes of senility or Alzheimer’s or at the very least, mental instability. One cannot reverse themselves on so many political positions in such a short period of time and not give the impression that he has a screw or two lose somewhere.
With his unequivocal endorsement of all of Bush’s tax cuts for special interests—pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, financial corporations—one has to wonder what he thinks about the events of the past few days.
There was a huge car bombing right in the heart of the “successful surge” in Iraq with 51 Iraqis killed and many more injured. Since the first of June, 2008 a dozen more of America’s soldiers have been slaughtered as Moqtada al Sadr has given permission for a portion of his troops to again kill the “occupiers” i.e. Americans.
I have been warning on this blog since the surge was first called for by Bush/McCain that al Sadr had put a leash on his dogs and ordered them back into hiding until the “occupiers” withdrew from Iraq. Meanwhile, the rebel cleric pretended to be working for peace when all the while he was working with Iran’s leader of the real power behind the former Peacock throne, the head of the Guardian Council.
As the al Maliki government negotiated with U. S. authorities for the rights to maintain up to one hundred and eight permanent military bases in Iraq (without informing the Congress or the American people of Bush’s intent to keep U. S. soldiers on the ground ad infinitum nausea while keeping a heavily armed military prepared to fight Iran should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make a move on an newly independent Iraq, or continue to pursue its ambition for nuclear power. With one hundred and eight U. S. airbases in Iraq, we would be positioning ourselves to protect the newly imposed democracy in Iraq while expanding our efforts to democratize the entire region.
Simultaneously, several of the Bush corporate allies are negotiating with Iraqi powers that are presumed to control the oil reserves in order to obtain rights to produce and distribute the huge quantities of oil believed to be undeveloped under the sand soil of Iraq.
I wonder how McCain feels now that Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR, was paid $ 1 billion dollars in spite of the refusal of fired military commander in charge who insisted that many of the fees were fraudulent and bill should not be paid; the Bush administration gave the new man the authority and paid them in spite of the strong objections? How can a man who had pretended for so long that he was the good guy in the white hat from Arizona endorse one of the weakest and most corrupt presidents in history on matters such as the disaster in Iraq, tax benefits for the rich and special interest groups? McCain is just as weak as Bush and if Obama has any gumption, he will hold his feet to the fire on these issues.
The Daily Show on Comedy Central for June 17, 2008 Jon Stewart’s guest was CBS foreign correspondence Lara Logan recently back from Iraq. For the first time, the audience heard a journalist “tell it like it is.” She pulled no punches in reporting that the conditions in Iraq are nothing like our news broadcasts reflect. In fact, U. S. networks are barely covering the events in Iraq since the primary season has been in full gear.
She mocked those who visited Iraq for a few hours maybe two or three times like Senator McCain and each time painted such a rosy picture to convince his constituency that the “surge was working,” and that the U. S. would, in the end be the victor.
Logan reports that dignitaries do not get even a valid picture of what life is really like in this war torn city. She was not given much time to relate to Stewart’s audience the details, but it was clear from her tone of voice that the American people are having the wool pulled over our eyes by guys like McCain, Senators Graham (R-SC) and Lieberman (I-CT) who always seem to go as a team on these visits.
Obviously, their primary role is to reinforce McCain’s manipulations of the facts. Whether it is that McCain is being fed a wheelbarrow full of lies or his military mindset is exploiting the facts the generals on the ground are relating to him to make his position on the Iraq war valid. Without the surge working, McCain has no platform upon which to base his campaign and buttress his argument for supporting the invasion, maintaining the troop
level and sustaining his position that our troops should remain there until victory is realized.
McCain is the shell of the man he was in 2000 when he stood firm for his principals and got slaughtered by the right wing of the party which is about as happy about his nomination of their party as a horse-thief facing the gallows.
If I were Obama I would set aside some time to have long talks with Lara Logan. She knows what she is talking about and has long term and first hand exposure to the real Iraq beyond the censored script the military big shots such as Petraeus and his lieutenants provide the political dignitaries who visit the front lines and the television network executives who want to acquire favor from those in power both in their own corporate owners or the Washington power brokers.
If potentially destroying our wild-life preserves and our beaches on the east, west and south of this country was a toll we, the people, were willing to pay and if by drilling in these playgrounds we could produce enough oil to make us energy independent, I would personally be shocked.
The invasion of Anwar by mammoth oil companies is not the long or short term answer to our independence. What we should have been doing for decades is giving major tax benefit to companies for the development of new forms of fuel within a specified period of time. This government must learn into invest in its own future.
Spending a trillion dollar in Iraq to fight an enemy that is nothing more than a phantom we are more than willing to do. The I. Q. of the entire Republican members of Congress when added together does not make the entire body equal to that of an average student. They and too many Democrats let Bush pull them around by the nose like stuffed animals. Under the Republican-control of the Congress, not one committee completed its constitutional responsibility of oversight of the executive branch of government and therefore allowed the Bush Administration unbridled authority to do what they damn well pleased with our money, our military and our country as a whole in the eyes of the more commonsensical remainder of the world.
McCain has proven to me that he does not deserve the power of the presidency and that he will do whatever is necessary to repeat the errors of the past eight years.
4:48:24 PM 
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