On Tuesday afternoon, during a visit to a children’s hospital in Nashville, Cindy McCain said that her husband’s opponent, Senator Barack Obama, has “waged the dirtiest campaign in American history.”
Huh?
Maybe Cindy meant that Obama has been the target of the dirtiest campaign in American history. But I doubt it. No, she meant what she said, and it’s ironic that she made these remarks in a hospital. Back in 1994, Mrs. McCain admitted to stealing drugs from her own charity to sustain her personal addiction to Percocet and Vicodin. She also fired the administrator of that charity in an effort to cover up her crime.
If Barack Obama has run the dirtiest campaign in American history, as this woman alleges, why haven’t they mentioned these facts? Can you imagine what the McCain camp would do if it were Michelle Obama who had done this?
In the past several months, conservative advocates have spread vicious and unfounded rumors about Barack and Michelle Obama. He’s secretly a Muslim. She hates “Whitey”. The subtle and not so subtle instances of racism have been a consistent undercurrent to this campaign. With less than a month until Election Day, and with McCain’s poll numbers sinking like the NASDAQ, now the surrogates have stepped aside. Now the principals are directly involved in the slander.
It’s a simple matter, really. The American people are preoccupied with the economy. McCain’s own advisers admit that his poll numbers go down when he addresses economic issues. So if you’re losing, and you can’t talk about the one thing people really care about, what do you do? You throw bombs. You call your opponent “unpresidential” because he’s willing to negotiate with our enemies. You roll out the stewardess to say that Obama is “pallin’ around with domestic terrorists.” And now, in a new low, you trot out the trophy wife to engage in personal attacks and distortions.
Distortions? Oh, yes, I forgot to mention Cindy’s remarks on Wednesday. At a McCain rally in Pennsylvania, she said “The day that Senator Obama cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you.”
No, Cindy, that was the Vicodin.
What Mrs. McCain declined to mention, or perhaps does not know, is that Senator Obama voted against a particular appropriations bill that did not include a timetable for withdrawal for Iraq. Now, I know that it goes against the policies of the last eight years to ask questions and demand accountability before handing out billions of dollars. But this is nothing but the same old foolishness of singling out one vote on a particular bill and ignoring the fact that a legislator voted for a different but similar bill instead. They did this to Kerry in 2004. At one time, I thought that this was one tactic we would not have to endure this year, because we had two senators running against each other, and presumably that would cancel out the effectiveness of the tactic.
What we have seen in this campaign, rather, is John McCain’s refusal to let facts get in the way of a good line. He continues to recount in speech after speech Governor Palin’s opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere” even though it has been well documented that she was for it until it became a political issue, and only then did she oppose it. We have seen Senator McCain continue to claim that his opponent voted 94 times to raise taxes. What he doesn’t mention is that the votes in question were to lower taxes for most people, while raising them for a much smaller number of people. And neither the Senator nor his felon, I mean wife, bothers to mention that McCain himself voted against funding for the troops. McCain voted against a funding measure virtually identical to the one opposed by Obama. The difference? The bill McCain voted against included a timetable for withdrawal. You know, the same timetable that the Iraqis themselves have now adopted because they want us to leave.
So why does Cindy McCain say these things? Maybe she doesn’t know any better. Maybe she doesn’t care. Or maybe she can’t stand the thought of the next few years at home with a defeated John McCain. Maybe she’ll say or do anything to prevent him from going off on her and once again calling her (in public) a word that rhymes with runt.
What a wonderful First Couple they would have been...
