Who To Believe?
by James Glaser
February 25, 2008

It is getting harder and harder to know who to believe in this year's presidential race. I have always had a hard time believing anything Hillary Clinton had to say. I still don't understand how the people of New York let her run for Senate. She wasn't born there and she never lived there. The woman is a carpetbagger in my book, but then all that shows is how gullible the people in New York are.

If you google, "concerns with Hillary Clinton," you will get way more than a half million hits. The woman worries most Americans.

Everybody talks about what a hero John McCain is. John McCain was shot down over North Vietnam, and was a prisoner of war for five and a half years. I don't understand what is heroic about that. I feel very sorry that he had to endure everything he went through, but that still doesn't make the man a hero. I think of heroes as those who jump on a grenade to save their friends lives, or those who attack and capture an enemy position, thus saving lives, or somebody who runs our into a field filled with enemy fire to carry back a wounded comrade. A hero puts his or her life on the line to save some one else. Sorry, but that is not John McCain.

John McCain talks a good line about just how ethical he is, but the facts point in a different direction. John McCain is a politician, and like any other politician, lobbyists can make politicians feel real important. That is how they get things for their clients. Politicians who help out lobbyists get lots of help from those same lobbyists, come election time. The Washington Post reports this the lobbyists working for Senator McCain's campaign:

The current "revolving door" batch of lobbyists who run his entire life include lobbyists for Verizon, SBC, AT&T, Alcoa, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Airways, Land O' Lakes, General Motors, United Technologies, UST Public Affairs, eBay, Goldman Sachs Group, Cablevision, Tenneco, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Dell, Fannie Mae, Southwest Airlines, Toyota and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
[Washington Post]

Some reports say that McCain has almost 60 lobbyists working on his campaign. That wouldn't be so bad, other that the fact that Senator McCain will tell you in campaign speeches how lobbyists are destroying our country.

[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O Lakes, the UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae. [...]

In McCain's case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign — most of them as volunteers — seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric. "He has a closer relationship with lobbyists than he lets on," said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "The problem for McCain being so closely associated with lobbyists is that he's the candidate most closely associated with attacking lobbyists."

Public Citizen, a group that monitors campaign fundraising, has found that McCain had more bundlers — people who gather checks from networks of friends and associates — from the lobbying community than any other presidential candidate from either party.

John McCain wants to be President so bad he can taste it, and because of that he will use who ever he must to get elected. The people running his campaign are in a tit for tat industry, and they might be volunteering their time this year, but you can bet if McCain wins this election, he will be beholding big time to every lobbyists who gave his a stack of checks or worked months on the campaign for "free."

Barack Obama has not been on the political landscape that long, but he has done enough to worry me. While in the Illiones Senate and the US Senate, Obama had this habit of voting "Present" many times on hard votes. The man knew he wanted to go up the political ladder, but he wanted it both way on many votes. One thing he did vote for, and that was to continue the Iraq war. Obama claims that he never would have voted for the war in the first place, but he repeatedly has voted to keep the troops in harms way. That is another example of wanting it both ways. He can claim to be against the war, but if the war goes well, he can claim he voted to keep it going.

I did watch one news program where Senator Obama said that the troops will be their for years to come, and that he wanted the troops to come with honor and dignity. We attacked a country that never attacked us, no one will argue with the fact that we have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, we have physically and sexually tortured many Iraqis, and we have driven millions out of the Iraq. You want to tell me how in the heck we will ever leave that country with any shred honor or dignity?

We have three candidates still in the running with Clinton, Obama, and McCain. I can no longer believe anything any of them say without doing a lot of fact checking first. I believe any one of these three, if elected, will continue to lie to the American people. Maybe Presidents have always done that, but I believe Bill Clinton and George Bush took lying to a new level, and that these new candidates will continue in that vain.

Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source