DO VOTERS NOTICE McCAIN'S POLICIES?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

John McCain’s domestic and foreign policies are opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans.

His economic policy is to soak everyone but the very, very rich, whose tax cuts he favors preserving and extending into perpetuity.

His health care plan? He has none, other than to preserve socialized medicine for him and his family and to leave as many people as possible at the mercy of insurers and drug companies, who paid him and his Senate colleagues handsomely for that privilege.

Now he says he wants to rip up the coasts for more oil so when we run out we’ll not only have no oil, but dead beaches.

He wants to send police after women who choose abortion even when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. He also wants to criminalize the doctors who treat them. To ensure this he will dig through the sludge to find more people like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, etc. and get them lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.

He intends to maintain Iraq as a colony even though the elected government there wants us out. At the same time he claims he wants to foster democracy there.

He equates military duty in Iraq to the occupations of Germany and Japan, where G.I.s were treated, for the most part, decently, and could walk the streets alone without being harmed. Despite his military heritage he doesn’t identify with the enlisted men who must carry out mad edicts from above. A good officer looks after his men and women, but this grandson and son of four-star admirals has other ideas.

Bush and Cheney have succeeded in arranging sweet deals for pet oil companies to move into Iraq. And they've also succeeded in quadrupling petroleum's world price. But even if McCain were to get at all the oil in and around Iraq through Exxon-Mobil and other global corporations, you have to ask whether they would share it with Americans. Of course the answer is they would sell it to Americans at the same world price anyone else would pay. The oil companies, through the special tax breaks arranged by their lobbyists, don’t even pay their fair share of the ten billion a month we pay to occupy Iraq for them. But McCain does favor giving us a gas-tax holiday, which would save the average family a couple dollars a month and further deprive our broken-down insfrastructure.

But our hopelessly inept and corrupted corporate media don’t even try to get at such issues. They consider it more important to corner politicians into wearing American flag pins.

Americans, who for the most part are able to see the Bush administration as a gang of law-breaking, lying incompetents, are almost evenly split when they’re asked to choose between a candidate who will continue the Bush-Cheney policies and one who won’t. That’s quite a disconnect.

But ignorance reigns during this perfect storm of failing education and failing media. An increasingly ill-educated public doesn’t notice the failures of the news media so much as long as new “American Idol” segments are provided each week.

BUSH QUOTE OF THE WEEK: There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal.