In 1967 John McCain could have made the world a better place by honoring the U.S. military Code of Conduct to which he gave his sacred oath to uphold. He could have held out against his North Vietnamese captors as countless other brave American soldiers chose to do by refusing to answer their questions, by not making disloyal statements against the United States and by refusing to give them statements that would result in harm to American soldiers and his fellow prisoners of war. Instead of honoring his word, his country and his fellow soldiers and prisoners, John McCain chose to ensure his own personal survival and comfort. Within days of his captivity he advised his captors that his father was Adm. John S. McCain Jr., CINCPAC or commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific region, including Vietnam. In exchange for this information, John McCain was given medical treatment that was denied to all other American prisoners of war. His five and one half years of captivity by the North Vietnamese were noted by the numerous published accounts of McCain’s cooperation with the communist government of North Vietnam, including his detailed statements concerning strategic military information and his admission that he and other American pilots were specifically ordered to bomb civilian targets. Other American soldiers being held by the sadistic North Vietnamese military refused to cooperate and suffered with their injuries in silence. Other American soldiers refused to respond to their interrogators despite the excruciating pain their North Vietnamese tormentors inflicted upon them and the deplorable conditions under which they were held. While John McCain made the conscious choice to become Saigon’s “Songbird” as he was described by the Saigon-UPI on June 4, 1969, other American soldiers made the conscious choice to keep the sacred oath they made to their nation regardless of the personal suffering that choice brought. John McCain could have made a difference in 1967 but he chose not to.
Between the years of 1991 and 1993, John McCain was faced with another significant opportunity to make the world a better place while he served on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs investigating the flood of intelligence information regarding the host of live sightings of previously unaccounted-for American military personnel still being held in prisoner of war camps in Vietnam. Instead of working to shed the light of truth on the numerous cases where American service men, who were known to be alive toward the end of the conflict, had been abandoned by the Nixon and Ford administrations in their eagerness to disengage from the war, John McCain worked diligently to dismiss, diminish and invalidate every claim, and with McCain’s support, a statute was enacted during the 1990′s that rendered all of the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam as well as a great deal of other Vietnam War related information as classified information regardless of the revelations those accounts and reports might contain about the missing American soldiers. Instead of bringing comfort and closure to the families of those American soldiers who remained missing in action at the end of the conflict, John McCain used his position on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to make sure that nobody would ever find out what became of their missing sons, their husbands, their fathers and brothers. Conveniently, his support for this statute also buried forever the comments of his fellow prisoners regarding the affect that McCain’s cooperation with the North Vietnamese had on their captivity. Furthermore, McCain took the lead role in demanding that the U.S. Justice Department investigate the POW/MIA activists and their organizations who he accused of fraud after those groups expressed their outrage over the active part he was playing in the U.S. government’s cover up of the honorable American soldiers they had left behind to die in Vietnam. The Justice Department investigation initiated by his unfounded accusations found absolutely no reason to charge any POW/MIA activist. Interestingly enough, in March 2000, when Southern California’s large Vietnamese community expressed their outrage over McCain’s use of the word “gook” during a campaign speech to express the hatred he felt for his former North Vietnamese captors, McCain was not apologetic and responded by saying, “I hated the gooks and will continue to hate them as long as I live.” However, despite McCain’s avowed hatred of his former captors, when Bui Tin, a former senior colonel in the North Vietnamese Army and one of John McCain’s former interrogators testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992, McCain embraced his former torturer as if he were a long lost brother. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, John McCain could have made a significant difference but, once again, he chose not to do so.
When John McCain was elected to office as a U.S. Senator from Arizona in 1986 he was, once again, given the opportunity to make the world a better place. Instead, he used the authority of his office to help Charles H. Keating, Jr. battle federal regulators who questioned his operation of Lincoln Savings and Loan. He contended that there was no conflict of interest in his assistance to Mr. Keating despite the fact that McCain’s ex-wife, Cindy, and his father-in-law, James W. Hensley were the largest investors in Fountain Square Shopping Center, a subsidiary of American Continental Corp., which was run by Charles H. Keating, Jr., or that John McCain, his ex-wife and his daughter made at least nine trips at Keating’s expense from August 1984 to August 1986 aboard either Keating’s American Continental Corporation’s jet or chartered planes and helicopters owned by Resorts International. Three of the trips were for vacations at Keating’s personal retreat in the Bahamas. John McCain, in fact, received some $300,000 in political contributions from Keating during the 1980s. After federal regulators filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln’s deposits to his family and into political campaigns, five U.S. Senators came under investigation for attempting to influence the regulators on Keating’s behalf. The U.S. Senators who became known as the Keating Five were Alan Cranston (D-CA); Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ); John Glenn (D-OH); Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and while none of them were ever convicted of any crime, McCain received a rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising “poor judgment.” Charles Keating was eventually convicted of racketeering and fraud in both state and federal court after his Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $3.4 billion. When given the opportunity to effect great and lasting change as a U.S. Senator, John McCain, once again decided to put his own self interests above the general welfare of many others.
As millions of American citizens became justifiably alarmed by the federal governments refusal to effectively handle the out of control illegal alien problem in the United States and the population of illegal aliens soared past the 20 million mark without hesitation, John McCain again had the opportunity to do what was right by representing the will of the people who elected him and by doing everything in his power to ensure the security of America’s borders against the invading aliens as he swore to do with his oath of office. Instead of doing what was right by the people who elected him to office or doing what would be considered the right thing to do to ensure this nation’s security, John McCain allied himself with the nauseating socialistic Massachusetts senator, Edward M. Kennedy, and together they attempted to force the American people to acquiesce to a bill that would have rewarded the more than 20 million criminal invaders threatening to destroy our country’s economy with American citizenship and immunity from prosecution for the many crimes these individuals have committed. John McCain chose to turn a deaf ear to the vast majority of American citizens who adamantly opposed rewarding the parasitic illegal aliens and staunchly defended his proposed legislation which would have seriously undermined our nation’s rule of law by granting massive benefits to those who willfully violated U.S. laws, while, at the same time, denying those benefits to those who have played by the rules and sometimes even to U.S. citizens. Almost single handedly, John McCain did more to inject racism into the immigration debate than any other U.S. Senator with his lectures to his fellow Republican senators about their xenophobic perspectives and how in strong Hispanic communities they were going to be seen as racists for wanting to ensure this nation’s security by enacting tougher border controls. McCain used the same divisive racial tactics in 2006 when he opposed Arizona’s Proposition 200, which would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, and legal status to access certain state benefits. Over 190,000 Arizonans petitioned to put Proposition 200 on the ballot and it was enacted by 56% of the state’s voters, 46% of whom were Hispanic, and yet John McCain had the audacity to oppose the will of his fellow Arizonians with his incessant bleating about how Prop. 200 would result in “racial profiling.” John McCain has been an enthusiastic advocate for bilingual education in America’s public school system despite the numerous problems and unnecessary expense these divisive and discredited programs represent, while at the same time he has been strongly opposed to all legislative attempts to make English the official language of the United States. Where he has had the chance to unite American’s diverse citizenry over vitally important issues of national security as any responsible elected representative should be expected to do, McCain has unfailingly furthered his own self-serving agenda by using divisive racial-identity politics to disrupt the debate and distract from the issues at hand.
Of the three issues that have consistently plagued the Bush administration, the continuing war in Iraq, the federal government’s refusal to secure the nation’s borders and the ridiculous trade policy that has devalued the American dollar while sinking America in foreign debt, John McCain is an ardent supporter of all three.
John McCain voted against George Bush’s tax cuts. In 1993, McCain voted to confirm ACLU liberal and pro-abortion Ruth Bader Ginsburg and when Bush attempted to restore the judicial balance of the court, McCain joined hands with the Senate Democrats to oppose Bush’s conservative Supreme Court nominees and he again joined hands with the liberal Democrats in their battle to silence dissenting opinions prior to elections by co-authoring the highly questionable McCain-Feingold law which is nothing more than a blatant attack against the First Amendment right of free speech.
Few honestly intelligent conservative voters are fooled by John McCain’s alleged new-found enlightenment. Every time this self-serving political hack has had the chance to do what any decent American citizen would consider the right thing for the American people, or even the right thing for this nation, he has shamelessly chosen to serve his own self interests. He has destroyed his own credibility on so many issues that it is extremely difficult to take anything the man says as being serious and the only thing that is patently clear about John McCain is the utter contempt he feels for the intelligence of the American voters he struggles to deceive.
Heading into the Florida primaries and Super Tuesday beyond that, the more credible polls are indicating that John McCain has gained a slight lead on the Republican nomination, and it would appear that McCain’s straight talking claims about seeing the light on immigration issues are starting to suck in enough of the sufficiently gullible American voters to make some measure of headway. Whether or not John McCain can sustain his thin disguise as a voice of political conservatism long enough to be win the nomination is anybody’s guess, but his advancing lead has left a growing number of conservatively inclined voters facing the question of, not who they will vote for if McCain does manage to win the Republican nomination, but whether or not they even bother to vote in the 2008 presidential election, because in the view of many formerly staunch Republican supporters, in a race between McCain and Hillary Clinton, or between McCain and Barack Obama, there simply is no lesser of the two evils and the only moral choice that decent Americans will be able to make is the choice to not participate in what will undoubtedly be the most disastrous election in the political history of the United States.
For more information about John McCain’s collaboration with the communist government of North Vietnam while he was being held as a prisoner of war, including five transcripts of approximately twenty interviews in which he cooperated with his captors to the detriment of his nation and his fellow POWs, visit “Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain” and “The U.S. Veterans Dispatch” at their respective web sites.
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