Why John McCain should not be President (Part 1)
It is pretty clear after the results of the Democratic elections in Kentucky and Oregon that Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate. Thus, it is no longer necessary to talk about why Hillary Clinton should not be President since she’ll clearly no longer be in the race. Now it is time to focus my attention on the Republican candidate, one that is probably as prolific as Clinton when it comes to discrepancies in a campaign. This is the first of what will likely be many posts about why I think John McCain should not be President of the United States.
I recently read that McCain’s finance co-chairman, former Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler, had stepped down. What concerns me about this is the fact that Loeffler runs a lobbying firm called The Loeffler Group, a firm that has lobbied for other foreign interests and foreign governments and, according to Newsweek, was paid $15 million by Saudi Arabia.
McCain recently put a policy in place that prohibits any member of his campaign staff from being a registered lobbyist or foreign agent. With this policy, others have left his campaign including advisers Doug Goodyear and Doug Davenport, both of which worked for DCI Group, a consulting firm hired to improve the image of Myanmar’s military junta. McCain also fired energy policy adviser Eric Burgeson, who represents energy companies as a lobbyist.
If this is McCain’s idea of action against lobbyists then it’s too little too late. Even McCain’s own website had this to say about lobbyists:
As John McCain has said, “Americans believe that political representation is measured on a sliding scale. The more you give the more effectively you can petition your government.” It is no coincidence that the most influential lobbyists with the greatest access in the nation’s Capitol are also the most prolific political fundraisers, and that incumbents attract money in far greater volumes than most challengers.
You know, for a guy who claims to be “Ready From Day One“, he sure as hell didn’t make sure that he wasn’t hiring ex-lobbyist from day one of his campaign.
But that wasn’t even the most scariest story of the week. The most scariest is one that my wife forwarded to me from the Huffington Post, one in which McCain gets his fact wrong about Iran:
It’s scary because here’s a guy who has been through the worst of the worst when it comes to war, is twice my age, and doesn’t know the difference between Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah. What’s worse, he even argues about it. Even I know who the hell the Ayatollah is. I learned that when I was a kid back in 1981 when the Iran hostage crisis took place. It’s pretty clear that Ahmadinejad is not the Ayatollah. It’s insulting because, out of all people in the United States, it’s the President who needs to know this stuff the most. Pretty crazy when even a 10 year-old kid knows more than John McCain about Iran’s leaders.
More to come soon…
