Liar, Liar

How have they lied to thee? Let me count the ways. There may be a problem when I run out of fingers and toes. (memo to self: check w/Dan in re e)

Well, an easy one is pork. McCain claims never to have voted for pork. True, he’s been a bit stingy in that regard but not exactly absolute. Of course he seems to think that pork is the major domestic problem.

Major? In this year’s budget the requested amount was about $16.5 billion. True, that’s money but eliminating it would have made a very small dent in a budget that ran somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 billion over.

It may have been a hard choice but McCain voted for the bailout bill. It alone contained $150 billion in pork. That makes up for several years.

He seems to have made a mistake in picking a running mate. Sarah Wink-Wink definitely doesn’t agree with the old man. Miss Sarah in 2002, her last year as mayor, had pork to the tune of $1,000 per resident. I don’t think any community had a higher per capita average. As governor, this year’s pork is, true to form, the highest per capita in the entire nation.

I don’t understand her mentality; that’s assuming such exists. She is from the state that, due to oil revenue, is in the best financial situation of all. They give every resident more than $1,000 as a little gift. This, while California is begging the feds to bail them out. Country First? No. Alaska First.

It appears that she buys into that secessionist nonsense of the Alaska Independence Party of which she is so fond. To hell with the other 49. Let’s get a bigger share of the national pork pot than any of the others. Isn’t her association with Wally Hickel much closer than Obama’s with Williams Ayers? Hasn’t she expressed her agreement with secessionists while Obama has denounced Ayer’s activities? The New York Times says she misrepresented (lied about) Obama as “palling around with” Ayers.

A thought keeps running through my head. A vice president must be given a security clearance. Would not Sarah’s long association with an organization formed for the specific purpose of secession be a bar to receiving any level of security clearance? Without a clearance she would be forced to resign.

McCain sounds like a committee chairman when talking about pork, not a president. He says he will go through bills line by line to eliminate pork. I don’t necessarily think that this is a lie. I think it is ignorance. The president doesn’t have a line item veto. He would have to veto every bill that contained pork. The system would grind to a halt. I guess it’s a matter of sometimes he lies; sometimes he’s ignorant.

McCain claims to be against big government. He’s voted with Bush almost 95 percent of the time. Bush’s programs have grown the government  to record size. The pentagon bureaucracy is larger now than during WWII. There are more generals now than when we had twelve million men under arms.

McCain hails General Petraeus as the peer of Wellington and Napoleon. Back in January of 2007 he was saying that the Petraeus plan for the surge was organized totally wrong. McCain was saying that the surge wouldn’t work. There were to be too few troops. The command was split. Petraeus was wrong. The surge plan was all wrong according to the guy who knows how to win wars, by winning them.

McCain now is the General’s loudest supporter and he says he led the call for the surge and that it worked. Even at his advanced age, John is quite adroit at jumping on bandwagons and claiming to be the driver.

McCain claims that the surge is working. Not quite the full story. It was originally an escalation, a simple, long-term increase in the number of troops. That wouldn’t get through Congress. Okay, let’s make it temporary, a surge. But, if it was to be relatively small and temporary, it wouldn’t win the war. What was it supposed to do? Well, the surge was to be tied hand and foot to the accomplishment of definite goals. If memory serves it was eighteen.

The most generous reading of the situation can only claim that three or four of the goals have been met. So, the surge, which is supposed to be to make possible the accomplishment of those specified goals, not simple pacification of a couple of provinces, hasn’t quite worked yet.

The number of troops was too small to accomplish the pacification. The situation is much calmer now, particularly in the Sunni provinces. That is because the Sunni leadership realized that they were the primary victims of Al-qaeda in Iraq (something that didn’t exist until after our invasion).

The Sunnis decided to cooperate with us against the outside terrorists. They also agreed to accept bribes from us. They were put on our payroll. This was popular in a country where the unemployment is 50 percent.

The Sunni may be smaller than the Shia in Iraq but worldwide the Shia are a minority. Our friends in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, indeed, almost all are Sunni. For us to target the Sunni, as we originally did, was unwise. Also, under Saddam, the Iraqi army was totally dominated by the Sunni. The Sunni are more experienced in bearing arms, so any conflict would be fairly even, despite a numerical disparity.

The likelihood is that whether we leave tomorrow or in fifty years, there will be a war between the Sunni and Shia. The surge has not worked. To the extent it did was ascribable to the serendipitous change of position of the Sunni and to our bribes. Neither of those are a reason to reflect credit as military genius on anyone.

Again, despite McCain’s lies and claims based on ignorance, the surge did not work. Petraeus is not a military genius. We cannot stay in Iraq until we win. What is winning in this situation? We will not impose a permanent peace between two factions that have been going at it for several centuries.

McCain says we are winning. He says we will win. Has he ever defined winning? No. No one has. He lies. He presumes military expertise. That is simply another lie. Such hubris and nonsense in another veteran would be pitiable. McCain, however, may be in a position to try to realize his delusions.

McCain says he supports the troops. He voted against increased funding of medical care for the troops, even after the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital. He voted against increased armor for the humvees. The troops have expressed their appreciation of his support by donating to Obama’s campaign by six to one over McCain’s campaign.

I bit off more than I can chew. This post is already too long and I haven’t begun to cover a fraction of the lies. Now we have McCain attacking someone else’s character? The Good Book says, Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Tagged as: aip, ayers, iraq, lie, mccain, obama, palin, petraeus