McCain Presidency? Run For Your Lives!

Author Cliff Schecter Discusses "The Real McCain" with BuzzFlash.com --

And It ain't a Pretty Picture

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 11:53am. Interviews Where are the questions about Rick Renzi, whom he got in a fist fight with, but eventually became friends with, who served in McCain's past campaign, and who’s now received a 53-count indictment against him by the FBI? McCain kept Renzi on as a co-chair of his Arizona campaign while running for office, after the guy was being investigated for all manner of misdeeds. Or the questions about Pastor Hagee. But beyond that, he befriended the late Jerry Falwell, who blamed 9/11 on Americans. He blamed it on gays and lesbians and a variety of other groups.

-- Cliff Schecter on the Real McCain

Yes, this is the book with the sensational charges about McCain's temper that the mainstream media recently cited: 1) that back in the '90s, McCain publicly called his wife the "c" word; 2) that he regularly tells colleagues to "F" off; and 3) that he engaged in at least one punching brawl on Capitol Hill.

But the book is a lot more than titillating details on John's temper tantrums and vulgar tactlessness. It's kind of the inside scoop on Mr. Flip-flop incarnate. In fact, Schecter -- a wry informative progressive political commentator known to many on the web, television and radio -- refers to McCain's different political positions as if he were versions of Windows, only McCain doesn't get better with each version.

From a certain prism -- the one shown in this book -- McCain is more of a Frankenstein with an ingratiating streak for the media than a maverick.

Okay, so the guy doesn't know Sunnis from Shiites? Hey, that doesn't matter because McCain knows victory when he smells it, and it doesn't pass the sniff test until you kill enough of them that it doesn't matter whether they are Sunnis or Shiites.

BuzzFlash talks with Cliff Schechter about why McCain should never be president and how the media gives him a free ride.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Okay, Cliff, you wrote The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn’t. First of all, you got some national publicity because of the New York Daily News article going back to an incident in 1992. We don’t want to use the word that McCain allegedly used to call his wife Cindy, but, I mean, let’s deal with the fact that you bring up a topic which is considered one of his vulnerabilities, although the mainstream media doesn’t cover it a whole lot, which is his temper.

Cliff Schecter: Yes.

BuzzFlash: What exactly is the case? You know, he claims they are isolated incidents. Is that true?

Cliff Schecter: No, nothing can be farther from the truth than that, which is often the case with McCain. What you see is not what you get, and this is just another case of that. Because his temper – I can go through numerous cases that are both publicly known and recounted to me for my book, both by on-the-record sources, off-the-record sources – a variety of them. He is what most people consider dangerous and frightening. Some people say it may be an after-effect of Vietnam. I’m not a psychologist and I can’t say whether that contributed. But this is a guy that was known for his temper in high school; his nickname was McNasty. It’s been a long-term thing with him that he enjoys degrading people. He has a very violent temper towards people when they disagree with him.

He has a vengeance streak a mile long. The only time he doesn’t take vengeance is when he sees it in his own political interest not to, like when he can have a rapprochement, like with Jerry Falwell or some people like that, George Bush obviously being a big case. But otherwise, a temper. A perfect example is what you were talking about. The Washington Post wrote an article earlier this week citing reports that came from my book – the story I broke – that he physically assaulted Congressman Rick Renzi, also of Arizona.

Fox News was the only network to ask McCain about the incident. McCain denied it. To give you an idea about the McCain people’s defense on this, later for the Washington Post article, I guess as people realized that it did happen, and that some people knew about it, they [McCain's people] admitted it and just said it wasn’t as bad as I claimed it was. You know, it wasn’t as bad as reports claimed it was. So they’ve already shown their dishonesty in talking about his temper. They’ve changed their account – within two weeks, of what happened. By next week, it’ll be: well, he did punch people but he didn’t bite anybody. You know, who knows what they’ll come up with next?

BuzzFlash: Well, he personally reacted to your book, didn’t he?

Cliff Schecter: He did, and he denied it. And I guess that’s the point I’m making is that he denied the charge [of assaulting Renzi], and that’s been proven. Because he said that I had anonymous sources and I was making it up. But now, of course, he’s had to admit that it did happen, and try to say, well, it happened, but it didn’t happen exactly the way I said. But that’s the newest line out of the McCain camp.

What you need to know about him is not only does the incident that you refer to, where in 1992, he referred to his wife with a very bad term that most of us, if we referred to our wives [in that way], we’d be sleeping under a bridge somewhere. He did it in full public view, reporters, aides – you know, I got it from three anonymous sources, all who saw it. He, of course, is denying it. Now people need to ask themselves if they believe him or they believe me. I’ve just totally raised questions about his credibility in denying an earlier charge that was proven true.

But let’s look at the rest of the record. The fact that he’s known as McNasty in high school. His uttered profanities in no particular order on the floor of the Senate, to Senator John Cornyn, a Republican, to Senator Pete Domenici, to Chuck Grassley, all Republicans. McCain made contact with Senator Strom Thurmond, a guy who was in his nineties at that time – the late Senator Strom Thurmond – and knocked him on his butt.

In some of these other cases, I spoke to a defense analyst, a guy by the name of Winslow Wheeler, who worked for Senators Domenici, Javits, Kassebaum and David Pryor – three Republicans and a Democrat. Wheeler mostly considers himself a Republican and actually believed in limiting pork barrel spending, instead of just rhetoric like John McCain. Wheeler challenged John McCain that he wasn’t doing enough to control it. McCain got him fired and went on a mission to destroy him. And he said to me that John McCain winning the presidency and having control of the IRS, the CIA and the FBI should scare every American. Senator Thad Cochran, the fellow Republican Senator of his, before he got with the [Republican party line] program, spoke the truth earlier on and said that Senator McCain being president should send a cold chill down my spine.

BuzzFlash: Well, let’s go to the media because we’ve been through this with many candidates about the issue of how political figures cultivate the press. For instance, Bush was said to have beguiled the media because he has this very fare-thee-well persona, and the back-slapping, and gives reporters nicknames. And they feel very honored by this. And, to some of us, it’s kind of astonishing that the national press corps – people, in some cases, are paid in the high six figures if not more...

Cliff Schecter: And they behave like they’re at a high school election.

BuzzFlash: Well, that they allow their reporting to be influenced by the fact that they’re being flattered and cajoled by a candidate, rather than by the issues at hand.

Cliff Schecter: Yes.

BuzzFlash: And this comes up in your book. I mean, McCain gets extremely favorable press coverage.

Cliff Schecter: Yeah, he does. And that’s an important part of why these temper stories [are appearing] now, particularly what the Washington Post did in reporting the stories, and even in quoting Senator Bob Smith – another one who’s saying that he disqualified McCain as being president – former Republican senator of New Hampshire – which is great. They went out and got reports, and they looked into what I did, and what others did. So I give the Washington Post all the credit. I give Fox News credit. But it’s still not getting out there in the manner in which it should for a guy where there are this many incidents. I’ve only named incidents of very big named people for the most part. There are all sorts of activists and others in the POW-MIA community and other places that have had to deal with John McCain and have horror stories to tell of how he treated them. So this is out there.

Now to answer your question. I would say there are three parts to it that I sort of define why the media does this – why McCain gets such a free pass.

The first part, I think, is the whole war hero thing – the fact that he served in Vietnam, the fact that he was a prisoner of war for five years and was tortured. The media has this John Wayne-type complex where most of the men who work in the media view themselves as tough guys. And they want to be working-class heroes. You hear them referring to themselves that way all the time. I’m not saying everybody’s this way. But there are many cases of this where they see something in McCain they wish they saw in themselves – a kind of courage on the battlefield. And so that’s one reason that they sort of fell in love with him.

But then after that, he’s smart – his people did two smart things. They played on that war hero background, and they built this whole straight-talk persona. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Whether it’s foreign policy, tax cuts, abortion – I could give you dates and names of things he’s flip-flopped on off the board. So [McCain's campaign] built this great false image of this guy, this Teddy Roosevelt guy who speaks truth to power, when nothing could be further from the truth. And the press has eaten that up.

And the final part, of course, is that he gives them access and gives them everything they want. Now you just brought up he invites them to the Sedona ranch, and loads them up with barbecue, and has a little bit of that back-slapping thing that Bush has. And when you combine all that together, there’s simply no doubt that that’s affected the coverage of him.

BuzzFlash: You know, it’s somewhat astonishing, you know, to us at BuzzFlash, that you could have ABC in the Democratic debate spending 50 minutes on questions like – to Barack Obama – do you believe that your former pastor loves America in his heart. And, yet the press doesn’t seem to be holding McCain accountable for Hagee endorsing him to any great degree. I mean, not with the tenacity and ferociousness that Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright has been brought up again and again, even though, you know, this is a secondary person. And on top of it, McCain sought Hagee’s endorsement.

Cliff Schecter: That’s correct.

BuzzFlash: So my question is: why is there this double standard toward McCain?

Cliff Schecter: Well, it’s exactly – it’s those three items that I talked about. He lays it on them, and sucks up to them constantly. They’re kind of in awe of his background way before he got into politics, something he did thirty-something years ago, which has nothing to do, by the way, with his political person. As someone once said to me: you know, courage in the battlefield and courage in politics are two very different things. And John McCain has proven that.

And then this straight-talker image. Again, that’s only the beginning of what they don’t report. To get to some of the more specifics, in 1990, he said we couldn’t even think about trading U.S. for Iraqi blood in the Gulf War. He was an isolationist. He was against being in Somalia, Haiti. He attacked Bill Clinton for it. And then you find out, of course that he does a complete 180 in the late nineties. Now, anybody who takes the positions McCain did before is waving the white flag. Now he's in league with neocon advisors and he'll have us go into Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Sudan when we’re done with Iraq, whatever "done" means. Richard Pearle wrote a book about this.

In addition, tax cuts – he stood up in 2001 and said George Bush’s tax cut was a budget buster. It went disproportionately to the wealthy. It was crazy during a time of war. He said that about the tax cut in 2003, after the war with Iraq. And now he’s fighting the fight to make these very same tax cuts permanent.

And the third one I’ll give you is on abortion. In 1999, he had two interviews with CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle where he said making abortion illegal would force women into horrible operations, and we shouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. Now he wants to overturn it. He even indicated he would support a human rights amendment.

So those are his three issues. I could give you a lot more when you go into gay rights, and creationism, and a variety of things he’s flip-flopped on. The media should be reporting this, but instead, they love the access. They love the pursuit of the image – the tough guy and all that. And so they don’t.

And just quickly saying what you said earlier, there was a guy employed in McCain's campaign in 2000, a known white supremacist named Richard Quinn, who wrote articles for a magazine called Southern Partisan. Other articles in the magazine talked about slavery being beneficial to African Americans. And Quinn himself openly praised David Duke and sold t-shirts mocking the assassination of President Lincoln. Where are the questions about that association?

Where are the questions about Rick Renzi, whom he got in a fist fight with, but eventually became friends with, who served in McCain's past campaign, and who’s now received a 53-count indictment against him by the FBI? McCain kept Renzi on as a co-chair of his Arizona campaign while running for office, after the guy was being investigated for all manner of misdeeds. Or the questions about Pastor Hagee. But beyond that, he befriended the late Jerry Falwell, who blamed 9/11 on Americans. He blamed it on gays and lesbians and a variety of other groups.

Or right here next to where I live in Columbus, Ohio, another [McCain association] reverend is named Rod Parsley, who has pretty much freaked out and said that the United States’ mission is to destroy Islam. Where are the questions on that? The truth is that if we want to get to the association game, there’s a heck of a lot of corrupt, crazy, deranged and racist people that John McCain has spent a lot of time with. This isn’t sort of a relationship in church. This is a political relationship with these people over many, many years. And he’s not being asked the very same questions.

BuzzFlash: And he also made peace with Jerry Falwell before he died.

Cliff Schecter: Well, yeah, I said that. That was one of the big ones. Falwell sat there after 9/11 and said that it was our fault. People for the American Way, gays, lesbians, separation of church and state – pretty much everything but the Tooth Fairy, although I’m sure he would have gotten to that – had caused 9/11 to happen. It was our fault. This is a guy whose endorsement McCain sought. McCain spoke at Liberty University, went on Meet the Press and said that Falwell was a positive influence on our political process, in contrast with the year 2000 when McCain said Falwell was an agent of intolerance. And yet nothing – nothing about him. Nothing about these unbelievably insane extremist preachers McCain supported.

BuzzFlash: Well, I should also note – and we’ve noted this on BuzzFlash – that there’s a double standard with Democrats and perhaps particularly a double standard because Barack Obama’s black, and he’s got the middle name Hussein, so the right wing’s going crazy about this. But McCain doesn’t generally wear a flag pin. And yet no one seems to ask him about this.

Cliff Schecter: Because that portrays one of the biases that I was talking about of the media towards him. Because they wouldn’t even deem to question his patriotism. Heck, he served us and was a prisoner for five years. By the way, Jeremiah Wright also served in the military.

BuzzFlash: Yeah, he was a Marine. I mean, you know, at a time when blacks were not treated that well in the Army.

Cliff Schecter: Right. So, you know, I mean, of course there’s a double standard. And it’s glaringly obvious to anybody who wants to take an objective look at these so-called quotes around this liberal media, which of course is a joke. Anybody who really watches can see the media has protected McCain, has stood up for him, and dismissed any charges. Just the other day, a bunch of major media figures dismissed the Washington Post article and said: oh, everybody has a temper. Well, not everybody has a temper where they physically assault people, call people, you know, unbelievable profanities in full public view, and make the kinds of enemies McCain has. And this is the guy we’re going to trust with his finger on the nuclear button or to go to diplomatic meetings abroad?

BuzzFlash: Well, again, you know, paradise is a Beach Boys song – "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran," as McCain sang in New Hampshire. This is not a joke, I gather.

Cliff Schecter: Bombing Iran isn’t funny. I think I’ve got a pretty decent sense of humor. I don’t find any humor in that.

BuzzFlash: We’ve occasionally seen some of his uglier sides emerge. Going back again, as you did, for the epithet that he shouted in public to his wife. But it was during the nineties, the Clinton administration, that he made the Chelsea Clinton joke about why’s she so ugly? Because she’s the daughter of Janet Reno and who was it?

Cliff Schecter: I don’t remember. I think it was Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton.

BuzzFlash: Yeah.

Cliff Schecter: He was implying a few things with that comment. He was making an unbelievably nasty and not just mean-spirited, but quite frankly, sophomoric attack on the daughter of the President of the United States. And of course, implying his wife was a lesbian.

BuzzFlash: Have there been other times, that sort of dark side?

Cliff Schecter: There certainly has. I have an account in my book of a perfect example of where you can sort of see two for one – that he’s not the reformer he claims to be, and what a vicious guy he is. When he was working on his so-called campaign finance reform, he was working with Common Cause. And the president of Common Cause at the time was Shellie Pingree, who’s currently running for Congress in Maine. And Shellie Pingree disagreed with him about how they should go forward. McCain said they should just ban these 527 groups – all these independent ads attacking people.

By the way, I also state to you another flip-flop. He’s accepted 600 grand from the Swift Boaters – a 527 group and people he called dishonorable in 2004 – that’s a little aside for you.

But at the time he was willing to just ban those groups. Shellie Pingree said that we need to push for school public finance campaigns. And they both had experience in that, because in Arizona and Maine, both of those states publicly finance campaigns. Well, McCain disagreed. Not only was he against her on reform, but he decided, instead of trying to work out differences with her, was that he’d try to destroy her. So he started lobbying board members and also calling funders, and calling her all sorts of unbelievable names, and then attacking her. Making up stories about her and trying to get her fired from her job.

The Shellie Pingree story was another story I broke, again with anonymous sources. McCain people said: oh, it’s all trash journalism. And now Mark Schmitt, who writes for The American Prospect, has come out with his name and thoroughly confirmed everything and said that he was there. I wish I had interviewed him for the Pingree story. I didn’t know he was involved in these matters back then, because I know Mark. And he has completely corroborated what I said. That was an example where McCain tried to destroy someone’s career, and ruin their reputation over the fact they simply disagreed with him.

McCain also recently went to a newspaper – I will send you this e-mail if you wish to see it, to back up my account. But I don’t want to give the name of the reporter or the name of the newspaper on the record. It’s a major newspaper in Great Britain. McCain went to them and he smeared me. He made up absolute falsehoods and lies about me. He said that I’m unstable. I’m a known liar. You know, everything you can imagine he’d do. I’m a big boy. I don’t care. I think it shows more about him than it does about me. I kind of find it funny when John McCain calls somebody else unstable. And so this is what we’ve got.

After eight years of Bush, this is what people don’t get who support McCain. If you want more of the type of smears that the Bush people did to Richard Clark and Paul O'Neill and others who dared criticize the Bush administration, when they went after them to destroy them, that is what you’re going to get with John McCain. That is the kind of vicious character he is. And that is his dark side. It’s been there since he was young. It hasn’t gone anywhere. When he got into that fight with Rick Renzi, for example, he was referring to him as boy, which he likes to do to people just to be nasty, to put people down who are younger or a station he sees as below himself. He’s just not a good person, quite frankly.

BuzzFlash: Could you apply your knowledge of McCain to something that happened this week? Here, we had the North Carolina Republican Party running this very nasty ad against Barack Obama based on the Reverend Wright association. Well, McCain said: "I totally disapprove of the ad." But they went ahead and ran it. Now there's a 'have your cake and eat it too.' McCain’s the presumptive candidate of his party. And to be really objective, you’d assume the North Carolina party would go along with their presumptive candidate. But it doesn’t seem like he did anything beyond telling the media that he objected to it.

Cliff Schecter: Right. And I’m really glad you just asked that question, Mark, because that, right there, in the essence, is John McCain. That’s been his entire career. That’s what I was talking about – his foreign policy and taxes. It’s not good enough for John McCain to just take a position. He takes it – whatever position he believes at that moment, which, by the way, changes all the time – and he stands up and moralizes, and says how he’s right and everybody else is wrong. He then goes beyond it to personally insult some people who disagree with him, question their motives, question all manner of things about them. And then he acts like he’s doing it from good reasons. He calls it bipartisanship. And, you know, he’s doing it because he’s standing up for the country. That’s why he’s wrecking this person’s reputation – that’s why. And then you find him, like you did on foreign policy or taxes or abortion, 180 degrees on the opposite side within any matter of time. On one show with Chris Matthews, he switched his position on civil unions within one TV show. He was for it. And then somebody whispered in his ear, and then he was against it. The point is that yes, he’s having his cake and eating it too.

There’s no way that this guy who would stand up and curse people out before the Senate – if he were truly angry about that ad, we’d know it. MCain's own people had an e-mail this past week saying that Barack Obama was the candidate of Hamas. This came from the guy who said he wants this to be an honorable campaign, and he’s not going to engage in character assassination. He wants to talk about issues. I’m not going to use political speech here. He’s a liar, and a serial liar. And he’s gotten away with it by creating this straight-talk image. And it’s done a disservice to our democracy, quite frankly.

People are not getting earnest information about this guy. There is no doubt in my mind – I wrote a piece about this for the Campaign for America’s Future, where I’m a guest blogger right now, about the very thing you’re talking about in North Carolina. And how obvious it is that they’re bringing up the ghosts of Jesse Helms. And John McCain is just looking the other way, because that’s what he does. He says one thing and he does another. That’s John McCain.

BuzzFlash: Okay, let me ask you two more questions. One is: when McCain went on his recent trip to the Middle East and Iraq, that we described on BuzzFlash as Joe Lieberman accompanying him as sort of the assisted living caretaker for McCain, because McCain was sort of an assisted living tourist, and Lieberman was the assisted living caretaker, because McCain didn’t seem to know what was going on in Iraq or the Middle East.

Cliff Schecter: Lieberman had to whisper to him the difference between the Shiites and the Sunnis.

BuzzFlash: Is McCain really that out of it, that he doesn’t know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, like who’s aligned with whom in Iraq and Iran, like it just doesn’t matter? And I ask that because it seems that McCain is the embodiment, at least now, of the victory culture. Who cares who they are or what they are? We just got to win because we’re Americans.

Cliff Schecter: That’s exactly right.

BuzzFlash: Don’t bother me with the details.

Cliff Schecter: I’m really glad you’re asking the perfect questions for people that need to know what they need to know here. Because the temper is a huge issue. The fact that McCain isn’t really a reformer, and pretends to be. And has 66 lobbyists bundling for him, and his campaign manager is a lobbyist.

BuzzFlash: He’s one of the biggest lobbyists.

Cliff Schecter: Yeah, Rick Davis, his campaign manager, is a huge lobbyist. And Charlie Black, his media advisor, and then the guy who runs the Senate office, Mark Buse, is a lobbyist. And, you know, he’s done all manner of favors for people with businesses on the Commerce Committee. And he goes on and on about how much of a reformer he is. He is not. Those are two things people need to understand.

The third one I think that’s very important for them to understand is he literally is the reprise of George W. Bush when it comes to knowledge of foreign policy and economic policy. I like to call him George W. Bush that can finish reading My Pet Goat. McCain's main attitude is 'Don’t bother me with the details.' McCain’s said he’s part of the war caucus now. His stance toward foreign policy is: 'I don’t really care. They’re all bad guys, and all look the same and sound the same, and that’s all that matters.'

Same thing with economic policy. He’s admitted he doesn’t really know the American economic policy, and that’s just fine. Bring Phil Graham on board – one of the guys who’s most responsible for the housing crisis right now, according to Paul Krugman and others, for some of the deregulation he helped push through when he was a Senator from Texas, and known as a senator in the pocket of the banking industry. Of course, Graham had to go work at UBS right after he deregulated them.

So expect McCain to just turn it over. Expect him to turn over the economic policy to Phil Graham the way George W. Bush has turned it over to all manner of people on the right. And expect him to turn over his foreign policy to the Bill Kristols, and the Charles Krauthammers, and the other ignoramuses of the world who have no idea about foreign cultures, and don’t care to know anything about foreign cultures. Whether something will work or not, whether diplomacy is the best option – well, they want to grab their guns first. Of course, all the ones advising McCain have also never – unlike McCain - have never stepped before a battlefield. It’s all playing games of Risk on their computers. And that’s who you’re looking at – a guy that just has a complete lack of knowledge, you know.

On the issue of healthcare, he simply says how horrible government healthcare is. And funny that – he’s been on government healthcare his entire life. He was born to an admiral. Here’s a guy who has had government healthcare taking care of him, and well, he’s reached his seventies now. So it seems it’s done pretty well for him.

BuzzFlash: He denied that, when someone asked him about that, if I recall.

Cliff Schecter: Well, Stephanopoulos asked him, and it was an absolutely lame joke, saying, well, the government’s taken care of me for a couple of years. So he wasn’t denying it. He was playing off of what he always plays off of, which is I was in the Hanoi Hilton, so anything else I do politically therefore is acceptable and good, because I was a prisoner of war. So he didn’t really deny it. He just changed the subject. But he knows as well as anybody else knows that the very healthcare he attacks is socialist. And the "horrible" government healthcare is the healthcare he’s been happy to accept his entire life. And he probably doesn’t really know the details because he’s never needed to. When you have government healthcare given to you by your dad, and when your wife – you get to leave your first wife and marry somebody else who’s worth $100 million, you don’t need to know much about the economy. You know, he’s perfectly fine not knowing about these issues.

And that is where he will be George Bush’s third term.

BuzzFlash: Okay, the final question is – and I don’t want to get into technical details, because they’re quite lengthy. I heard Rachel Maddow talking to the legal counsel for the DNC about this. And it took about a half an hour. But you’ll know what I’m talking about. But for our readers, this is to say that there is a strong case to be made that McCain in the primaries is violating the very campaign finance laws that he holds himself out as a maverick for creating – the Russ Feingold law having to do with a loan that was made to his campaign. The DNC is trying to get the FEC to look into it, but the FEC doesn’t have a quorum. So McCain – well, McCain’s sort of getting off the hook on all this. I think the details speak for themselves. And anyone who hears the story of what the loan had to do in terms of violations of the campaign finance laws he helped to create, it’s pretty clear. And he’s being saved by the lack of a quorum. But this goes back to the emergence of him as a maverick figure because he teamed up with Russ Feingold and campaign finance reform. But, you know, there’s a strong theory, of course, you’d agree with that may merely have come out of his trying to get out of the tar that he had poured upon himself with the Keating 5 affair.

Cliff Schecter: Yes.

BuzzFlash: Most people don’t even remember the Keating 5, not that we have long memories in America for political history. But his campaign finance efforts with Feingold brilliantly seemed to bury Keating 5, so we think, oh, it must have been the Keating 4.

Cliff Schecter: Isn’t that funny how that works here?

Another thing he’s gone back and forth on numerous times is whether or not he supports public funding for campaigns. He’s either supported or not supported numerous times. As you just referred to, this current law – the campaign spending – he obviously is not paying attention to the law, and doesn’t really mind the fact that, as you said, there’s no quorum. They’re not going to do anything about it. He can get away with it. So he’s violating the very spirit and really the actuality of the law that he supported in the past. But again, this is again what he’s done. He questions other people and talks about the appearance of impropriety and then he gets in a huff about it. Again, wouldn’t that make him be questioned whether he should have his campaign surrounded by lobbyists – 66 of them bundling for him? I mean, shouldn’t that have made him question not only whether he should have been on Charlie Keating’s corporate jet back in the eighties, and had the babysitter – which is really a true story – flown to the Bahamas on the corporate jet, but also whether he should be getting government people to try and support Vicki Iseman's clients, such as telco companies.

Iseman may be spending time with Rick Renzi, whom the FBI is looking into for financial impropriety. And Blackwell, who ran for governor of Ohio, and was the Secretary of State here that suppressed votes and had an investment in the Diebold computer touch screen. Blackwell had stock in Diebold and by coincidence had them buy these very touch screen computers to be used for voting. McCain has been spending time with these characters.

George Allen, who had a number of financial and other scandals, introduced McCain at the CPAC conference recently. McCain just doesn’t live up in any way to the standards he sets for the rest of us, and the image of being a reformer.

BuzzFlash: Just one quick follow-up and we’ll let you go. In relation to the New York Times story about McCain and Vicky Iseman -- it was very interesting. The mainstream press and some of the so-called pundits on television quickly focused on the propriety of whether the New York Times was indicating an affair between Iseman and McCain, rather than, as you pointed out, the impropriety of the fact that she was a lobbyist, and he was apparently passing on favors to the industry that she represented.

Cliff Schecter: Iseman was a telco lobbyist.

BuzzFlash: And that was the bigger story, you know, in terms of improprieties. Whether or not he had an intimate relationship to her, you know, is largely, you know, irrelevant. The fact that he was that close to her, she was flying with him, and he was doing favors for her clients, was the larger issue. But that got lost in whether or not the New York Times should have printed an article that suggested there was something salacious between them when – and the New York Times did a bad job because it didn’t bring the favoritism issue up front.

Cliff Schecter: Right. The shame of the whole thing is it kind of reminds one of what happened with George Bush and the Dan Rather situation. A couple of documents – whether or not they were forged – became the focus instead of the fact that there was a year and a half of time when Bush wasn’t showing up for duty.

It’s the same thing with John McCain here. People could focus on attacking the appearance of an affair with this woman and not proving it, when the point you needed to prove was that he wrote improper letters to clients that she was working for, pressuring regulators to deregulate the cable market in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and other places. Not to mention she was able to give him a nice earful about other clients of hers when they were flying on corporate jets around the country and going to elite parties. And that was the important part. So it’s half the battle that got lost.

I’ve got two chapters in The Real McCain about it, looking at whether McCain is really a reformer. And just like many of the things I brought up on this phone call, it really debunks the reformer image. People have forgotten the Keating 5. It was a brilliant move on the part of McCain’s people for him to be the straight talker and push for campaign finance reform and all that to try and cover up his past. But the truth is, while he was pushing for campaign finance reform, he was still behaving in the same exact way as he did when the Keating 5 situation occurred. He never changed.

BuzzFlash: Okay, Cliff Schecter, a wonderful book. And thank you for exposing the real McCain.

Cliff Schecter: Thank you so much for your time, Mark. I appreciate it.

You can purchase The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't (Paperback) and support BuzzFlash by clicking here.

You can visit the website forThe Real McCain here.

You can visit Cliff Schechter's website here.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.