So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time...

Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are two more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain's growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday's Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.

In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would "rely heavily on" for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.

Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.

I think I need to start keeping a list.

...I suppose I could add the fact that he rejected calls for Pervez Musharraf's resignation in December 2007, while welcoming it today, but that's not an exaggeration or a lie. That's just piss-poor judgment, based on the biased notion that only a strongman can keep the brown people together. It's truly a colonial mindset for foreign policy where you install the dictator to keep the masses relatively stable. It's dumb thinking, and dangerous besides.

Don't Know Much About History

Chris Matthews' brutal takedown of some robotic wingnut yesterday was notable simply for how easy it was. Apparently asking a conservative to define the words coming out of their mouth is a question on par with the final round of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.



Of course, what the wingnut is referring to above is the President's comments yesterday in Israel, trying to stick it to the Democrats by calling them Nazi-appeasers. He used the artful phrase "an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ in discussing the times in 1939, aware but unwilling to admit that he was alluding to Republican isolationist Senator William Borah of Idaho. What he appeared blissfully unaware of was the collaboration of his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, who reaped financial reward for him and his family (including his son Bush 41 and grandson Bush 43) through sitting on boards of companies who did business with the Nazis.

(By the way, this is the biggest gift George Bush could have given the Obama campaign, so much so that I almost believe it had to have been staged.)

But less remarked upon was this amazingly ignorant comment by John McCain in an interview with Matt Bai.

as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

Of course, there is no history of colonialism in the Middle East. Except for Algeria. And Jordan. And Iran. And Saudi Arabia. And Yemen. And Bahrain. And Oman. And Qatar. And The United Arab Emirates. And Iraq, whose borders were almost randomly drawn on a British map, which has led us to the instability we see today.

(McCain, by the way, was for talking to Hamas before he was against it, another example of torching the past.)

The worst thing the conservative movement has foisted on the country is a collapse of historical memory. Our civic education here is not so robust, and our civic knowledge of history is worse. This has given wide latitude for conservatives to create their own reality, and jabber away with "facts" that consist of shibboleths and catch phrases, which by now have been ripped of all meaning outside the Manichean "good" and "bad." That's what we saw with that shameful appearance on Hardball. That's what we saw by the President yesterday. That's what we saw from McCain in that interview. And that, sadly, is a part of America. The Poor Man says it best:

It’s all like this. Everything is just like this. Some blank young person who has memorized a 5″x7″ index card of focus group-approved phrases, yelling, yelling, yelling over everyone. And you can say what you want, and be as right as you want, but he’s going to keep yelling, and yelling, and yelling until you get sick of it, and at the end of the day everybody knows that Barack Obama goes to secret Muslim church. Everything is like this. An election won’t fix it. This rules the world.

Laura Bush is in the bubble, too

I defy you to listen to this NPR report from Weekend All Things Considered and not lose your lunch. It describes the lengths to which large government agencies will go to shield the powerful, in this case, the First Lady, from undeniable truths, and in fact it accurately characterizes how Western elites have allowed themselves to be exposed to colonial lands for centuries. While visiting the African nation of Mali, one of the most persistently poor and water scarce countries on the planet, the US Embassy and international aid organizations did their best to create a Potemkin village, ensuring that Mrs. Bush would walk away from the visit satisfied that life was improving for the people of Mali, when in fact the same struggle for existence continues. It's a sickening report.

Addie Goss courageously chronicled the tremendous amount of work done to refurbish a school that would be the centerpiece of the First Lady's visit, which is financed by the President's African Education Initiative:

It was Thursday, only 24 hours left before the First Lady’s visit, and a work crew from the US Embassy was installing electrical outlets in two classrooms. The next day, the outlets would power the fans to cool Mrs. Bush and the rest of the crowd. But like most schools in Mali, the Mandela school doesn’t have enough money for electricity, so the power cord from these new outlets led out the windows to a mobile generator the Embassy brought over and hid out back.

USAID bought brand-new gravel to cover the mud in the courtyard, so Mrs. Bush could walk down it during her choreographed visit. The trees and bushes were freshly trimmed and watered. The kids who would serenade Mrs. Bush wore matching traditional outfits. This is about as far removed from the reality of Mali as humanly possible.

Demba Bundi is a high school teacher who works with the Teacher Training Via Radio program. During the week before the First Lady arrived, he watched the slow removal of plastic bags, peanut shells and paper trash from the courtyard. On Tuesday, he saw an embassy work crew tear out two of the kid’s water spouts because they were in the way of Mrs. Bush’s entrance. He was also struck by some selective re-painting on the wall surrounding the school.

DB: Only the entrance door has been painted new, because that’s where everybody gets in. But the rest of the wall is dirty, and you have all these American gangster boy kind of graffiti on the wall, and nobody seems to care about that, but just the entrance door which to me is so interesting.

Every move of Mrs. Bush was planned to the letter, so the US Embassy did the bare minimum needed to ensure that she wouldn't encounter anything in her line of sight that would trouble her beautiful mind. The school even set up a chorus of third-graders who would grace the First Lady with a "traditional song." So traditional that it was in a language none of the kids knew, French, the COLONIAL language of the nation. That must of been more soothing to the Western ears of the First Lady than Bamanka, what they actually speak. So FOUR DAYS of class time was spent teaching these kids this one song in a foreign language so the First Lady could smile that Joker grin and feel good about herself and her husband's fine work serving the educational needs of Africans.

Incidentally, even BEFORE the renovations, this was one of the richest and most successful schools in all of Mali, inaugurated by Nelson Mandela (the school bears his name) and a recipient of plenty of foreign aid. But for a White House official visit, every blade of grass had to be in place, every piece of the wall had to be freshly painted. God forbid that someone noticed the crushing POVERTY in the country.

American sources at the Embassy say the school is refurbished to allow Mrs. Bush to be comfortable and focus on the substance of the event. Aside from the Mandela School, Mrs. Bush made just two stops in Mali: the President’s mansion and the house of the US Ambassador. The whole visit was over within hours.

So this was the part of the visit where Mrs. Bush got the "authentic" view of "real Mali." A complete fabrication. And did the US Embassy even bother to leave the improvements in place after the visit?

Yesterday morning I returned to the Mandela School with teacher Demba Bundi. The courtyard was once again covered in trash, this time water bottle labels and donut cartons from the First Lady’s visit [...]

We went into the classroom that had been electrically fitted. The Embassy had removed the fans, the furniture and the generator the same afternoon as the First Lady’s visit. Even the outlets had been pulled out of the walls.

It's impossible to know whether or not the First Lady knows about any of these herculean efforts to make surface-level improvements so the places she visits look just gleaming. Maybe she's as blissfully ignorant as the President. It's a comfortable place to be, as the Embassy employees said. You can will yourself into believing that you're a fine person who's doing great things to help impoverished Africans and build them a better life. The reality is far crueler. But this of course is how emissaries have viewed the "rabble" of faraway lands for quite some time. And this false impression is a two-way street. The very wise teacher Demba Bundi had a great quote:

Mali is a poor country, we’re not ashamed of saying it, we’re poor. But despite poverty level, we still want to impress the West. Which to me is pointless. If I am poor and sleeping on the dirt and you are coming to visit me, let’s hang out on the dirt. And maybe I’d have a better chance to get some help from you.

If I didn't happen to be in the car on a lazy Sunday in the middle of summer right before a holiday, I wouldn't have known about this truly shocking report. Kudos to NPR for putting it on the air. And there's a lesson in it for all of us. We all have this subjective sense of how things operate, without going deeper into what has been constructed behind the curtains to maintain that impression. I know that the likes of Laura Bush probably never reflect on that, but maybe we all should. And we should always endeavor to seek information about the world as it is and not they way we would like it to be.