January 30th

 

Once again there are no right-wing columnists in the morning paper so I have the opportunity to aim at targets of convenience.  It is tempting to go after Governor (as she insists on being called) Sarah Palin who embarrassed herself yet again in front of a large TV audience. It will be impossible this time to blame “the mainstream media” for her humiliation. She has truly become a pathetic figure. In her case we don’t have to worry about any part of the body-politic ever being in her care.

But then there is John McCain; he picked Ms. Palin to be his Vice Presidential running mate back in 2007. McCain is still in a position where similar bad judgment can damage the country. As a result of McCain’s selection Sarah Palin could, right now, be President of the United States. McCain has never admitted that Palin was a poor choice for Vice President. For McCain as for most other candidates it’s about winning the election, it isn’t about the country. The typical candidate, skilled at sophistry, excuses anything that will help him win on the basis that his winning is necessary for the country’s wellbeing.

McCain was a genuine Vietnam War hero. He was a prisoner of war for nearly six years and was repeatedly tortured. To his eternal credit he has insisted that his country not use many of the methods for questioning prisoners favored by his right-wing colleagues. Still, when he returned to this country he divorced his wife who had been badly crippled in an auto accident while he was a prisoner and indulged himself in an orgy of skirt-chasing. This ended, assuming that it has ended, only when he married his current wife, a very pretty blonde multi-millionaire heiress, eighteen years his junior, whose fortune secured his political future.

McCain, with acolytes Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte, have tried repeatedly to blame the administration, preferably Secretary Clinton, for the disaster at Benghazi where our Ambassador and three guards were murdered. Clinton has said that she was at fault for not increasing security when that was requested. Short of invading Libya it is difficult to see what protection even a company of marines could supply against a large number of dedicated attackers willing to get into the compound at any cost. Our embassies are by tradition United States territory but they exist at the pleasure of the host country. Iran’s takeover of our embassy in Tehran in 1979 is evidence that countries can ignore this convention. The Benghazi incident is evidence that rather than provide solutions McCain and other politicians would prefer to use this tragedy to further their political agendas.