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Title: THE GATHERING OF THE SONS OF BITC#ES - FLASHBACK: George Bush And Karl Rove Accuse John McCain Of Being A Traitor In Vietnam
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URL Source: http://patdollard.com/2015/07/flash ... of-being-a-traitor-in-vietnam/
Published: Jul 25, 2015
Author: Pat Dollard
Post Date: 2015-07-25 17:43:08 by HAPPY2BME-4UM
Keywords: JEB BUSH, 2016, KARL ROVE, JOHN MCAIN
Views: 70
Comments: 2
Excerpted from The New Yorker, November 17, 2008: defining moment of the “old” John McCain—as many Americans, even some of his friends, have begun to refer to him as he was before his run for the Presidency in 2008—took place in February, 2000, during his first bid for the White House, when he was challenging George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in the South Carolina primary. McCain had recently upset Bush in New Hampshire and was in a buoyant mood, vowing that, like “Luke Skywalker fighting the Death Star,” he would not only defeat Bush but reform a party corrupted by “big money” and, as he later put it, “agents of intolerance.”
Within days, sordid attacks began to appear: flyers on car windows claiming that McCain, who had adopted an orphan from Bangladesh, actually had fathered a black child; recorded phone messages, or robo-calls, spreading rumors that McCain’s wife, Cindy, who had once been addicted to prescription painkillers, was a junkie; and lies, propagated by an obscure group of Vietnam veterans, suggesting that McCain had become a traitor while serving in Vietnam.
McCain’s response was decisive: he pulled from television his negative advertisements, and announced to supporters, “If we don’t prevail, my friends, we know that we have taken the honorable way.” On the evening of the primary, McCain and his family watched the returns in a hotel suite in Charleston. As the polls came in, showing that he had lost by more than ten points, Cindy wept. “How could they believe all that about you?” she said of the public.
Excerpted from Vanity Fair: On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush. In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative. Bush had resisted. His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.
Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead. With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” Warren Rudman, the 74-year-old former New Hampshire senator and one of McCain’s national chairmen, told me. “When you look at a lot of campaigns, not just that one, when front-runners suddenly fall behind, their campaign consultants just go off the deep end.… People going down for the third time, they grab on for anything they can get ahold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”
At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time.
“I always knew that if Bush got in trouble he’d push the doomsday button,” a respected Washington figure with solid ties to the religious right told me, asking that his name not be used. He said he’d been told the strategy called for an “underground campaign” by all the heavyweight groups of the Republican and Christian right, a campaign that would be modeled on Ralph Reed’s infamous, Atwater-like boast about his Christian Coalition work: “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until Election Night.” Luckily for Bush, the source said, the showdown was in South Carolina, where the Christian Coalition had its greatest strength. They’d work through word of mouth in the evangelical community, and it’d never be picked up by the media. “Reed had pledged to Rove that he could deliver. Ultimately, it was all about power. They were all attaching their fates to Bush.”
If Bush had everything at stake, the religious right had nearly as much. From a power high after the 1994 Gingrich revolution, it had been humbled in the ’98 elections for going overboard with the Clinton sex scandal. In 2000 the key leaders passed over one of their own, Gary Bauer, and put their money, literally, on Bush. Lee Bandy, of The State newspaper, who has seen it all in 43 years of covering South Carolina politics, told me, “I’ve never seen the Christian right so energized.”
History was on Bush’s side. And, in a way, so was Lee Atwater, nine years after his death at 40 from a brain tumor. Stopping an insurgent like McCain was just what the master strategist envisioned when, in 1979, he persuaded the South Carolina G.O.P. to abandon its presidential-preference convention for an early and open primary that would be the gateway to the South. The next year, he directed Ronald Reagan’s landslide there over George H. W. Bush. Later, the South Carolina primary became known as the “fire wall” for the party establishment. In 1988, after Vice President Bush (with Atwater in his prime, steering his national campaign) lost in Iowa to Bob Dole and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, he managed to turn it around in New Hampshire. But it was only after his romp in South Carolina that he was home free.
In 2000, George W. Bush was the clear choice of the state’s bosses—known as “the Campbell machine,” after Carroll Campbell, governor from 1987 to ’95 and still popular. It could as easily have been “the Atwater mafia,” since Atwater and Campbell, as a team and starting virtually from scratch, had all but achieved one-party rule for the G.O.P. in South Carolina.
Besides Campbell himself, the Bush team was chockablock with Atwater debtors: Senator Strom Thurmond, who owed him his tough 1978 re-election; local strategist Warren Tompkins, who had been friends with him since the fourth grade; and communications czar Tucker Eskew, who’d apprenticed under him. From the religious right there was Robertson, who’d gone to Atwater’s hospital bedside shortly before his death in 1991 to try to clear up any bitterness left by the ’88 race. (He believed Atwater had been behind the leak of the sex scandal involving fellow TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart; it broke days before the South Carolina vote and damaged Robertson by association.) And there was Coalition executive vice president Roberta Combs, an old South Carolina pal, and Reed, who used to say that all he ever really wanted to be was a “Christian Lee Atwater.” In 1997, Reed left the Coalition for Enron. (It’s been alleged that Rove arranged it, to keep him loyal to Bush; both Reed and Rove deny this.) He then set up his own political-and-corporate-consulting firm in Atlanta, which in 2000 had a multi-million-dollar contract to mobilize voters for the G.O.P. (Reed declined repeated requests to be interviewed.)
Even Texans Karl Rove and George W. had their own quirky Atwater histories. In 1973 a 22-year-old Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for chairman of the College Republican National Committee. And in Dad’s 1988 race Junior had been assigned to Atwater as a sort of family watchdog and sidekick (“It turned out they were on the same wavelength,” said a mutual friend), giving him a front-row seat as the hatchet man engineered the destruction of Michael Dukakis with the notorious Willie Horton racial-scare campaign.
Given all that firepower—plus a big money advantage: Bush’s side, unfettered by federal limits, reportedly had as much as $8 million, while McCain, who had capped out in the state, had less than $3 million—some experts, even some McCain backers, are convinced Bush would have won no matter what.
But nothing was left to chance.
McCain’s deputy campaign manager, Roy Fletcher, told me that by the morning after the New Hampshire vote “we had all kinds of stuff coming into the Washington headquarters. They were already spreading all this crap about McCain.… We knew right then we had a problem: These guys are gonna go nuts. … It was pretty obvious they’d laid a plan for South Carolina, to start immediately. Just boom! Go at him as hard and as vicious as you can.”
Nancy Snow drove all night from New Hampshire to volunteer in McCain’s office in her old hometown of Greenville. Then an assistant professor of political science at New England College (she’s now at Cal State Fullerton), Snow had invited John and Cindy McCain to speak at her school and was sold.
“We were starting to get wind that this was going to be a very different campaign,” she said from her parents’ home in Birmingham, Alabama. “There was this sense that everything was turning negative. People were walking into the office with copies of this particular e-mail and asking us about it.… It was so revolting.”
The “revolting” e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—was from Richard Hand, a professor of the Bible at Greenville’s Christian-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2. With the school’s ban on interracial dating still in effect then, the veteran political reporter Curtis Wilkie told me “he might as well have gone to a goddamned Klan rally” as go to B.J.U.
Bush came under attack for it, mostly from Democrats and commentators. McCain said little. (It wasn’t until nine days after the primary that he declared that the G.O.P. is “the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson … the party of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones.”) But Danielle Vinson, an associate professor of political science at Greenville’s Furman University, who studied the primary in depth, told me that what the media didn’t grasp is that “B.J.U. people are very active, very political; they’re a great campaign resource.” As it turned out, Wilkie said, “Bush knew what he was doing going to Bob Jones”—shrewdly “pandering” to the evangelical vote, just as called for in the Reed game plan.
“This whole thing, it was orchestrated by Rove, it was all Bush’s deal.… It was pretty rank,” said Fletcher, “and they had an institution that was peddling all that shit, and it was a university, Bob Jones University. I’m telling you, if there was a campaign headquarters in South Carolina, there it was. Hand was part of it, but Hand wasn’t the only one.”
Mark Carman, who owns the Capitol City News & Maps store, told me of going to a candidates’ debate in Columbia, “and when we got back to our car, there was a flyer under the windshield wiper saying something about McCain having a Negro child. My wife is African-American—she just tore it up.”
State representative Jim Merrill, a political operative in 2000 who’d backed Dan Quayle before moving to McCain, told me, “We caught a couple of kids red-handed putting flyers on cars outside a seniors’ center in Hilton Head. One of the kids said a guy had paid him 50 bucks to do it.” Who was that guy? He had no idea.
Kevin Geddings, a prominent South Carolina Democratic consultant now based in North Carolina, told me someone had faxed him “a kind of cheesy Kinko’s pamphlet” with a photograph of the McCain family. “It was just so obvious,” he said. “It was one of the few shots you’ve ever seen of the McCains that so prominently featured that particular girl.”
The girl in question is Bridget. In 1991, when Cindy McCain was on a relief mission to Bangladesh, she was asked by one of Mother Teresa’s nuns to help a young orphan with a cleft palate. Flying her to the U.S. for surgery, Cindy realized she couldn’t give her up. At the Phoenix airport, she broke it to her husband, and they eventually adopted the child. But few people knew that story. In the words of McCain’s national campaign manager, Rick Davis, a smear doesn’t have “to be true to be effective.”
McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”
Almost daily, the ugly buzz grew. Another prominent rumor was that Cindy was a drug addict. In 1994 she’d admitted that she had a prescription-painkiller problem and blamed it on two spinal surgeries and the stress of her husband’s role in the Keating Five scandal. (He was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a disgraced financier.)
There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. 
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#1. To: neoconsnailed (#0)
U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY
He is beneath contempt.
JOHN McCAIN and INDIAN CASINO GAMBLING
#2. To: HAPPY2BME-4UM (#1)
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