McCain Says He Knows & Hates War-But "NO ONE Can Name A War He Did NOT Wholeheartedly Promote"

Friday, September 05, 2008
Rambo and the Mean Girl
Juan Cole

McCain keeps saying that he knows war and hates it and wants to avoid it. But no one can name a war in recent memory that he did not wholeheartedly promote. He was an enthusiastic cheerleader for Vietnam, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq War. His record strongly indicates that if elected he will plunge the US into yet more violent conflict, in a never-ceasing quest to wipe out that stain on his character, of having been broken in Vietnam, and that blemish on US nationalism, of defeat.

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As for Sarah Palin, her spiteful and snarky dismissal of Barack Obama and community organizers recalls the Tina Fey film "Mean Girls." Palin, the former beauty queen who posed in a red, white and blue bikini with a gun, is very like the leader of the Plastics clique in "Mean Girls," the Rachel McAdams character, Regina George. Her clique sets the standard for style at school, establishing itself at the top of the social hierarchy by its regimented exclusiveness. Those who are in any way different are put down by the Plastics, who crow about their superiority just as Palin exults in her (largely non-existent) "executive experience." Although the surface narrative of Sarah Palin is her everywoman small town ordinariness, the subtext is that she is special, as capable of shooting a tiger as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and as at the same time a veritable Miss World. The McCain camp is hoping that the American common person will be seduced into Palin's Plastic clique just as the Lindsay Lohan character was in the film. (Lohan's character was initially an outsider, having returned from Africa . . .)

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Rambo and the Mean Girl are narratives intended as what magicians call misdirection.
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Rambo and the Mean Girl will tell you that they are the squeaky clean Republicans, not like all those other Republicans, and we should focus on them, not on all the crooks.

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You want real policy positions and a rationale for them that goes beyond "I will make my friends rich," then you won't find that in the convention in Minnesota.

more at:
http://www.juancole.com/2008/09/rambo-and-mean-girl.html

Remember.... the Repug mantra... to Clinton... "He's starting a war without a defined finish.?"

cause, you know, only democrats' military actions are bad.

MOTS, FMY.