mccain Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

I more or less live blogged the first Obama-McCain debate via Twitter (reverse chronological order). I'm an Obama supporter but don't think he did very well. Especially at the end, McCain turned on the human, with his pledge to support veterans, etc. I think Obama would do a much better job supporting vets but like most recent Democrats he has trouble getting out of professorial tone. 

Well the Department of Justice must be a Quaker Ranter reader because they followed yesterday's advice and confiscated the private papers of actress Anne Hathaway, ex-girlfriend, board member and business partner of con man Raffaello Follieri.

But yet again her publicity machine rolls on. Most news outlets are calling the papers her "diaries" in oblique reference to her appearance in the 2001's "Princess Diaries" movie. One tongue-in-cheek headline read "The FBI knows whether Anne Hathaway dots her 'I's with hearts." Financial papers, photos, documents, etc., are reduced to "diaries". Boy oh boy. I wonder if the celebrity blogs will start describing the D.A. as a "fire breathing dragon." Poor little Anne bilking millions of dollars from investors, how was she to know?

The NY Daily News article says the papers included photos of Follieri with the Clintons, Pope John Paul II and John and Cindy McCain. Down here in South Jersey we can't help but wonder whether a few chummy shots of the Italian con man with pal Bishop Joseph Galante. Such pictures certainly exist somewhere, whether in Anne's collection or in the photo shoebox of some South Jersey priest. I would love to see them.

There's a reasonable expectation that intelligence agencies should be possessed of a certain degree of intelligence. The graphic pictures of U.S. military personnel torturing prisoners in iraq and Guantanamo Bay outraged Americans and brought condemnation from all corners of the civilized world.

The stories that came out of Badgdad's Al Grahib prison gave a boost to the iraqi insurgency, proof of the brutality of the American invaders that could be paraded across the screens of Al Jazeera. We've never heard that any reliable intelligence information ever came from the degrading interrogation practices employed at Al Grahib, which shouldn't be a surprise: torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique (many of the detainees at Al Grahib were taxi drivers at the wrong place at the wrong time when a military sweep came through). Torture's real purposes are usually much baser: revenge, humiliation and base cruelty.

Lesson to the White House: Unless you want to stroke the insurgency (and get more U.S. soldiers killed), lay off the torture.

Unfortunately we have a White House that doesn't learn lessons very well. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 last week on a John McCain-sponsored amendment to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees held by the United States government. President George W. Bush is now actively lobbying the Senate to add a loophole that would allow U.S. intelligence agency to continue torture.

Yes, that's right, the President of the United States ("Beacon of the Free World," "The Light of Democracy," etc.) is officially going on record as a supporter of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. It's a sign of a certain kind of inhumanity, or at least insensitivity, that Bush even had the guts to approach the author of the anti-torture amendment asking for the CIA exemption, for McCain spent much of his Vietnam War service being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.

What kind of intelligence is needed to know Bush's lobbying is yet another gift to the propaganda arm of iraqi insurgency? It looks like we'll be getting to that 2,000th solider soon.