John McCain recently displayed yet another example of how truly disingenuous he is, by criticizing the Georgian-Russian Conflict with the statement that, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” Watch the video below, and then let’s talk.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this blog just talking politics. This site is supposed to be about the intersection of capitalism and culture. But, it’s an election year, and, I suppose you just can’t get away from it. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time writing about the virtues of Ron Paul.

The fact that John McCain was able to come from so far behind in the primaries to achieve the position he’s in now makes me sad for the gullibility of so many Americans. The man is utterly, desperately, completely disingenuous. He talks about how much he sympathizes with people who disagree with him, which would be great, except that he’s so obviously full of crap. His advisers are lobbyists and sycophants who tell him that the policies he wants to work, will work. And how can anyone have fallen for the way he laid it on so thick during one of the Republican debates when he took his microphone off the podium and walked out to address the wife of a veteran who disagreed with the war? That stunt should have buried him. When a person is truly compassionate, these gestures emerge organically. When a person is deceitful and conniving, these gestures are contrived. And how can ANYONE not see this in John McCain?

Don’t forget how the late Tim Russert caught John McCain being disingenuous about the war earlier this year. The man is a hypocrite. Why are so many Americans buying his lines? About this most recent gaff, Huffington Post had this to say:

It was the type of foreign policy rhetorical blunder that has regularly plagued the McCain campaign and could have diplomatic ripples as well. Certainly the comment was meant in innocence. But for those predisposed to the notion that the U.S. is an increasingly arrogant international actor, the suggestion by a presidential candidate that, in this day and age, countries don’t invade one another – when the U.S. is occupying two foreign nations – does little to alleviate that negative perception.

I suppose the larger issue does, in fact, pertain to culture, if not capitalism: We’re a nation very often, very easily led by men of mediocrity.

Over at Pressing The Flesh, another politics blog, I ran across this recent YouTube video of the late Tim Russert interviewing John McCain on Meet The Press. He traps McCain by making him eat some of his own words about Congress’s responsibility in wartime situations.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post ran an article by staff writer Matthew Mosk, criticizing Ron Paul for hiring family members to work on his campaign. Mosk demonstrated his woefully inept understanding of Paul’s positions as early as the lead paragraph:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has built a national following largely by preaching an isolationist foreign policy. Stick with your own kind, says the maverick presidential candidate.

And he goes on:

And that’s more or less what he has been doing over the past few months, putting relatives in a slew of key positions and paying them a total of $169,063, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

I don’t have the energy or desire to pick apart Mosk’s entire article, when it so obviously demonstrates his distaste for Ron Paul’s ideals and, thus, reveals the motivation behind writing the shitpile article that showed up on A3 last Tuesday. But, since Matthew Mosk is an idiot, and not just somebody who disagrees with Paul, I’ll say this much:

Ron Paul does not support isolationist foreign policies. Just last week, on National Public Radio, Ron Paul reiterated his position, saying that the best kind of humanitarian aid the United States government could offer any country is this: Stop bombing people! Furthermore, Ron Paul encourages diplomacy, free trade, and non-governmental foreign assistance. None of these things would be possible in an isolationist nation.

Enlisting the help of a candidate’s family members throughout a campaign is a time-honored tradition that extends back to the early beginnings of this country. It is, in fact, expected of closer family members such as the candidate’s wife or husband. For anyone working on a campaign in a position that would be paid if the worker were not related to the candidate, it’s actually an ethical imperative that the relative be paid the same amount.

Also, of the 30+ million dollars Ron Paul’s supporters have contributed to his campaign, the $169,000 paid to six workers related to him accounts for less than one percent of that total.

Mosk later suggests that continuing to campaign until the convention when John McCain, the presumptive nominee, becomes the actual nominee, is somehow untoward as well:

Paul has received relatively few votes in his insurgent bid for the Republican nomination, but he has attracted an extraordinarily dedicated following that has flooded his campaign coffers with more than $30 million in donations. Even after releasing a video on his Web site in March indicating that he no longer expected to win the Republican nomination, Paul has continued to collect and spend those riches.

…

An added concern with the presidential campaign, Sloan said, is that Paul has fundamentally transformed his bid for the White House into something more ephemeral. Spending by the campaign has slowed considerably over the past month. Paul spent $470,862 in April, leaving him with $4.7 million remaining.

Well, the same day this article ran in the Washington Post, Ron Paul had his best performance so far in the Idaho Republican primary where he picked up 24% of the vote. Is Ron Paul going to win the Republican nomination this year? Unfortunately, no. But, has his campaign become ephemeral? Only in the weaker and willfully obtuse minds of people like Matthew Mosk.

From Ron Paul:

The Federal Reserve is killing our dollar, the war is killing our soldiers, police-state methods are killing our civil liberties, and the income tax and bureaucratic meddling are killing our economy.

If we’re not interested in stopping this, if we’re content to elect leaders only because we think they can “win", if we settle for what we’re told to do by the club we registered for the last time we renewed our driver’s license, then what is the point of voting at all? What is the point of “winning"? What will be left for us when the professional winners have taken what they want from us– the only things we have that they want– our vote and our money?

It seems that we give this great privilege of choice away too freely. It’s as if so many of us are like spoiled ex-virgin teenage prostitutes– happy to give away ourselves like candy. We’ve lost our innocence and we’ve stopped making informed decisions. Instead, we give it up to the first pimp with lots of dough and power to come along and demand it of us. We run with a crowd of disenchanted losers, doing what’s easiest, what requires the least conviction, what we can bite the inside of our cheeks, shut our eyes, and get through without crying.

I think it’s time we stop. I think it’s time we ask ourselves what’s really important to us. I think it’s time we re-examine those things we hold most dear and rediscover the deeply buried love of the principle of this country that I suspect lurks somewhere within all of us. In this age of torpor, we may be numb; but, we’ve never been more connected. We can glimpse the suffering that goes on outside the relative safety of our borders, and some part of us knows to what principles we owe our freedom– crumbling though it may be.

At any moment, we can stop this. We’re only victims of our own apathy. We can take back our independence and power by the simple act of rejecting defacto positions and spoonfed ideas. We can start thinking for ourselves. We’re individuals, and when we act like it, we become free and very powerful. Let’s do it, all of us. Who’s with me?