McCain is Just Another Politician

Two weeks after his apparently totally disingenuous offer of $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Yuma, it is clear that John McCain is not a man of his word. In fact, McCain is not the political voice in the wilderness he wants you to think he is, rather he is just another politician.

After seeing McCain's $50 an hour offer, I immediately sent his office multiple e-mail messages indicating my interest and willingness to take the work. I also sent an e-mail to Andrea Jones, Senator McCain's press secretary, detailing my opinion of McCain's insensitive and arrogant statements and asking for a response from the Senator. To date, I have not received a response to any of my e-mail messages.

In addition to the e-mail messages, I also placed two calls (April 6, April 10) to the Senator's Washington, D.C. office. Both times I spoke with low-level McCain staffers who declined to identify themselves. When I indicated that I was calling about the $50 an hour jobs, both staffers said exactly the same thing, "Sir, the Senator was being facetious."

You can believe I called that bluff right then and there. "Are you kidding me," I asked. "No, really, are you really going to try to feed me that answer?"

Silence.

"I watched the speech, and I saw him not once, but twice challenge the audience that they could not pick lettuce in Yuma for the season for $50 an hour. He was damn serious, and I so am I. I'm ready to go to Yuma tomorrow, and I want that $50 an hour job" I continued.

More silence. Finally, "Sir, the Senator was being facetious, he made that quite clear."

Wha-?, huh-?, wh-?. He what?" I sputtered. "I saw the speech. I heard the words. He was not being facetious. Did you see the speech?" I questioned.

Guess what their answers were? That would be a no, on both counts; neither staffer had seen the speech they were defending.
Though I pressed for more explanation, the McCain staffers would not utter a word beyond their practiced company line.

After two days, the Main Stream Media (MSM) hadn't even batted an eye on the McCain comment. Lying is an accepted and even appreciated element of both politics and entertainment, so both McCain and the MSM thought nothing of it and were moving right along to their next misleading and fallacious statements, stories, and quotes. But a tiny band of upstart Internet rabble spanning the political spectrum, including the TruthMaker, Project USA, and Free Republic dared speak out.

Determined that McCain not get away with his total bald-faced, flat-out, fuck-you lie without any repercussions of any kind, I resolved to become a misshapen, rusty wheel, wobbling around with the persistent annoying squeak of the righteous, irritating the fuck out of anybody within earshot (I'm thinking some kind of Souza march as the background music for the book-on-tape version of this part of blog post). Because politicians are so completely insulated from their electoral constituents and only listen to their paying constituents, the MSM is really the only way to hold them accountable, which goes a long way toward explaining why we're in the mess we're in. But that's for another day.

I sent multiple e-mail messages to the likes of Lou Dobbs, Dan Froomkin, Howard Kurtz, and Sal Ruibal, imploring them to call McCain on the carpet for his duplicity. As I told Lou Dobbs, this is my protest, this is my voice. I want McCain and all politicians held accountable for their words and actions and I'm willing to go pick lettuce in Yuma for a few months to do it.

For a while, it seemed like this story was just going to disappear into the ether. For example, in the week following McCain's Lettuce Challenge, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote two articles on McCain and his public image, but neither made any mention of the Lettuce Challenge. Meanwhile the Page 6 payola fluff is still getting daily treatment.

The Lettuce Challenge story finally started to get some traction on April 13 when Lou Dobbs ran a short piece on his show about Project USA's online lettuce-picker application. On Friday, more than three dozen demonstrators showed up at McCain's Washington office carrying job applications and heads of lettuce. By yesterday, even the conservatives were piling on. Viva la revolucion!

Still, no one has actually held McCain accountable. He has not been interviewed or questioned by any journalist of any kind about the Lettuce Challenge. So long as the MSM allows politicians to walk away from the public statements with total impunity, politicians will never feel the need to keep their word. Just ask McCain about that.

As a conspiratorial side note related to McCain's renewed allegiance to the Republican power brokers, just try to find a transcript somewhere of McCain's speech to the AFL-CIO on April 4 in Washington, D.C. "You can't do it, my friends."

McCain's capitulation to the dark side has been building to a head in recent months, including throwing himself into the sweaty embrace of Jerry Falwell (much as he dry humped Bush in the '04 campaign) and speaking at Falwell's Liberty U. next month. South Carolina in 2000 seems a distant memory, like it never happened. And oh! look-ee here, on Sunday Falwell comes out and says he won't endorse Rudy Giuliani. Hmm, I wonder who he will endorse. I won-der . . .

To top it all off, Mr. Straight Talk Express is seriously going off the rails by signing on to the Nixonian Republican "win at any cost" philosophy. He truly is a maverick no more, if in fact he ever was -- let's not forget that McCain's maverick image is more image than maverick. Anybody remember a little something called the Keating Five Scandal?