LiamScheff.com — The Conspiracy Realist

The McCain Speech, Notes on an Interesting Man

McCain offers his service – and seems 1,000 times less insane than our current president.

(All quotes are paraphrases from memory of having just listened).

John McCain gives a very strong, but un-florid speech to a crowd that has not always loved him. An earthy speech, with blessedly few “Amen” choruses and “Can I get a witness!” lines, of the kind that mark the rhetoric since Reagan (Clinton, Bush).

He even threw cold water in the audience’s face at one point, declaring the “Latina daughter of migrant workers,” to be a “US Citizen.”

Uh-huh. Pulling that in St. Paul, in Rush Limbaugh’s den? That is a maverick.

He spoke clearly and lucidly about his transformational experience as a prisoner-of-war; this told from the man himself, is a different experience than the hagiographies that have been spouted at and about him this week. He went through the events without flourish, and with efficiency.

He described the take-off on a flying mission, sure of his safe return, an argumentative and feisty, cocky and diffident self-serving young man. He catalogued his plunge into the lake in Hanoi, with two broken arms and a broken leg.

He spoke of his capture, his torture, and of the “compassion and love” – his words – that he learned and witnessed and experienced in sharing this with his fellow prisoners-of-war, who he credited, again and again, with “saving his life” by caring for him when his arms were immotile, and by giving him the courage to move beyond his psychological terrors, physical wounds and broken sense of self.

He spoke of his gratefulness for it – for the entire experience of being a prisoner of war. He described this as the experience after which he was forever changed, because it served to humble his ego, to erase hubris, and to teach him to love and serve a higher calling.

He told this story near the end of his speech – he did it in good tempo, not belabored, not exaggerated, and not for sympathy, but by way of explanation. At least, this is how it seemed to me – a true, quite spiritual statement about a man’s epiphany and growth beyond ego.

Would I have stayed in Hanoi when offered the chance to leave? Not in my 20s. Maybe in my teens, when I had a strange pride in my ability to suffer… but for four years???

But, for reasons that are not understood to me, he did stay, in what became four additional years of imprisonment, even though he was offered the chance to leave after an initial period.

Strange, and very unusual.

He comes across as a truly independent-minded man, with a small tolerances for long grudges. He gives the impression, strangely enough, of having passed through Siddhartha, on his way back to the United States. It’s very unusual, and like nothing I’ve heard in a politician. There is someone home, I suppose, is what I mean. And that is a rare, rare thing in a political figure since WW2.

Would I have supported the Vietnam war at the time? No. But is John McCain a remarkable human being?

I think so.

On the speech:

McCain said, “Education is the civil rights issue of our day,” vowing to offer some financial support to people who have lost jobs, while they retrain in new, more stable work.

He vowed to stop “paying 700 million dollars” or something similar, to “countries that don’t like us very much,” (China, is the correct answer), and indicated that under his administration, work would be returning to the United States (and its allies).

He said that we had to “catch up to history,” and talked about social and economic programs that were designed and built for the “1950s” and must be brought to reflect our “global economy” and “global information age.”

One theme of his speech was that America works better when decisions are made by individuals in communities – not by bureaucracies. There was a libertarian theme to his work, a ‘people oriented’ capitalism, reflecting the American ideal of the industrious individual and enterprise.

On this note, he vowed to work with all colleagues, regardless of affiliation, to address, attack and fix problems of systemic over-spending, hamstrung bureaucracy, etc. He mentioned his long history of bi-partisan work in the senate, which has often earned ire from the Conservative base.

On the note of ‘choice’ as the American ideal, he vowed support for parents to “choose” or have “choice” in the education of their children, when local public schools fail them. He mentioned charter schools, and the idea of home-schooling seemed to fit, though he did not mention it by name. He vowed to make schools accountable to “parents and students,” not to bureaucracies.

On abortion: “A culture of life,” but not “pro-life” or “anti-abortion.”

On inflated spending bills: “I will veto the first one that comes across my desk, and you will know their names.” (the names of the drafters of the bill, and recipients of excessive payments).

On the war: “I hate war. It is the most terrible thing.” He vowed to use all of his learning and experience to create a stable peace. He offered that Russia was acting out-of-bounds, that al Quaeda remains a threat, that Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons. But he did not call for invasion, occupation, or obliteration of any country, as has been the habit with Republicans and Hillary Clinton.

He didn’t offer that the Iraq war was a brutal violation of the very themes he was describing; like the rest of everybody who supported the war, he wants us to somehow “solve” the Iraq problem with the continued use of loyal and patriotic young men and women, to nation-build in Iraq.

The Republican theme has been a tacit admission that the Iraq war was a catastrophe – until an abundance of American teens and 20-year olds (these are our troops) were installed in and around the Tigris and Euphrates.

The overarching sentiment then, is to “wrap up” the Iraq “mission,” and to move full-throttle into building an energy policy that grants and preserves American energy (and political?) independence.

He’s coming on like Woodrow Wilson, and that’s not a bad thing.

On energy: Drill baby Drill, build nuclear generators, invest in hybrid and electric cars; in sum, do everything and everything to get out from under the thumb of Saudi Arabia and develop every technology that exists to create AC energy.

And so? He wins this round, with his party-partner, Sarah Palin. At this point, I think the Democrats have a losing battle on their hands. If I were to be optimistic on McCain’s part, I’d say that the only thing that could stop him from winning would be a health issue, and I certainly don’t hope that for the man.

If he were to win, I’d say his chances of breaking up the viscous plaques of intrigue and overspending, at least in his target areas, is superior to Obamas, who enters as a distant outsider, a young and fairly unseasoned fighter, and perhaps not a fighter at all, by nature – but a writer, or an orator, or a political philosopher. Or an auto-biographist?

Oh, right.

Conversations about peak oil, theories of inside knowledge of 9-11, the broken medical systems, the corrupt pharma-industrial complex, and other GNN (http://gnn.tv) topics were quite absent, but of course!