Beginning to Tell the Truth About John McCain

In the face of a media white-wash of John McCain, tonight I begin presenting the truth about this authoritarian Presidential candidate. The following is taken from a web site called MyDD or My Direct Democracy. In coming months I will present information about John McCain so prudent voters may have the best possible information about this conflicted and confusing candidate.


In a recent tour across America, [w]hile ostensibly reaching out to people in "forgotten places," McCain was also trying to solidify the Republican base. His speech on Supreme Court judges, in particular, was a dangerous bit of pandering. Many on the left and in the media missed the significance of that speech and the cases McCain referenced, but Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker caught it:

The giveaway here was that McCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage. The case was Roper v. Simmons, in which a seventeen-year-old boy murdered a woman after breaking into her home, and was sentenced to death. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion overturned the sentence and held that the Constitution forbids the death penalty for juvenile offenders. McCain's reference to the Court's "discourse" on the law of "other nations" refers to Kennedy's observation of the "stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty." Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.

Nor were his references to penumbras and emanations accidental. Those words come from Justice William O. Douglas's 1965 opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy, and ruled that a state could not deny married couples access to birth control. The "meaning of life" was a specific reference, too. It comes from the Court's 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade, and forbade the states from banning abortion. In short, this one passage in McCain's speech amounted to a dog whistle for the right--an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teen-agers.