Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The dangers of a McCain presidency
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Harry Nash
Nash is a teacher and writer living in Buena Vista.
Is it possible that the American people will end up electing a Republican who could prove to be an even more dangerous leader than President Bush?
In what obvious ways could Sen. John McCain be more dangerous?
The Arizona senator has been running on his Vietnam POW fame for more than half his life. The media have accorded him undue reverence on that score alone. Would McCain be as intimidating to the media had he not ended up in a North Vietnamese prison camp for more than five years? Such is the glorification of the militarism in our culture.
John S. McCain III powerfully identifies with the instruments of power. He has never encountered a bloated Pentagon budget request that he didn't like. He has joked about "bombing Iran." Such is the glorification of the militarism in our culture.
McCain's grandfather was an admiral. His father was also an admiral. The latter played a central, devious and treasonous role in covering up the truth in Israel's vicious, intentional attack on USS Liberty, an electronics-intercept vessel standing off the coast of Egypt in international waters, during the Six-Day War of 1967.
He was commander of the Pacific Fleet during his son's incarceration in Hanoi from 1967 to 1973. (There are some indications that the young McCain received special treatment from the North Vietnamese because of his father's position and the likelihood that his captors might at some point use him as a bargaining chip.)
McCain is as pro-Israel (which means, given the historical context and Israel's behavior, especially since 1967, pro-Zionist) as any U.S. politician could possibly be.
McCain's wife, Cindy, has a family history that is relevant. Her father is the late Jim Hensley, who was, according to research by Michael Collins Piper of American Free Press, "the owner of the biggest Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Arizona -- one of the largest beer distributors in the nation."
"The Hensley fortune," writes Piper in AFP's Feb. 4 issue, "is a regional offshoot of the big-time bootlegging and rackets empire of the Bronfman dynasty." Jim Hensley, according to Piper, "got his start as a top henchman for Kemper Marley, who, for 40 years until his death in 1990 at the age of 84, was the undisputed behind-the-scenes political boss of Arizona. But Marley was much more than a machine politician. In fact, he was also the Lansky crime syndicate's top man in Arizona, the protégé of a Lansky lieutenant, Phoenix gambler Gus Greenbaum."
Greenbaum had been instrumental in the 1940s in running a national wire for bookmakers behind the front of the Transamerica Publishing and News Service. Marley inherited this operation when Greenbaum turned his attention to the development of Meyer Lansky's casinos in Las Vegas.
It was Greenbaum who took over management of Lansky's interests there following the murder of Benjamin ("Bugsy") Siegel for skimming Mob profits from the new Flamingo Casino -- a "hit" ordered by Lansky himself. Greenbaum and his wife had their throats cut in 1946, and an intense and bloody competition among mob elements ensued. But Marley survived while developing a virtual monopoly on liquor distribution in Arizona, thanks, evidently, to his embrace by the Bronfman family. In 1948, Piper notes, "52 of Marley's employees (including Jim Hensley) went to jail for federal liquor violations -- but not Marley.
"The story in Arizona is that Hensley took the fall for Marley and, upon his release from prison, Marley paid back Hensley's loyalty by setting him up in the beer distribution business. That beer company today, said to be worth $200 million, is what largely financed John McCain's political career. The support from the Bronfman-Marley-Hensley network was integral to McCain's rise to power."
Piper notes also that Hensley's investments in dog racing linked him also to the Emprise Corporation of the Jacobs family of Buffalo, N.Y., which had been the Bronfmans' primary distributor of illegal liquor during Prohibition. The Jacobses' wide-ranging enterprises were once described as "probably the biggest quasi-legitimate cover for organized crime's money-laundering in the United States."
McCain, despite his support for immigration and campaign-finance reform, is much less a maverick than his advertising would have us believe. Beyond these issues, he will pander shamelessly -- including to the likes of the NRA and televangelist John Hagee.
Most ominously, McCain assiduously avoids any mention of the words diplomacy, negotiation and peace. They have no place in his conception of the world following 9/11. Did they ever? Would they ever?
