Garry Trudeau and John McCain

Remember Mark Slackmeyer, aka “Megaphone Mark”? He was part of the original Doonesbury gang, the 60s slacker/activist who has ended up working for NPR, where he and his politically conservative life partner debate each other on the air. Around where I lived, Slackmeyer was a familiar type. (In fact, it was rumored that a local alternative newspaper journalist, a classmate of Garry Trudeau’s at Yale, was the original model for Megaphone Mark.)

We recognized many of the Doonesbury gang in our own circle. It was fascinating watching them grow up, because, unlike other comic strip characters, they did grow up. Like us, only somewhat more slowly. They left their communes behind, got married, had kids, got divorced, went to law school, got jobs on Capitol Hill, got fired, went into rehab. Ups and downs. Like the rest of us.

But in the last several years, Garry Trudeau has thrown something much tougher at one of the old gang. B.D., Michael Doonsbury’s college roommate, has lost a leg in a grenade attack in Iraq. Since his injury, the football coach and former college jock has turned into a moody alcoholic, now undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress at Walter Reed Hospital.
This new storyline has won Trudeau admiration and awards in some surprising quarters, including the Pentagon and the Disabled Americans Veterans. Even John McCain has done an about face. In 1995, he went on record as saying he held the liberal cartoonist in “utter contempt.” This past year McCain wrote an introduction to Trudeau's The Long Road Home , a collection of his strips about B.D.'s injury and recovery. (The proceeds will go to a veterans’ charity.)

Doonesbury has always been topical, and often controversial. During the Vietnam War Trudeau’s anti-war cartoons were part of a larger protest movement. Because of the draft, that war was central to our generation’s experience. After it was over, many of those who opposed the war came to regard the veterans as victims, not perpetrators.

In the war in Iraq, decades later, Trudeau’s has directed his focus and sympathy to the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to writing about their issues, he’s a frequent visitor to the injury ward at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at gatherings of wounded troops.

On his website, Trudeau has also created a virtual community for soldiers – a sort of "Global War On Terror literary magazine,” as he has written. "The Sandbox," is a digest of military blogs, open to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Posts on The Sandbox include a list of 63 items every Iraq-bound soldier should pack (baby wipes, webcam) and attempts to compare real combat with the way it’s portrayed in the movies. (Movies are more interesting,” wrote one soldier. “It’s sort of the banality of being shot at.”)

In providing this forum for active duty soldiers, and in writing about disabled soldiers in Doonesbury, the humorist underlines and important truth as effectively in the era of Bush as in the era of Nixon and Johnson.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/

McCain's Gay Baiting

If you were a member of a conservative household in Florida last week, you might have picked up the phone and heard a recording that accused Mitt Romney of being soft on gay rights. The "robocall," as these canned communications are known, featured a woman's voice reminding voters that Romney once "told gay organizers in Massachusetts that he would be a stronger advocate for [their] special rights than even Ted Kennedy."

This was the sound of the John McCain campaign taking the low road. Ironic, but not surprising. Senator McCain learned a thing or two after Karl Rove masterminded a smear operation against him in the 2000 South Carolina primary. This year, who should McCain have hired to help run his campaign but the same Bush operative who orchestrated the whispering attacks against McCain seven years ago?*

Those robocalls in Florida were aimed at stirring up anti-gay sentiment among voters by pointing out Mitt's flip-flop on gay rights. Yet McCain's own record on the issue is not entirely flip-flop-free. Four years ago he called a constitutional ban on gay marriage "antithetical to the core philosophy of Republicans." Two years later, he told televangelist Jerry Falwell that if states didn't pass laws prohibiting gay marriage, he would back a constitutional ban.

It remains to be seen whether McCain's courting of the religious right will succeed. He may be sound on abortion and gay marriage. But his anti-Mitt robocall also stressed that America needs someone who will preserve "the sanctity of marriage." It's a bit rich that John McCain thinks he can out-marriage-sanctity Mitt Romney—who, after all, is still on his first wife.

To refresh your memory, here's a recap of the McCain divorce: While McCain was imprisoned at a Vietnamese POW camp, his wife Carol, a former model, was in a serious car accident. Her injuries left her four inches shorter, considerably heavier, and disabled -- not what McCain expected when he came home, himself still suffering from severe injuries. By his own account, he "ran around" for a while. Then he met a wealthy 25-year-old from Arizona with whom he began a steady adulterous relationship. Soon after, he dumped Carol, who had reared their three children while McCain was in prison. A month after the divorce was final, he married the heiress.

Hypocrisy seems to come with the territory of being a social conservative (examples supplied on request). But how rotten do you have to be to treat another person like this? People carry on about Bill Clinton's character issues, but, really, Slick Willie seems like a stand-up guy compared to John "Sanctity of Marriage" McCain.

Karl Rove's Black Love Child

Eight years ago this month, John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination. The rest is history--specifically the tragic and blighted history of our young century. It worked in another way as well. Too shaken to defend himself, McCain emerged from the bruising episode less maverick reformer and more Manchurian candidate.

The former crusader against the Republican establishment has since turned into a Bush-hugging, business-as-usual politician who has backed down from many positions that set him apart from conventional conservatives. Before, McCain supported the separation of church and state; now he wants a Christian in the White House. The confederate flag, which he once considered an offensive symbol, no longer troubles him. And he has come to believe that tax cuts are a good idea.

I don't want to say that McCain sold his soul to the devil, since I believe that religious metaphors have no place in politics. But consider this: shortly after losing the 2000 election, McCain told an interviewer that there must be "a special place in hell" reserved for the rumormongers.

Seven years later, who is running McCain's South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting Bridget. If you can't beat them, hire them--even if they've launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

Bridget McCain was a seriously ill baby in Mother Teresa's orphanage when Cindy McCain visited and decided to bring her back to the United States for medical treatment in 1991. John and Cindy adopted her not long after. Now 16, Bridget learned of her role in the 2000 campaign only when she Googled herself. According to the New York Times, when McCain entered the current race, Bridget summoned his aides and asked them to pledge that this campaign would be different.

We can't know what reassurances were offered, but Condon doesn't seem to have repented for his role in the 2000 slander. He told the New York Times reporter that he wasn't surprised about the downward spiral of the Bush-McCain race. "Our primaries have a way of doing that," Condon said. "There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works."

John McCain is now favored to win in South Carolina. The personal attacks of the 2000 election season, he recently told an interviewer, were "long ago and far away." "I had to get over it.... I don't ever think about them or dwell on them." Cindy McCain agrees. "We're past that. We've moved on."

The McCains may have moved on, but I haven't. Bush made a decisive step toward the White House by spreading lies about an 8-year-old child. (Not to mention a couple of decorated war veterans.) These vile tactics are not OK. If something similar were to happen in a high school election, those responsible would be suspended and black marks would be entered on their permanent records. But in politics, it seems, there's no such thing as a permanent record. Consequences do not exist--however blatant the misconduct.

It's time we changed that. In the 2008 election, voters need to send a message that attention is being paid--that this time liars and cheats will be defeated, not given a free hall pass.