12 February 2008

Election Day



Dr. Jack Wheeler, letter jacket and former man-eating tiger, Vietnam

I slept in, since there was no point in getting all wrapped up in something only to have to drop it to go vote. Based on the 2000 election, I assumed the lines would be long, and I was out the door and padding down the sidewalk toward the Culpepper well before six.

I worked the 2004 Presidential Election at the polling station, and the lines before opening were all the way up the walkway from the Activity Center to the new metal fence. It appears to be a preemptive security move by the Senior Center against the big apartment building next door. It is nice and ornamental, though there are spikes on the top that are not purely decorative.

I was prepared for a long wait with a travel mug of coffee and gloves, but I was second in line. I could have been first, but I waved a young lady ahead. Peering in the door, we could see other people lined up across the large linoleum-tiled room, waiting in the warmth of the Center, rather than on the outside.

Others soon joined us in line. A tall man of South Asian ancestry observed that sleet and snow were already falling in Frederick to the north, and that he wanted to get his duty out of the way. I agreed with him. It was good not to be in Frederick in almost any circumstance, but particularly in the snow.

The Precinct Captain himself opened the door right on time, sighing that he had to leave the door open against the chill. The people from the inside entrance beat us to the registration table. One of the seniors from Big Pink had a big computer print-out of all the registered voters, and a sign that said “republican” in front of him. A younger, more vigorous fellow I did not recognize sat next to him. He had the Democrats, and he had himself a line to deal with.

I honestly did not know what I was going to do until the moment I saw the line. I had a good reason to vote for each of the three major candidates: a vote for Barack might put the stake into the heart of the Clinton Campaign. A Vote for Hillary might slow down the groundswell for the young Senator who does not have much of a record on anything. I had not contemplated voting for McCain because there seemed no point in an idle vote against a likable but irrelevant minister from Arkansas.

A friend of mine from Up North days in Michigan was in the class ahead of me in high school, the famed class of '68. He was a bit of a rogue, one of the guys your folks hope you don't hang around with, and thus had an aura that was quite appealing. He had a series of scrapes with the local cops, and in his senior year, was offered an opportunity by the local magistrate to enlist in the Armed Forces as an alternative to incarceration.

It was not the cool thing to do, but the alternative seemed less so, and thus he found himself at the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Detroit the following week. The line to enlist in the Army was long, and the one for the Marines was short, and he did not want to wait. Such is how life works, and that is how he found himself in his Class A greens the next June, back to receive his diploma with the class of 1969, ready to ship out for Oakland California and point west across the Pacific, to Vietnam.

Jim did not die there. He came back home to do that.

I did not want to wait either, and I thought of Jim as I walked toward the registration table. There was one old woman waiting there, and ten or twelve waiting to vote for Hillary or Barack.

I'll cut to the chase on this, since it is evident that I did what I had to do. I was the second person to vote Republican this morning in this precinct. They gave me my card, there was no one waiting at the electronic machine, and there was only one list on the touch screen to choose from. I stabbed at the tab for Big John, and then hit the big red box that said “Vote.”

I was out of there in about two minutes, and the Democrats were still waiting in line, waiting to do something important.

It took the specter of minor inconvenience to make cynical politics fall away. You see, the other major factor is that I am really pissed for the first time in this campaign. It started with my heart, when I was pulling for Bill Richardson. When his campaign joined that of the other qualified candidates on the ash heap, I considered myself a free agent.

I have always had a certain admiration for John McCain. I liked his principles and his courage in standing up for what he believed in. I liked that he poked a stick at the religious right, and that his social principles had no particular litmus test. He seemed to take each issue and examine it on the merits, rather than attempting to cram it into some pre-existing matrix.

I also think that anyone who survived what he had, and could still grin about it, is a pretty damn good man.

That is why what almost threw up when I read what is going to be done to him, and I am a pretty hard case. I saw the words I missed during the South Carolina primary in 2000, the one in which Big John got whacked by that weasel Carl Rove. I'm sure he could never have imagined that another Republican could be capable of spreading such appalling lies against another.

You may recall the lie that came around again in the primary a couple weeks ago. It was an echo of the original slur, something so reprehensible that for me it constitutes fighting words.

On behalf of Governor Bush, Carl orchestrated a push-call campaign that alleged McCain had a love child with an African American woman. The Senator from Arizona, in real life, on planet earth, has a daughter of South Asian heritage who he adopted from the Mother Theresa orphanage in Bangladesh.

I thought that was about the bottom of the barrel, but it was not. There was more slander that gave a template for the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry. It is the worst slander I have ever heard in my five decades of observing politics in this republic. It is starting to go around again, so let's just get it out in the open and identify who is spreading it, so if you see him on the street, you can swerve up on the sidewalk and pin him to a building.

All's fair in politics, I know that. We have already been down the road with the lies. We know that Barack actually did do cocaine, and is alleged to have attended a radical Maddras in Indonesia, and is a closet Muslim even now, though he attends a Christian Church with a radical black minister.

On the other side of the Democratic equation, Hillary is said to be having a mad affair with her competent and lovely staffer, Huma Abedin. I think it is sort of hot, as an idea, but that story gets better. In the current version of the story, Huma left Michigan when she was two, and grew up Muslim in Saudi Arabia and now works for Saudi intelligence. The image of the pillow talk they might have is fantastic, and if the line had not been so long I might have voted for it just for the creativity.

By comparison, the lie about Big John is so breathtaking that is makes John Kerry and his creative and partly imagined riverine heroism pale in comparison. Kerry was actually there.

The lie starts with intimation that many Senators think he is psychologically unstable. The statement is that he is once addressed his colleagues with obscenities. I thought that sort of conduct was reserved for the Vice President, who told one of the distinguished members to go “screw” himself.

That is just the set up. There follows a complex legend that there are transcripts of his interrogation by the Vietnamese, in which he betrays military secrets under torture.

Every one of the POWS did. Even Jim Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honor and one of the finest and bravest Americans ever to wear a uniform.

The kicker is the claim that because of his status as the son of an Admiral, McCain got special treatment. Instead of being in solitary, McCain was treated to an apartment in Hanoi, and the services of two prostitutes. The times he said he was in solitary he was actually in a menage a trios across town. No one can prove that he wasn't.

There is more filth, of course. Some of the wing-nuts have resurrected commentary from the legendary military loon Col. David Hackworth. In accumulating his impressive rack of combat medals, Hackworth probably got more American kids killed than any one else of his military generation. He has been dead since 2005, but that does not stop the lies.

You might better recall Hackworth as the crusading journalist who hounded former Chief of Naval Operations Mike Boorda to suicide over the issue of the “Combat V” device on his Bronze Star.

Men of honor take these things seriously. I take it pretty damn seriously, too.

Dr. Jack Wheeler is the guy who is most recently spreading the lies. He runs a for-profit blog of which I was blissfully unaware until this week.

His credentials are remarkable, even if they are true. He is not a medical doctor, of course, since he got his PhD in philosophy. He claims to have shot a man-eating tiger in the highlands of Vietnam, though I looked carefully to see if he happened to be a tourist or a soldier.

He appeared to be touring, and the tiger he is pictured with was not equipped to shoot back.

He was “the youngest Eagle Scout in Boy Scout history, climbed the Matterhorn, swam Hellespont and was adopted into a clan of Shuara Jivaro headhunters in the Amazon” all before he had his drivers license.

He is also responsible for the Reagan Doctrine, though it is not possible to ask the late President what he thinks about that.

Among his key issues are race relations in America. He claims- and I am not making this up- that “The only Americans who owe reparations to the descendants of slaves are the descendants of slave owners. These people are one and the same, i.e., American blacks are a racial mix of white slave owner and black slave. Blacks owe reparations to themselves.”

And how about this one? “The next insanity to come in the homosexual assault on the American Family will be PHM: Polygamous Homosexual Marriage. Pathologically promiscuous homosexuals will consider their "marriage" a legalism that will in no way prevent them from adultery en masse. To maintain the pretense of "marriage" however, they will have to quickly begin agitating for the legalization of group sodomization as "just another form of the married life-style."

Reading more about Doctor Wheeler made me feel a little better about the credibility of the slime that is going to get thrown at Big John as this goes on. We may as well get it out in the open now.

Oh, they say John may have had an affair in Washington, too. A heterosexual one. Horrors.

If you happen to see the Good Doctor, you might tell him that I am looking for him. And unlike the tiger he killed, there are those of us that are perfectly willing to shoot back.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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