From a press conference on April 14th in which he also announced support for a pending enhanced shield law for reporters, comes the GOP nominee for US Pretenderent:

McCain: “Now, before I take your questions, I would like to respond briefly to the comments one of my opponents made the other day about the psychology and political mindset of Americans living in small towns and other areas that have experienced the loss of industrial jobs.

“During the Great Depression, with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world from despotism and mass murder, and came home to build the wealthiest, strongest and most generous nation on earth. They were not born with the advantages others in our country enjoyed. They suffered the worst during the Depression. But it had not shaken their faith in and fidelity to America and its founding political ideals. Nor had it destroyed their confidence that America and their own lives could be made better. Nor did they turn to their religious faith and cultural traditions out of resentment and a feeling of powerlessness to affect the course of government or pursue prosperity. On the contrary, their faith had given generations of their families purpose and meaning, as it does today. And their appreciation of traditions like hunting was based in nothing other than their contribution to the enjoyment of life.

“In my other profession and the war I served in, the country relied overwhelmingly on Americans from these same communities to defend us. As Tocqueville discovered when he traveled America two hundred years ago, they are the heart and soul of this country, the foundation of our strength and the primary authors of its essential goodness. They are our inspiration, and I look to them for guidance and strength. No matter their personal circumstances, they believed in this country. They revered its past, but most importantly they believed in its future greatness, a greatness they themselves would create. They never forgot who they were, where they came from, and what is possible in America, a country founded on an idea and not on class, ethnic or sectarian identity. And America must not and will not forget them.

“Next week, I’ll begin a tour of places in America that do not frequently see a candidate for President. They are places far removed from the prosperity that is enjoyed elsewhere in America. I want to tell people living there that there must not be any forgotten parts of America; any forgotten Americans. Hope in America is not based in delusion, but in the faith that everything is possible in America. The time for pandering and false promises is over. It is time for action. It is time for change, but the right kind of change; change that trusts in the strength of free people and free markets; change that doesn’t return to policies that empower government to make our choices for us, but that works to ensure that we have choices to make for ourselves. For we have always trusted Americans to build from the choices they make for themselves, a safer, stronger and more prosperous country than the one they inherited.”

While Hillary’s primary odds grants her little choice but to seize on any Obama misstep and flail at it, McCain is left free to take the high road of countering Obama in face to face small town meetings in places campaigns don’t normally go. Of course, that high road comes after his team sent out 50 bazillion press releases to explode the issue into the public consciousness at the outset.

Despite the move, which demonstrates McCain will be a very shrewd campaigner, tugging at patriotic uplift strings and all, it comes complete with a lot of incomplete and revisionist history. That’s why I think it best to characterize this as his quest for the Pretenderency. Consider these omissions and revisions:

1) They suffered the worst during the Depression. But it had not shaken their faith in and fidelity to America and its founding political ideals. Nor had it destroyed their confidence that America and their own lives could be made better. With half the country unemployed or underemployed, their confidence in America actually was quite shaken. With 44% of the country’s banks failed, millions lost their savings. US banks, forced to call in outstanding loans, provoked a similar economic collapse in Germany, and the Nazis responded with an aggressive industrial expansion that ended their depression in 1936, fully six years before our recovery was complete. That solidified the Nazi hold on power and all the resulting atrocities that followed. In America, a number of American ‘heroes’ and businessmen echoed the anti-Jewish sentiments of Hitler and some profited directly through trade with Hitler. The names of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and Prescott Bush (the current president’s grandfather) offer examples of how some Americans acted in that time. Forty million citizens tuned in to hear the earliest shock jock radio broadcasts of the Irish Catholic priest, Father (Robert) Coughlin. From Wikipedia:

After the 1936 election, Coughlin increasingly expressed sympathy for the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini, as an antidote to Bolshevism. His CBS radio broadcasts became suffused with themes regarded as overtly antisemitic. He blamed the Depression on an “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers”, and also claimed that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution. On 27 November 1938, he said “There can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution … was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish influence.”

He began publication of a newspaper, Social Justice, during this period, in which he printed antisemitic polemics such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like Joseph Goebbels, Coughlin claimed that Marxist atheism in Europe was a Jewish plot. The 5 December 1938 issue of Social Justice included an article by Coughlin which closely resembled a speech made by Goebbels on 13 September 1935 attacking Jews, atheists and communists, with some sections being copied verbatim by Coughlin from an English translation of the Goebbels speech. At a rally in the Bronx in 1938, he gave a Nazi salute and said, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”

On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, when Jews across Germany were attacked and killed, and Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues burned, Coughlin blamed the Jewish victims, saying that “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” After this speech, and as his programs became more antisemitic, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts; in New York, his programs were cancelled by WINS and WMCA, leaving Coughlin to broadcasting on the Newark part-time station WHBI. This made Coughlin a hero in Nazi Germany, where papers ran headlines like: “America is Not Allowed to Hear the Truth.” On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin’s followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler’s persecution) into the US, chanting, “Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!” and “Wait until Hitler comes over here!” The protests continued for several months. Donald Warren, using information from the FBI and German government archives, has also argued that Coughlin received indirect funding from Nazi Germany during this period.

Additionally, after 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January, 1940, the Christian Front was shut down when the FBI discovered the group was arming itself and “planning to murder Jews, communists, and ‘a dozen Congressmen’” and eventually establish, in J. Edgar Hoover’s words, “a dictatorship, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany”.

Isolationist trade policies did deepen the depression, and it heightened xenophobia across the country. Notorious robbers such as Bonnie And Clyde and John Dillinger were romanticed by many as modern Robin Hoods. Prohibition laws were regularly flouted by otherwise law-abiding ctizens. Much of Al Capone’s bootlegging operation depended on illegal moonshine from numerous Midwestern locations.

Most of the country, of course, tried to work or moved to seek work, not because of faith in the country, but simply to endure. But with a third of the country tuning in to Father Coughlin’s anti-semitic tirades, and with the rout of the Hooverville of the WWI veterans of the Bonus Army, it’s a stretch to portray the America of that era as a group of selfless saints. To a well-off family in Arizona, it might have seemed like a time to salute Herbert Hoover, but much of America was standing in bread lines, wondering if the Nazis and Communists might have better means and methods for running the country.

Instead, they settled on Democrats and voted in the most popular President ever. And they got extensive relief for the worst off, business regulation and financial reforms, the WPA, CCC, BPA, TVA, Hoover Dam, and the crowning achievements of Social Security and the GI Bill. Without all that massive federal intervention, reform and assistance, plus the industrial buildup propelled by WWII, its ‘future greatness’ would never have been achieved.

For all the Japanese Americans who lost everything and went to internment camps - while German-Americans and Italian-Americans remained free - their faith in America was certainly shaken, but I guess their experiences don’t count.

But to a Republican candidate for Pretenderent, pretend history that sidesteps how Republicans have tried to unravel every bit of those government ssupports and reforms, it’s essential to promote such myths.

2) In my other profession and the war I served in, the country relied overwhelmingly on Americans from these same communities to defend us.

We were defended from the Vietnamese, which had never attacked us and had no interest in or possibility of doing so. They merely were seeking to be liberated from the colonial rule of the French and were forced to continue their revolution for independence against our larger powers. More than 58,000 Americans died from that offensive and misguided war, while the defenders of their homeland lost between 1 and 2 million. Our veterans were badly misused - and McCain was among many abused, because people from the forgotten communities of America were misled and lied to by their government.

And McCain wants to visit them while promising to maintain a similar misbegotten war of lies, distortions, delusions and needlessly wasted lives.

3) It is time for change, but the right kind of change; change that trusts in the strength of free people and free markets; change that doesn’t return to policies that empower government to make our choices for us, but that works to ensure that we have choices to make for ourselves. For we have always trusted Americans to build from the choices they make for themselves

Choices, unless it’s the choices of women over their own bodies. And let’s not have government to make any choices like the FDIC and other needed regulatory reform, environmental and OSHA protections or the oppression of the minimum wage. AS for affordable healthcare, let’s leave that to the free markets, as they’ve done such a good job resolving that problem for the 47 million Americans who choose to remain unprotected because they’d rather eat.

4) their appreciation of traditions like hunting was based in nothing other than their contribution to the enjoyment of life.

And nothing else, like their contribution to the enjoyment of food to survive on. Nor the occasionally expressed belief that one can’t permit gun control so we can defend with our flintlocks against the tyranny of our government armed with bunker busters.

5) They never forgot who they were, where they came from, and what is possible in America, a country founded on an idea and not on class, ethnic or sectarian identity. And America must not and will not forget them.

Only John McCain is permitted to forget them, as he’s already forgotten the ethnic and sectarian identity of tribal Americans driven to reservations by genocidal European immigrants, the ethnic divide faced by African Americans, the Chinese Americans who helped build the Transcontinental Railroad, the NINA signs that greeted Irish immigrants, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the squalid camps migrant legal Mexican-Americans were compelled to live in till 2 or 3 decades ago.

We were also not founded on class, though only white, male landowners were allowed to vote initially. Women had to wait a mere 138 years to gain that right and many African Americans had to wait till 1966.

America was a country founded on the ideas of religious separation of church and state, tax revolt, noblesse oblige, manifest destiny, white supremacy and its government was founded on the strength of considerable wisdom from a handful of architects who adopted ideas and principles previously established in European and American Indian nations - including some awful ones like slavery - and its major positives were the system of checks and balances to limit executive authority and the Bill of Rights, with the progress-permitting allowance for future amendments.

In addition to McCain’s make pretend American past that he plans to foist on forgotten Americans he never visited during 26 years in office, he’s also introduced a bill now to suspend all federal gasoline taxes throughout this summer. Suddenly, the conservative has become an economic populist. But only for 18 cents per gallon, only during the summer of the year he seeks election and only if it leaves out any investigation of price-fixing, gouging, scrutiny of oil companies, or the doubling -at least - of prices caused by a certain illegal profiteering-enhanced war.

Those kinds of things, along with windfall profits taxes, are the type of popular progressive platforms I’ve been urging Democratic candidates to adopt as far back as the 2004 election. Unfortunately, with moderates like Clinton and Obama, those pleas keep reaching deaf ears, so now another advantage has slipped - albeit minimally - to the dark side.

Of course, it’s been enjoyable to watch Obama and Clinton adopt other populist themes advanced by John Edwards to drive him from the race and to ratchet up their competition with each other. Still, by dallying on the easiest corporate target of all, they’ve let that edge slip to another reborn populist who was desperately seeking some fresh way to prove there’s a piddle of maverick left in him.

And instead of a real and immediate economic lifeline to the economically distressed small town and rural Americans who have no public transportation alternatives, our party’s discussing God and guns again, because that’s proven such a winner for us.

The only thing worse than having yet another Republican war junkie running for Pretenderent is having two Democratic moderates running to be the next Clueless-In-Chief.

I regret that I have only one vote to give for my country.