The Reality-Based Community

John McCain decided that he couldn't have Paul Manafort of the lobbying firm Davis, Manafort, and Freedman as chair of the Republican National Convention because the firm used to lobby for Ferdinand Marcos when Marcos was dictator of the Philippines. (Manafort also worked for Victor Yanukovich, the Kremlin puppet displaced running the Ukraine by the Orange Revolution, though not before his opponent had been poisoned with the evident involvement of the Ukrainian intelligence service.) Apparently the involvement of McCain's campaign manager, the senior partner in Davis, Manafort, and Freedman, isn't of any concern.

So McCain chose instead Doug Goodyear of the lobbying firm DCI, Inc. — which used to lobby for the SLORC, the tyranny that rules Burma. Part of its mission was to characterize as "falsehoods" complaints about systematic rape made in Burma. Those complaints were issued by the U.S. state department.

But don't worry, says Goodyear. His firm isn't lobbying for the SLORC anymore. And, as a bonus, it's no longer directing efforts to illegally evade the campaign finance laws. Now we shouldn't be too judgmental: perhaps Goodyear has genuinely learned from his mistakes. "In the place of the truly penitent," says the Talmud, "even a saint is unfit to sit."

In any case, McCain quickly dumped Goodyear (or Goodyear dumped himself) as soon as the news came out.

Since McCain is so concerned about the implications about Barack Obama's character of the fact that he served on the board of a community foundation with someone who had been a Weatherman thirty years earlier, it seems fair to ask what we can learn about John McCain's character and judgment from the fact that he surrounds himself with people who take money from foreign tyrannies hostile to the United States?

Posted at 06:29 PM | TrackBack (0) | |
Thread: John McCain