BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
When Ross Perot Calls…
The former presidential candidate blasts John McCain, and gets an education about Barack Obama's religion.
The phone rang and it was Ross Perot, who hasn't given an interview in years. Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, making him one of the strongest third-party candidates in American history, got straight to the point.
"Remember what you wrote about John McCain in the March 13, 2000, NEWSWEEK?"
"Sure," I lied.
"When McCain called Perot 'nuttier than a fruitcake'?"
The Texas billionaire, now 77, still has some scores to settle from the Vietnam era, and his timing is exquisite. Just days before the South Carolina GOP primary, he wants me to know that McCain "is the classic opportunist--he's always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won't even sit at the same table with him."
Mark Salter, McCain's longtime top aide, says the Arizona senator has plenty of veteran support and many close friendships among other former POWs.
The Perot-McCain relationship goes back to McCain's five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi. When McCain's then-wife Carol was in a serious car accident, McCain's mother called Perot for help. "She asked me to send my people to Philadelphia to take care of the family," Perot says. Afterwards, McCain was grateful. "We loved him [Perot] for it," McCain told me in 2000.
Perot doesn't remember it that way. "After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history."
Perot's real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. "There's evidence, evidence, evidence," Perot claims. "McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs."
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Member Comments
Posted By: iridescent cuttlefish @ 05/04/2008 12:38:10 AM
Comment: Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems. ??? Arthur Hoppe
Or because it's an extremely profitable enterprise, even when "we" lose. (Vietnam and Iraq share many similarities, including the enormous, really obscene profits they generated for certain "American interests").
So this is what a mainstream media outlet looks like...could it possibly be any shallower, any fluffier, any more misdirecting? How is it that Perot's POW/MIA experience isn't mentioned in connection with McCain, while all this superficial celebrity "Last time I talked to John...gosh, Ross has these really big ears" crap is the heart of the piece? Let's face it, folks, they're all whores: the politicians, the "journalists"--everyone associated with the political process in America is a lying sack of...well, you know. And you do know this.
And yet you still get sucked into voting for the right wing or the left wing of the Party, arguing the relative merits of "our representatives" when you don't even have a democracy to begin with. We used to laugh about the Soviet Union's one-party elections--are we really so much more sophisticated when we know that the same coffers sponsor both "sides" in our elections? Or did we imagine there were no strings attached?
Here are a few modest suggestions for actual, substantive political discourse in this land of collective make believe (and no, they will never, ever be addressed, a sure sign of their validity):
* the drug war~~why are drugs illegal? what's the cost/benefit analysis? who profits and how from the prohibition, especially on cannabis? (Dr. Melamede's "Harm Reduction: the Cannabis Paradox" http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/2/1/17 is both an eye and a mind-opener, as is any old link to the prison economy http://impiousdigest.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=72 )
* secrecy~~what are the (theoretical) checks & balances on the apparatus of the National Security State? (Okay, it's a trick question because there are none. Zero. Not operationally, not budgetary...nothing. My favorite quote here comes from a senator, but it could just as well describe the conscience of a nation:
In 1956, when Senator Mike Mansfield sought to establish a joint oversight committee on intelligence, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, advocating the ostrich???s position noted, ???It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead, it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have??? (cited in Britt Snider monograph).
Good luck, America! (Oh, one last link to the war hero's other biography: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8221 )
Posted By: newvoter @ 04/21/2008 6:17:46 AM
Comment: Lincoln, unfortunately, did not include the Civil War in his platform and I for one would probably not have voted for him if he had. Makes me wonder what Obama could really be planning with an unrepentant terrorist, a bigot pastor and a Mafia connection.
Posted By: NBKrupp @ 04/14/2008 12:59:07 PM
Comment: If you want to know more about POWs - and possibly why Perot feels as he does - read: "Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union" by James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood and "The Men We Left Behind: Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Deceit and the Tragic Fate of POWs after the Vietnam War" by Mark A. Sauter and James D. Sanders. "The Men We Left Behind" regarding the Senate Select Committee on POWs convinced me that John McCain is not presidential material. This leaves me no one for whom to vote for the first time in my life. I will not be voting for president.