Interview Meme – part the Penultimate

From Enemy of the Republic: 2. Name 3 American officials who are currently under the Imperious Curse and doing the Dark Lord's bidding? Explain your answer.

The Dark Lord bit is a bit subjective and I’m not too well versed on politicians anyway, so I’ll interpret this one as which three politicians I think have recently been acting as though someone else has been controlling their actions to the detriment of their career and the American public. I’ll start with:

Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He looked like a strong candidate for the Republican presidential nominee, someone who could perhaps reform the tarnished image of Republicans created by President Bush, and who might best serve the majority of Americans with his political mix of social liberalism and financial conservatism. Unfortunately, whoever ran his campaign (probably Osama bin Laden) decided the best course of action would be to wait until he had been completely eliminated before running. Seriously, when Romney and Huckabee are drawing more press than Giuliani, it’s because he’s using the “Campaigning through Hibernation” model.

Senator John McCain. I had generally been a supporter of McCain, mostly because when I noticed him in the press it was for doing something good, such as calling out the other senators for trying to attach greedy riders to anti-terrorist bills (famous McCain paraphrase - “The sea lamprey, in my opinion, does not pose a clear and present danger to national security”) or criticizing President Bush for trying to push through his anti-gay agenda, citing his belief that good Republicans stood for keeping government out of people’s lives instead of trying to regulate personal relationships. Then during the last days of the campaign he traveled to California to lobby for the passage of Proposition 8. What happened to the McCain I respected? Either he turned into an old person afraid of being banned from heaven so he decided to stack the deck in his favor, or he feared his personal politics weren’t grabbing enough redneck fundies from Obama, or he was hit with the Imperious curse. You decide.

I was going to mention Cynthia McKinney, Georgia politician and daughter of a famous civil rights movement leader, but despite the accusations of anti-Semitism and her racially biased suck-up letter to a Saudi prince schmoozing for dough in the wake of 9/11 and her attack on a police officer, I can’t actually accuse her of acting as though under a curse. She consistently behaves like she smokes crack and whacks her head with a lead pipe. Instead I’ll choose another local politician / offspring of a civil rights movement leader – Ralph David Abernathy III. Given the current Obamarama mood in this country, I’ve been able to find many more articles praising RDA3 for his ability to be of the same race as the president-elect, but I had to dig to find stories of things he’s actually done. The media seems to have forgotten about how he attempted to carry marijuana through the airport upon return from his Caribbean vacation and how he bounced the check he used to register to run for reelection, although there is some mention of those items here before the report on how he lead police on a high speed chase. Also, his impeachment is a matter of public record, although details of all his crimes (mostly things like theft and violating his public office oath) are difficult to track down. What I remember most was, after bouncing the check, he publicly accused his wife of overdrawing their account and causing the issue. I would have thought him something less of a crud if he had at least manned-up an took some responsibility for himself.

Side note – I wonder if our civil rights leaders should have spent a little more time at home making sure their kids didn’t turn out to be out of control public nuisances.