McCain-Lieberman `Bull Moose'
Duo Destabilize the President
by Jeffrey Steinberg and Anton Chaitkin
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the man widely referred to by professional Senate staffers as "the real Manchurian Candidate for 2004," has forged an unholy political alliance with Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "New Democrats" apparatus. Their purpose is to destabilize the Bush Presidency, and drive the United States toward policies certain to provoke the "Clash of Civilizations" new Thirty Years' War of Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, et al.
McCain is promoting his own third party candidacy in the 2004 Presidential elections, as a rerun of the 1912 Theodore Roosevelt "Bull Moose" operation, that defeated incumbent Republican William Howard Taft, and installed the Anglophile Confederate, Woodrow Wilson, into the White House. In the 2002 made-for-television remake, the currently leading Democratic Party potential beneficiary of McCain's dirty operations against President Bush, is Joseph Lieberman.
As EIR reported on Feb. 15 ("Worldwide Opposition Rises to Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Statement"), Senators McCain and Lieberman, along with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle, turned the annual Wehrkunde international security conference in Munich, Germany on Feb. 1-3, into a platform for pushing a Middle East war, targetting Iraq, Iran, and even longtime U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. McCain and Lieberman were particularly rabid, in demanding the immediate military elimination of Saddam Hussein.
Back in Washington on Feb. 14, McCain showed up at the DLC's think-tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, to showcase a legislative initiative that he has launched, with the current DLC chairman, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. McCain and Lieberman are co-sponsors of a petition for the creation of a Congressional panel to probe the intelligence failures of Sept. 11—which is widely understood to be a drive to purge current CIA Director George Tenet and install a replacement, more friendly to Israel's current war aims.
McCain and Lieberman were the two leading Senate sponsors of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, under which millions taxpayers' dollars have flowed into the pockets of the corrupt and inept Iraqi National Congress opposition to Saddam Hussein.
Blackmail, Plain and Simple
On Feb. 4, 2002, New Yorker magazine published a promo for the McCain "Bull Moose" operation, which rather bluntly spelled out how McCain—in league with the DLC apparatus—intends to blackmail President Bush into the Mideast war scheme, which the President had earlier rejected. "What works best for McCain right now," author Nicholas Lemann wrote, "is a dynamic in which he keeps presenting tests to Bush, with the idea that, if Bush flunks, McCain might be motivated to run for President. Bush has to keep placating him, and if he doesn't, McCain gets to run on the basis of principle rather than ambition.... The conduct of the war is an ongoing test, in which McCain is monitoring Bush for signs of getting soft because of a fear of asking Americans to sacrifice in an election year."
The number one issue on both McCain and Lieberman's blackmail list, is war on Iraq, as their performance at the Wehrkunde conference demonstrated.
EIR's investigation into the McCain-Lieberman collusion has established that the anti-Bush alliance between the hyper-ambitious Republican and the "New Democrats" gang has been ongoing for nearly two years, dating back to the 2000 primary elections, when Al Gore forged a "Get Bush" deal with McCain, during the hotly contested South Carolina GOP vote.
On Feb. 14, 2002, Gore's 2000 campaign manager, Donna Brazile, told the Washington Times that she had established a liaison with McCain's campaign adviser John Weaver, during the South Carolina primary campaign. It appears that, in return for McCain's support for the fight to banish the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol in Columbia, S.C., the Gore campaign cancelled the Democratic primary altogether, allowing Democratic voters to cross over and cast their ballots in the Republican primary election for McCain. While this Gore dirty trick, repeated in Michigan, was not sufficient to allow McCain to defeat George W. Bush, the dirty collusion between the "New Democrats" and McCain continued.
On Feb. 13, as the final debate on the House of Representatives version of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill was coming to a close, Donna Brazile was leading the effort to win Congressional Black Caucus votes to the bill. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) told a group of Republican legislators that McCain was "so deep in bed with the Democrats on this issue that his feet are coming out of the bottom of the bed."
The Courtship
In the Spring of 2001, the McCain-Lieberman collusion accelerated—after to the detriment of the Democratic Party and the nation—the defection of Sen. James Jeffords from the GOP appeared to give the Democrats control of the Senate.
Earlier in the year, the LaRouche movement had mobilized the Democratic Party base in an effort to defeat the nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General. While the mobilization succeeded in winning enough Democratic Senatorial votes to have defeated the nomination via a filibuster, then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) decided, instead, to let the Ashcroft nomination pass. But the fight had ignited the Democratic Party, and the "LaRouche factor" was growing in importance, as 2004 Presidential candidate LaRouche led a nationwide campaign to save D.C. General Hospital from shutdown, a powerful intervention against the entire "managed care" takedown of public health services.
Senator Jeffords formally announced that he would join the Democratic Senate Caucus as an independent on May 24, 2001—placing Tom Daschle into the post of Senate Majority Leader.
On May 30, 2001, Senator Daschle signed a petition, circulated by LaRouche campaign organizers, demanding that D.C. General Hospital not be shut down.
However, two days later, Daschle, along with DLC president Bruce Reed, arrived at McCain's home in Sidona, Arizona, to spend the weekend. Daschle was hoping to convince McCain to switch parties, and add to the new, one-vote Democratic majority in the Senate. In hindsight, McCain never had any intentions of throwing away his political leverage over President Bush by switching parties.
While in Arizona with McCain and Reed, Daschle sent a fax to the LaRouche campaign office, removing his signature from the D.C. General petition.
It was a month later that the real deal was hatched between McCain and the "New Democrats." That deal was not forged with Daschle; he, instead, was drawn into the McCain-Lieberman game by agreeing to co-sponsor the campaign finance reform bill—along with McCain and Lieberman. On the July 4th weekend, Lieberman travelled out to the McCain ranch for several days of secret talks. Unlike the high-profile McCain-Daschle soirée, the "summit" with Lieberman grabbed no national attention, its subject never made public.
However, shortly after that get-together, McCain gave the green light to his 2000 campaign policy adviser Marshall Whitmann, to launch an online political newsletter, "The Bull Moose." Another 2000 adviser—McCain's liaison to the Gore camp—John Weaver, was recently identified by syndicated columnist Robert Novak as the source of a leak to the New York Times, charging that, during the South Carolina primaries, George W. Bush arranged for Enron Corp. to "hire" his campaign operative, Ralph Reed, for a $20,000 a month no-show job—so Reed could work full-time for the Bush campaign.
The McCain-Lieberman filthy collusion (see Editorial) is bad for the Democratic Party, which will self-destruct under the misleadership of the DLC. But it is far worse for the nation and the world. The combined efforts of McCain and Lieberman are driving the Bush Administration into a devastating strategic blunder, that could trigger war and chaos. The McCain-Lieberman dirty politics is worthy of the term "Axis of Evil."
