The first student speaker, Jean Sara Rohe, 21, said she had discarded her original remarks to talk about Mr. McCain.
"The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," she said, to a roaring ovation. "This invitation was a top-down decision that did not take into account the desires and interests of the student body on an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all."
You can read the rest in the link, but she had a strong climax:
"I am young, and although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong," she said.
She added, "Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."
There are only 100 U.S. Senators serving at any one time, out of, like, three hundred million Americans. And Jean Sara just spoke up to one of them in public.
Bring on the cajones!
It's easy to get all 1950's and wag the finger at the protestors -- I'm not talking about Ms. Rohe so much as about the students and faculty members who stood up, shouted or jeered. I consider standing silently with your back to the speaker a more polite and acceptable choice, since you're not trying to shout down or verbally disrupt a speaker.
Then there's the issue of John McCain's media fable role as having been smeared out of the 2000 GOP Presidential nomination in South Carolina by Bush and Rove. A racial smear, against McCain's very own adopted daughter. The lowest (modus operandi).
But the Straight-Talk Express of that campaign era has been replaced by McCain's campaigning not just for but with Bush in the crucial final days of the 2004 debacle. His criticisms of the Administration have only been remarkable by the standards of strict party loyalty, never going far enough into effective action against the spiteful deterioration of America's infrastructures by the power-grubbing BushCheneyCo GOP machine.
I'd be much happier were McCain the 2000 nominee than Bush. I don't believe we would have gone into Iraq, certainly not so recklessly, if at all. I'm sure if either Gore or McCain had been President, we'd have taken out Afghanistan, as we should have, but also stayed to finish the job.
But none of that matters because McCain did not stand up, did not make a contrary voice known, hid behind the good soldier routine just like Colin Powell and is just as stripped bare because of it. McCain harbors dreams of being the 2008 nominee, and I think he's the only GOP figure who has any real chance, a good one if Hillary Clinton buys or steals the Dem nomination (because there's no way by now with her unrepentence on her Iraq War vote that she'll ever do enough to earn it), but I think he's toast against Gore, looking like an old man next to Clark, Edwards, Warner, maybe even Joe Biden. And I'll lay odds they're all running.
It's much like that old '60's phrase, which tends to apply in stressful times: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. In this case, since McCain has definitely not been part of any current solution, he's just another cog in the machinery. Remember, Bush is a rich guy, and for him everyone is either a partner or an employee. McCain has acted for hire.
Look, I sympathize. If he wants to win the nomination, he's got to peel off some lunu fundamentalist votes, so he goes and speaks at last week's Jerry Falwell's Liberty University commencement, up at the podium big photo op with Jerry tall and huge-bellied in his kingly university robe. McCain looked small and frail next to the man he had just six years ago called an "agent of intolerance" and a figure who exercised an "evil influence" in the Republican party.
But it's times like these, like with McCarthyism in the 1950's, like when Nixon was using your Constitution as toilet paper, that true character stands the test. And McCain (like Powell) have flubbed it. Why should I rally to the side of a man who, as a Vietnam Vet and POW survivor should know more than anyone the cost of war and why not to be profligate with it, yet publicly supported the Iraq War right from the get-go.
Now the conundrum is worse for St. John. His oratory at the New School was the same as at Jerry Falwell U, something he had originally advertised so folks wouldn't think he's curtailed his tougher "straight talk" for Falwell U. ears. He received a hearty welcome by his friend and fellow Vietnam/Senate veteran, Bob Kerrey, but he reportedly didn't win over the crowd:
The Senator spoke in a dull monotone, without his usual charisma or charm. He was noticeably deflated by the crowd's harsh reception towards him. Remarks such as "I supported the decision to go to war in Iraq," were met with loud boos.
"I stand that ground because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it."
"Wrongly!" one student boomed from the back. Sitting directly behind us, Maureen Dowd and Adam Nagourney of the New York Times, chuckled.
And then some walkouts and I mean, harsh! I remember him with Chris Matthews on a college stage with students enthusiastically, organically, cheering him. The last thing I would have imagined in 2000 was a pair of lead New York Times reporters chuckling at McCain's humiliation at a goddamned college graduation.
So what does the Senator do now? He's lost the students, they're not coming back unless he does some Delta Force action on Bush in his bed with a hunting knife. This President is rapidly becoming pariah, and I doubt many world leaders want to be photographed with him. It's fascinating when someone voted by half the country to run it morphs over a year or a summer into untouchable, unwantable, mass scale detested, but that's what's happening to rich idiot George. Why take responsibility for vomititious 29% approval ratings when you can blame everyone else. Literally, everyone else.
I can't imagine what it's like for David Gregory to interview this President at this time. Was it like talking to a sociopath in prison?
And there's John McCain, still after all this time propping up a bankrupt ideology led by a remote, unrepentant killer.
So if you don't have the kids and you don't have me, you won't ever get me anymore, do you just dance with the date that brought ya and you're hopin', pretty soon, will have bought ya? And that's the GOP religious right, my friend, that's who you've been targeting so they better be who you got. Because independent does not mean "without followers" it means respected for your independent thought and action.
If you're McCain, do you use the student protest as a rightwing rallying cry? Do you trot it out at key press or public moments?
Or do you revamp your rap to include staunch support for free speech, what you fought for and spent five years in a deadly Vietnamese POW camp for?
Either way, I don't want anybody who so unequivocally supported the Iraq War to be my President. I don't trust that person to make perhaps an equally or more crucial national security decision in the future.
I want someone who is his own man. I think that's what the country will be looking for. Whether that's what the stratagems of men or Gods deliver is still so very clearly, so very dearly up for grabs.
Unlike our President, McCain is not by nature a foolish man. He's a guy who knows how to learn. So I wonder, what lesson did he learn at the New School?
Did he learn it might be tough? Did he learn not to come back to this crowd?
I'm hoping he learned how very real, how very deep, and how very contagiously now the people of this great nation are angry with this President and every mechanism that supports him. It is boiling over at the points where the two worlds collide. People are more aware than ever, and they don't want any more Karina or Abramoffs or Plames or NSA transgressions or Iraqs.
For everyone's sake, I pray that the lesson John McCain learned today was to stop being part of the problem.
Like, right now.
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