RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former United States Representative Cynthia McKinney is at it again: spouting nonsense on the world stage and lending aid and comfort to America’s enemies via an apparently never-ending stream of ridiculous and unfounded pronouncements. McKinney took her show on the road to the Middle East, where she fanned the flames of American hatred by telling Muslims living in Libya and Iran that the United States is exactly what they believe it is: a fat, bloated nation controlled by Israel that exploits the poor in order to line the pockets of the wealthy.

Appearing on Libyan state television, McKinney said that the United States had no business being involved in the conflict there, especially given the way that Obama administration is exploiting America’s poor.

“Under the economic policies of the Obama administration, those who have the least are losing the most. And those who have the most are getting even more,” she said. “The situation in the United States is becoming more dire for average ordinary Americans, and the last thing we need to do is to spend money on death, destruction and war.”

That’s classic McKinney of course. As a Congresswoman, she never displayed the slightest understanding of economics, nor did she show the even the faintest interest in learning about how modern economies function. Her job, as she saw it, was to secure the largest possible piece of the juicy federal pie for her district – period. And so, if real unemployment in America has been stuck over fifteen per cent throughout the Obama administration, the only conclusion McKinney is capable of coming to grips with is that the administration is passing out too many goodies to the wrong people.

Yet, ignoring the realities of free market economics was just the tip of the iceberg. McKinney saved her most outrageous statements for the people of the nation that represents the most dangerous and powerful threat to peace in the Middle East: Iran. In an interview on Iranian state TV, she threw Israel under the bus and stoked Muslim anti-American paranoia at the same time.

McKinney expressed outrage and disgust because the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) expected her to sign a pledge to support Israel before they would consider sending her donations for her campaigns. This is of course common practice for any number of PACs, left, right or in the middle. At a minimum, PACs expect you to answer a questionnaire so they can determine how reliable your vote will be. Quite often, they ask candidates to sign pledges that formalize their commitment.

Anybody familiar with American politics understands that this is the way fundraising works, all across the board, for better or for worse. But, one must assume that the Iranian interviewer and her audience aren’t at all familiar with American-style politics and fund-raising. Accordingly, a person discussing something like a pledge to AIPAC surely has a moral obligation to put those kind of fund-raising tools into proper context. Not so with Cynthia McKinney.

As the interview develops, it’s clear that the interviewer believes that signing the AIPAC pledge is a requirement for anyone running for Congress and that signing this pledge is a unique – and therefore sinister – occurrence in American politics. McKinney plays right into the paranoia, making it sound like if you don’t support Israel, you can’t get possibly get any money and therefore can’t be elected to public office:

McKinney: You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel that the economic assistant that Israel wants that you would vote to provide that.

Press TV: This is not a question for the Congress people serving that they are representing or they are supposed to be representing the people of the United States not a foreign country and yet they have to pledge allegiance to a foreign state? No one questions this?

McKinney: That is what I was asked to do and I made it public.

Any American interviewer worth their salt would have asked the logical next question: “Ms. McKinney, if you can’t get elected without big campaign contributions and if you can’t get big campaign contributions without committing to support the military superiority of Israel, how did you manage to get elected six times? You must have got campaign contributions from somewhere.”

Because she was appearing on television in a totalitarian state with a tame interviewer, that question would never be asked. The point of the exercise was to demonize Israel as much as possible and to fan the flames of anti-American hatred and paranoia as much as possible, and the facts be damned. It’s hard to believe that McKinney could be a bigger embarrassment out of office than she was when served in Congress, but that’s proving to be the case. The administration and Congress need to denounce her in the strongest possible terms, before she does even more damage to American and Israeli interests throughout the world.