"Intolerable for his hypocrisy and despicable air of brazen betrayal is Arizona Senator John McCain, who, for reasons of blatant electioneering, used manufactured outrage and pointed a red-hot finger at Reid, accusing him of playing politics by defending illegal immigrants to win reelection."
To deny that Harry Reid needs
the Hispanic vote in Nevada to win reelection this November would be the height
of folly. It's obvious that for the current majority leader of the U.S. Senate,
the road to victory - in a state where the ravages of the mortgage crisis and
the brutal collapse of the construction industry don't bode well for a quick recovery
of employment - has two lanes. One is offered by the grotesque weakness of his
opponent, a woman who has emerged from the ultra-right movement known as the Tea
Party, and the other offered by the growing political power of Hispanic voters.
So no one should be surprised
that last week, Senator Reid included in the defense
budget bill something called the Dream Act [Development,
Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act], which, if it becomes law, could
alter the destiny of thousands of young people born abroad but who came to the
United States as children when their parents emigrated without immigration documents.
Intolerable for his hypocrisy
and despicable air of brazen betrayal is Arizona Senator John McCain, who, for reasons
of blatant electioneering, used manufactured outrage and pointed a red-hot finger at
Reid, accusing him of playing politics by defending illegal immigrants to win reelection.
These are pathetic accusations coming from a man like McCain, who has turned political
flip-flopping into a way of life.
Four years ago, for example, McCain
favored repealing the hypocritical policy that permits homosexuals to enlist in
the military and go into combat, but forbids them to identify themselves as gay.
In May, at the height of a tight primary race for the Republican Senate nomination,
McCain changed his mind and, putting himself to the right of his very
conservative opponent, promised to oppose the adoption of a reform that calls
for full respect of people’s sexual preferences.
But nothing tops McCain’s amazing
ability to act like someone else than his change on the issue of immigration.
Only five years ago, he and Senator Ted Kennedy sponsored a bill that proposed,
among other things, a reasonable path to legalization for millions of
undocumented workers, which ended up being derailed by a handful of very
narrow-minded Republican lawmakers.
That same year in interviews he
gave to Spanish media, McCain questioned the usefulness and effectiveness of
the construction of walls along the border.
Three years later,
intimidated by an opponent well-known for his conservatism, McCain ate his
words and turn toward the extreme right, emphatically demanding the completion
of, “that dang fence” to stop “drug and human smuggling, home invasions and
murder.”
In a recent article, reporter
Maribel Hastings suggested that the radical change that McCain has experienced may
be because, “he can’t forgive Latinos for not voting for him in 2008.”
I don't know if his current angst
still stems from that, but what I'm sure of is that at 74-years-old and despite
having a family fortune amounting to billions of dollars, with a well-earned
reputation as a war hero and after almost three decades in Congress, McCain has
not resigned himself to losing power, even if it means making a deal with the
devil.
In its many incarnations, the
Faust of German legend has had
many variants but a single constant. From Marlowe
to Goethe, to Mann,
the successful and unsatisfied Faust longs for transient glory, although it
means selling his soul to the devil - and even knowing that once the pact is made,
his damnation will be eternal.
Today McCain has revived the
old tale without diluting its grandeur - but without the main protagonist noticing
himself in the comedy, in which life imitates fiction.
