No "Peace And Love" For "Straight Talk" McCain

So Repug Senators John McCain, Jon Kyl and Tom Coburn are fighting Dems Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer about an earmark of $1 million for a museum in Woodstock, NY to commemorate “three days of fun and music” in 1969, huh?

Somehow I’m sure that would generate tourism revenue more than offsetting the cost over time, but the Repugs can’t be bothered with that when there’s liberal-bashing to be done, as we know.

And how funny is it that “Senator Honor And Virtue” is trying to make some kind of a principled stand here over $1 million when, as noted here, he and Kyl have tried to steer $10 million to their home state for an academic center honoring the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist? And as also noted from the link, he…

“…pushed for, and got, $14.3 million for Arizona's Luke Air Force Base inserted into the just-completed fiscal 2004 military construction appropriations conference report. The only problem is the project to acquire more land near the base was not requested.”

Also, though Kyl seems to be good on earmarks, he had a thing for secret holds until the procedure was recently disallowed (most notoriously on The Open Government Act – yep, I think the Repugs really don’t get the concept of irony), to say nothing of the fact that he co-authored the amendment that expanded the AUMF recently (voted for by Hillary Clinton).

And Tom Coburn has no room to criticize anybody given his obstruction against passing a bill that would make it tougher for mentally ill individuals to purchase handguns, legislation authored in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre earlier this year (noted here; so many reasons why Coburn is a mess that it's almost impossible to list them all in a single post). Sure he stands up against earmarks (some of which are good, such as the ones Patrick Murphy delivered here), but I think saving lives threatened by gun violence is just a bit more important.

Somehow I don’t think beating up on those aging, tie-dye-wearing, recreational-drug-using (well, maybe not so much anymore, I hope) hippies of an earlier era through this measure (costing $1 million, after all – that’s what, half a day in Iraq?) is going to vault Senator “Maverick” to the top of the polls shown here. He’ll have to look for a miracle somewhere else (and as noted here, isn’t he a class act?).