Portraying McCain and Obama as saints

Mary Beard has an interesting article where she describes hagiographies (a hagiography is a biography of a saint) written about John McCain and Barack Obama; these books are supposedly aimed at children, and of course parents never read books to their children¹.

The one about McCain focuses heavily on his military service in Vietnam. You have to remember that Americans are bought up with a heavy indoctrination in patriotism and many of them treat soldiers as saviours and heroes, which the book capitalises on. It also mentions his medals, which Colin Powell says were being handed out like lollies during the Vietnam War, and there is plenty of dispute about McCain’s version of events in Vietnam. According to this sycophantic article the Vietnamese offered to release McCain but he refused because it would be a propaganda victory for the enemy and it just wasn’t the honourable thing to do. Frankly I find this unbelievable: I have heard of chaplains and doctors choosing to remain in captivity to assist others, but an airman has no good reason to remain in captivity, especially when the enemy is as cruel as the North Vietnamese were.

Whilst the book about McCain uses poetic licence, the ones about Obama exhibit the psychosis inherent in Obamania. One has him receiving a message from God, which sounds like another Marxist lie² to me; for a satirical view of the Obama myth see my post here. Did God also tell him to steal “excessive” company profits?

I’m all for free speech, but these books clearly show that politicians and their sycophants can never be trusted. A desire to politically indoctrinate children, which is clearly one purpose of these books, is a characteristic of totalitarianism (political indoctrination by parents excepted) and therefore these books should be repugnant to those who value truth and freedom.

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1. as I described in an earlier post, the Left uses schools to indoctrinate future generations. A high proportion of teachers are left wing, and I’ll bet that the Obama books will be popping up in schools more often than the McCain books do.

2. the post I have linked to here explains why the Left in New Zealand, the USA and elsewhere tells far more lies than the Right, as illustrated by the McCain and Obama books, as well as the Helen Clark billboards (click here and here).