The Hightower Report

The Myth of Georgian Democracy

I've got Georgia on my mind. Not the Peach State but the Republic of Georgia.

This nation gained its 15 minutes of international fame in August when it briefly got into a territorial war with Russia, its powerful northern neighbor. Georgia quickly got routed but not before U.S. politicians – especially the Bush White House and John McCain – leaped into the fray with a fusillade of red-hot rhetoric. They worked themselves into a froth condemning Russia while also praising Georgia as a plucky, Western-style democracy that deserves America's full support. Indeed, Bush and McCain immediately pledged a billion of our tax dollars to Georgia and hailed its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as a combination of George Washington and Rocky Balboa.

Back home, however, people snickered at the idea of Saakashvili being a democratic model. Running a semiauthoritarian state, he routinely unleashes his thuggish police forces to suppress his opposition, attack protesters, and repress the media.

Georgia's independent, human-rights watchdog, for example, says that "a free press is the main myth created by [Saakashvili] that the West has believed in." He bluntly reports that "the government is so afraid of criticism that it has felt compelled to raid media offices and to intimidate journalists and bash their equipment."

What Saakashvili can't achieve by bashing he gets by cronyism and censorship. Staff members and even owners of media outlets have been forced out, replaced by government allies. And the news director of Georgia's most popular TV station says she was under so much government pressure to alter stories that she finally resigned on the air.

Beware of the Bush-McCain line that Georgia is a flower of democracy. Once again, our leaders are trying to commit America financially and militarily on false pretenses.

McCain, the Anti-Maverick

John McCain keeps calling himself "a maverick" and is even calling the McCain-Palin ticket "Maverick Squared."

Puh-leeze. It's been my privilege to know some genuine mavericks, and I can tell you that McCain is not one of them. A 26-year Washington insider, the senator is now running as the trusted candidate of America's corporate establishment. He's such a reliable conformist to the corporate agenda that, at last count, 177 lobbyists for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, telecommunications giants, and other industries form the very core of his campaign, including every position from campaign manager to fundraising chairman.

Meet the original maverick: An early Texas land baron and political leader, Samuel Augustus Maverick was an independent-minded rancher who refused to brand his cattle. As a result, any unbranded steer wandering the range became known as a "maverick," a term that soon entered the vernacular to describe people who wore no one's brand – rebels, iconoclasts, nonconformists, and dissenters.

A grandson of the old rancher took this proud independent streak into politics during the Great Depression. Maury Maverick defeated the moneyed establishment of San Antonio to become a two-term member of Congress, then became the city's mayor, using both offices to battle the entrenched corporate powers on behalf of regular folks. His son, Maury Jr., carried the feisty spirit forward, battling the oil and gas barons as a state representative, then spent four decades as a brilliant American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. He represented – often for free – such outsiders and freethinkers as civil rights protesters, labor activists, McCarthyite victims, atheists, and conscientious objectors.

That, Mr. McCain, is a maverick. And you – being hoisted toward the presidency on the beefy shoulders of corporate lobbyists – are the exact opposite.