Fishwrapper - Oh my, what's a loser to do?

There are the "has beens who were." Then there are the "has beens who never were." And, of course, there are throngs of "has beens who never were and never should be."

In the aftermath of last week's primary election, let's pause for a moment of reverent silence in memory of the losers. The landscape is littered with bodies of office holders who reached a little higher ... and flamed out. Over there are stacked corpses of neophytes who believed the world was waiting for their message, but the world decided to wait a bit longer. And everywhere you look are the savaged remains of the crackpots, the kooks, the fellows whose eyes flash with the flames of political narcissism.

For folks who wouldn't shut up just a few days ago, there is only sepulchral silence from the now deserted campaign offices. Phones no longer answer. The lights have been turned off.

A little sincere grief is appropriate. Cathy Woolard, one of the few certifiably sane and principled people in local politics, is history, defeated by an ambition to become the 4th District's representative to Congress.

Mary Squires, who as a gutsy state senator told the truth about George Bush, found that when you tilt at windmills — in this case, the U.S. Senate race — they tilt back ... hard. Thwack!

Doug Teper, the Rodney Dangerfield of the Georgia Assembly, found that his never-ending supply of witty repartee wasn't sufficient to propel him into the job of DeKalb County's supreme being. Heck, when you haven't organized anything more complicated than getting a date for the weekend, it's sort of hard to con voters to turn over the wheel of one of the state's largest organizations, public or private.

DeKalb ex-Commissioner Judy Yates, the very archetype of the gadfly, and Teresa Greene-Johnson, a comer (now a goner) in the state House, also ran into the brick wall that is named DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones.

This question nags me every round of voting about people such as Yates, Greene-Johnson and Teper: If they so badly miscalculate their chances (after bombastic promises of victory, Teper scraped up only 4,870 votes, an anemic 5 percent in the contest for DeKalb CEO, why should we ever think they could make a sound judgment in their old jobs?

Another question: What are these folks going to do in the future? For some it's obvious. Congressman, senator wannabe and former trucking company owner Mac Collins can shill for the trucking industry. After all, that seemed to be his preoccupation in Congress.

The other losing candidate for the Republican Senate nomination, Herman Cain, won't have to retreat to his old gig of selling pizzas. There are so damn few blacks willing to rub shoulders with the GOP's "neo-cons" (as in neo-Confederates) that Cain will always find a place in the party. Look in the Republican directory under "tokens."

One lawyer who flopped in the election may find many new clients — among white supremacist groups, the Klan, etc. I'm speaking, of course, of Grant Brantley, who tried to unseat the eminently competent Leah Ward Sears on the Georgia Supreme Court. Brantley's campaign message was, essentially, I'm not a black woman, look away, look away.

A hefty group of ex-candidates are "consultants" — Teper, Woolard, Derrick Boazman (who wanted to be president of Atlanta City Council).

Teper is a consultant who never has had many clients, but since he knows where the men's room is at the Capitol, he can now sell such familiarity to private clients. Many legislators — although not the apparently impoverished Teper — auction such favors before they leave office. It's often hard to tell when they transmute themselves from bribed public servant to bribing private lobbyist.

Boazman's finances were always a little fuzzy, but now he won't have pesky reporters hovering around his anything-but-elucidating financial disclosure reports. Call it a silver lining.

At least Woolard gives consulting a good name. One of the few who fell and is still loquacious, Woolard is anxious to get on with issues campaigns, her consulting specialty. "There are things I believe in, and that's what I'll keep on doing," she says. And what about future campaigns for public office? "You know, there's so much that could be done on health issues and other people-related problems if we had a good person as (state) insurance commissioner," Woolard mused. "That guy (incumbent John Oxendine), is he just stupid or what?"

Big losers in the primary are Atlanta's famed Coxopoly Race-Baiting White Guy Tag Team. I'm speaking, obviously, of radio blowhard Neal Boortz and Jim Wooten, who adroitly combines being an Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist with flacking for the Republican Party.

Delivering Boortz and Wooten a heavy dose of comeuppance was Cynthia McKinney, who smartly won the Democratic nomination for her old congressional seat.

Boortz — who adores war as long as someone else fights — last week was labeling McKinney "the cutest little communist in Congress." And he repeatedly referred to "those people" — that is, African-Americans — as supporters of Osama bin Laden because they voted for McKinney. Boortz must have learned broadcasting at the feet of Father Charles Coughlin, whose anti-Semitic and pro-fascism rants, as well as smears aimed at liberals, polluted pre-WWII airwaves.

Wooten, in his "Unthinking Right" column last week, groused that McKinney "does really well when nobody sees or hears her." The implication is that she was sneaky in plotting her impressive victory over five foes in the Democratic primary for Georgia's 4th Congressional District. Nothing angers the media more than a politician who wins — without dumping bundles in newspaper and TV advertising.

The idea of an invisible McKinney is, um, laughable. True, she didn't feel compelled to subject herself to the ministrations of the AJC, whose top two editorialists, Wooten and Cynthia Tucker, are venomous in their treatment of the once and future congresswoman. McKinney shied away from most mainstream media, other than African-American publications and the progressive radio station WRFG. But reporters found her. I did. She told me, while having coffee during the campaign, that she didn't feel compelled to crawl to the AJC. CL endorsed Woolard as the most well-informed, least divisive candidate — a position with which I agree.

Labor managed to find McKinney, and the Atlanta Labor Council endorsed her. Many environmentalists thronged to McKinney, although Woolard split the tree-hugger vote. Those who know that Bush lied while almost 1,000 GIs and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died — they, too, managed to flock to McKinney.

McKinney also proved to the dismay of critics (especially the AJC) that she's a crack strategist. With many important GOP primary contests, Republicans couldn't cross over to vote against McKinney. She knew the other black candidates in the race would never gain the traction to overcome her sort-of incumbency. And Woolard stumbled by focusing her campaign on beating state Sen. Liane Levetan. McKinney spoke to her base, got them to the polls, ignored the white establishment — and trounced her opponents.

Still, I'm sure that the crowd Wooten (or the other side of the AJC's editorial Janus face, Tucker) hangs with didn't see much of McKinney. After all, the AJC hates McKinney to the point that it has fostered the lie that she said Bush allowed 9/11 to happen so that his family and pals could indulge in profiteering. It's a message that creeps into the news columns as well as opinion screeds. In the July 22 summary of election results, for example, the AJC reported that McKinney "implied that administration officials knew the terror attacks would take place but did nothing so people close to the president would profit."

Tucker commented last Sunday: "McKinney was ousted after she made incendiary remarks suggesting that President Bush had known about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but did nothing to stop them so that his friends could profit from the resulting war."

"Suggesting" and "implying" are subjective terms. The AJC offered only thin snippets of what McKinney actually said. Why? Because the newspaper wanted to do your thinking for you.

Here is what McKinney said on the subject in a March 2002 interview with a Berkeley, Calif., radio station: "We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on Sept. 11. ... Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before Sept. 11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms' stocks. What did this administration know, and when did it know it about the events of Sept. 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?" (For the full transcript, see: www.rise4news.net/McKinney.html.)

Her roughly 25-minute appearance included stinging criticism of Bill Clinton's administration; a description of how mass disenfranchisement of black voters (not hanging "chads") led to the Bush win in Florida; and complaints about the climate of fear in America, where any dissent is branded as unpatriotic. McKinney also accurately predicted the use of torture by the Bush administration.

At that time, Bush was frantically dissembling that he had no prior knowledge of the attack, a falsehood he repeated after last week's release of the 9/11 Commission report, when he said: "Had we any inkling, whatsoever, that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect America." There were mountains of warnings, including detailed intelligence reports.

So, when McKinney asks, "What did this administration know and when did it know it?" she was, if anything, prophetic. About the best that can be said of Bush is that his administration was incompetent in assessing intelligence.

What McKinney didn't do is say Bush allowed the attack so that pals could profit. Many did profit — Bush's father, Dick Cheney (still on Halliburton's payroll), Defense Department consultant Richard Perle, ex-CIA boss James Woolsey — the list goes on and on. McKinney points out the profiteering in specific, well-researched detail. But she never says that profit was the motive for Bush's horrible failure to protect this nation.

Senior Editor John Sugg — who still hasn't conceded the 2002 7th District Congressional race to John Linder, contending that "those electronic voting machines cheated me" — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.