Cynthia McKinney

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Cynthia McKinney
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Cynthia McKinney is a former member of the U.S. Congress from Georgia. She was the presidential nominee of the US Green Party in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections.

She is also a notable conspiracy nut, which tends to raise serious doubts about either (depending on what one wants to believe) the claims of the Green Party to run a grass-roots democratic outfit[1] or the sanity of left-wing activists in the U.S.

Contents

[edit] Electoral history

She was first elected in 1992 but lost her seat ten years later. Critics charged that her undoing came from claiming Bush knew 9/11 would happen but did nothing and getting documents released about the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, but her father Bill blamed it on "J-E-W-S." She got her seat back in 2004 but lost it again when she slugged a Capitol police officer who attempted to stop her from going into a restricted area of the Capitol because he could not see her credentials.[2]

If she had been elected, she would have been the first African American woman, the first woman, and the first Green Party politician to become president of the United States; but with endorsements from the likes of Roseanne Barr and Ward Churchill, who needs a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy™ to sink one's candidacy?

Either way, her political career is probably over.

[edit] Political positions and beliefs

While she has supported many sane and even mainstream causes, she has also put some weight behind quite a few crazier ones. To enumerate:

[edit] Sane

[edit] Crazy

  • Believes that the US military shot and killed 5,000 prisoners during Hurricane Katrina and dumped their bodies in the bayou.
  • Does not believe that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, or that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert F. Kennedy.
  • Has claimed that Jeb Bush was running a drug ring out of Colombia while he was governor of Florida.
  • Supported the rule of Gaddafi in Libya, including his persecution of the Nafusi Berbers.[3]

[edit] Truther

In 2002, McKinney was widely reported as holding truther views, and to have expressed these views for the Congressional record on the floor of the House of Representatives.

A fellow conspiracy enthusiast, Greg Palast, reported in June of 2003 that none of the media outlets making this claim offered a proper citation of McKinney's alleged statement in the Congressional record. This, he said, caused him to search that record and fail to turn up the quote.[4]

Palast further claimed that McKinney actually made the following statement for the Congressional record: "George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11." Unfortunately, Palast neglected to provide a proper citation of this claim, making it extremely difficult to verify without extensive trawling through the Congressional record.

The following year, McKinney signed on to a 9/11 Truth Movement demand for more answers about 9/11.[5] A year after that, she held a Congressional hearing on the subject;[6] charged that she was promoting trutherism, she responded with a letter saying, essentially, that she was just asking questions.[7]

[edit] Footnotes

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