‘Ware McCain

This skirts the edge of linkwhoring, something I’ve been avoiding, but I think it’s important. “It” being an article by Matt Welch about John McCain.

John McCain scares me. He has for a long time. There are a lot of smooth-talking, power-hungry operators in Washington, but McCain scares me because he’s one of the few that has the knack of appearing to be something other. People voted for George W. Bush because in him they thought they saw a straightforward, down-home kinda guy. But McCain makes Bush look like a two-bit carnival huckster. Where John Kerry threw his purple hearts in people’s faces, McCain’s experience as a POW is wielded less ostentatiously and yet is always there. McCain’s stock in trade is Sincerity, with a capital S. He’s the original Straight Talker from 2000.

And yet this is the guy who co-sponsored the hideous McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill, more properly called the Incumbent Protection Act. An attack on political speech so craven it bars groups like Greenpeace or MoveOn.org from mentioning a candidates name in ads in the sixty days before an election. And then used his “campaign finance reform” foundation as a front to fund preparations for his next presidential campaign.

This is also the guy who blew up doping scandals in baseball into a national crisis requiring congressional intervention.

And if Matt Welch’s read on him is correct, he’s a hardened war-hawk who’s grand vision of America is one in which everyone must sacrifice in order to restore the stature of the glorious republic.

Matt may or may not be right; lord knows there’s precious little of substance to work from in all that straight talkin’. What seems clear, though, is that McCain is no moderate, and he’s no stranger to cynical self-advancement.

To paraphrase Garth Algar: “John McCain is nobody’s friend. If John McCain were an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines… and dick.”

EDIT: OK, it’s not so much linkwhoring. I wrote that before I realized I had a few paragraphs in me.

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8 Comments

  1. Although I don’t agree on all the details..

    I do agree with most of the substance and definitely about the grand point here..

    I think McCain is nothing like what he portrays. He is not a moderate by any means… and every year his desperation to be president seems to cost him ever greater amounts of his integrity…

    The only thing that I can hope is that the more spotlight that gets thrown on him, the more it will raise the chance that the real McCain–who has a decidedly thin skin in many ways–will show himself as the power-hungry say-anything to anyone politician that he really is…

    basically.. he’s very much the “John Kerry” of the Republican party in my view–touted very much for some illusional “electibility” that hides a very self-serving individual..

    1. Re: Although I don’t agree on all the details..

      You’re right; I think McCain and Kerry is an apt comparison.

  2. The 2nd amendments is the mirror that looks deep into a politicians soul and shows the truth. MsCain is gun grabbing authoritarian prick, and very bad news if he get into power.

  3. There’s a whole lotta people out there that’d go gonzo for dick flavored ice cream.

    Pralines maybe not so much.

    1. You should write a letter to Ben & Jerries.

  4. Taken from the article…

    “”Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.””

    This alone is enough to send up a red flag. A good government is responsible to the people it governs, not the other way around.

    1. Re: Taken from the article…

      Yeah, I never got why people swooned over JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!” line. Shouldn’t that sort of thing be alarming, rather than exciting?

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