McCain Campaign Really Takes Off!
With the Palin pick McCain's showing the kind of aviation skills that served this nation so well during his navy years -- only six aircraft destroyed!
Monica Goodling Wasn't Available?
Sarah Palin? Really? Former mayor of 6000. Wants Creationism to be taught in the classroom. Likely to get slimed in very personal abuse-of-office scandal. Tool of oil industry. Rabid anti-sexer. But also beauty pageant bimbo. Supports
aerial hunting of bears and wolves. I can see why Dick Cheney might like to have her around, in some capacity or other, but she underscores the statistical likelihood of McCain's death in office, while undercutting the increasingly specious "experience" argument, which is about all McCain has beside the increasingly annyoing
subject-verb-POW reflex.
What is that tremulous, fearful yet rather pleasant sensation I'm having? Could it be hope?
In any case I fearlessly predict that she will not, in fact, be on the ticket in November.
Matters Moral and Medical
Having recently returned from an effete European vacation, I was talking to The Lobbyist over a chilled flagon of chardonnay and a wheel of brie when I happened to refer loosely to a large class of hypocrites as “pro-life.” She made the kind of face she does when she spots a cockroach and said, “I really don’t like that term. It flatters them.” I had to concede the point.
When you consider it, virtually all the militantly “pro-life” are also dependably pro-war, or inextricably allied with the Mars Cultists. Is it possible to be both pro-life and pro-slaughter?
It may even be that by making cell-level potentialities the focus of your moral vision one necessarily loses the big picture, that is, the operation of morals in the sphere of actual human beings, sentient entities with hopes and dreams. (“Never mind the collateral casualties! There are stem cells to be saved!” says General Bush)
What they really are is anti-sex, mostly. I mean, what kind of sex education do they promote?
Now, as reported by the
Washington Post, one of the most nauseating developments in recent memory:
The Bush administration yesterday announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.
The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.
"People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong," Mike Leavitt said. "Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience."
Again: "People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong.” That, like so much of the past eight years, would be funny, if it wasn’t so Orwellian. I wonder how this thinking at the White House applies to people serving in the military or intelligence services, people, including doctors and psychologists who ended up participating in torture. Also, how also will it apply to people who refuse to treat Republicans? Were I a doctor I’d be very tempted to draw the line right there.
David Brooks, Party Fabulist
David Brooks besmirches the editorial pages of the New York Times today with an alibi for John McCain. It's essentially the same one Scotty McClellan was recently tossing off for the Bushies; it's like something from the cover of a pulp novel about ducktailed delinquents and the teen sluts who loved them, "They wouldn't let them be good."
It's the System's fault, Brooks basically asserts. The once saintly, famously straight-talking John McCain (like W before him) has devolved into a serial liar and all-round scumbag, because that's the only way to "win" in today's post-Edenic media climate. Of course, as is typical of such macho-fascists who do not do nuance or introspection, Brooks chooses "authenticating details" which reveal far more about himself and his subject than he intends. Writing of the weekly Republican lunches where party talking-points and armbands were issued, he alleges:
John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship.
That's one way to read "this sort of behavior." Another, more plausible one, is: indicative of superannuated adolescent narcissism, of the class rich-kid's reflex contempt for everything that doesn't aggrandize himself (rather like W's penchant for nicknames like Turdblossom), and also his love of getting cheap laughs at his lame jokes from his sycophantic subordinates.
This reading accords much better with John ("You stupid cunt!") McCain's actual history, than with the rebranding hagiography (A Different Kind of Republican) that Brooks is dutifully trying to recycle from the 2000 runup. We should be very wary of it, shout it down at every chance. McCain, let us remember has been a full-time sleazebag all his life, far more like W (spoiled, mean, unprincipled and stupid) than has been reported. This is perhaps why his supposedly different campaign has been run by Bushians and the summiest sort of K Street profiteers.
In any case, apropos the Straight Talk, last night I happend to catch a snatch of the hideous Saddleback travesty wherein John McCain was asked to discuss his "greatest moral failing." I had a thrill of a suspense wondering if Saint John, could, unlike the sociopathic Bush admit to any moral failing. This was dispelled when, with an Oscar-worthy catch in his voice McSame replied, "My greatest moral failing, and I have been a very imperfect person, is the failure of my first marriage."
I doubt very seriously that this really constitutes McCain's greatest moral failing (I'm sure there have been many, many pimpings of the public trust with graver consequences), though it is probably the one that the cretinous Saddleback audience gets chubbies over. But it's worthwhile to parse the exculpatory strategy of McCain's locution. His failing was "the failure of his first marriage." He makes it into a thing that somehow just happened, like a bridge failure or the failure of an electircal relay. McCain the sociopath, and McCain the candidate (of course), is utterly incapable of straight talk here, for that woukld have required him to say, "My greatest moral failure was the desertion of my crippled first wife."
That might not have played so well with the Fox fans.
McCain Dives for Pearls in Cesspool
John McCain is scum; his supporters are scum; the reporters who pretend otherwise are scum and Americans who don't go out and vote against his scumminess are scum. Once again: evil is not some Lecterian delectation of the perverse; evil is the collective negligence -- people going along to get along.
Now McCain is
telling people Obama tried to legislate defeat, with his opposition to The Surge, in order to further his "ambitions" to be President. This from a guy who will say anything whatsoever (and its opposite on the same day) in pandering for votes. This from a guy who's totally fine with Rove's greenlighting the trillion-dollar fiasco in order to lose GOP crimes int he fog of war.
Anybody who thinks Bush is the worst President possible had better brace himself for the horror of McCain -- he's shown himself capable of astonishing new lows.
There's Cheating and then there's Dumping
....going out and getting stupidly laid and then coming home and reconciling with the wife is not the same as going out, getting stupidly laid, then divorcing the crippled wife and marrying the pretty young thing (and taking out your marriage license before the divorce is final). One is stupid. The other is cruel. Brutal. Heinous. And well within the moral capacities of our Republican presidential candidate.
But never question McCain's integrity. He's a man of honor. Except when he lies about the favors he did for the boss of lobbyist (and Cindy Mccain lookalike) Vicky Iseman, with whom, although (on second thought) he may have done some favors for her boss's special interest, John did not, not have an affair -- and unless you have video you'd better not even suggest it. Just ask Cindy.
