Valentine to McCain

McCain. So he's gonna be the Republican nominee for president. Well, sorry the media has misled you, but the guy actually is not such a hero. Were I to wish to identify those qualities in a John McCain that voters might need to know to accurately compare him with his rival, I might point out some of the following items about the man. He:

1) moved all over the country, admitted he never got an education

2) graduated at the very bottom of his military class at Naval Academy (894th out of 899)

3) nicknames were "Punk" and "McNasty" cuz he had a temper problem and fought all the time

4) never paid attention to details of flying an aircraft, got shot down, may have caused a major fire which consumed a bomber aircraft while screwing off

5) wrote a lame confession under duress trashing the USA, which he said he regretted ever doing

6) lived for most of his life as a super-playboy, dating strippers and trashy women, driving race cars, kind of an "I'm Mr. Flash" self-image

7) cheated extensively on his first wife, who was loyal to him while he was being tortured in the 'Nam, and left her soon as he was stateside, and only because, in his own words, "I was 40 and wanted to be 25."

8) lied to his trophy wife, the Stepford-looking Cindy, about his age (admitted doing this) to get her to marry him

Finally, he's 71, and does seem to be slowing down a bit. He might be a bit dottie. He has had skin cancer, now in remission, but it was really serious and for awhile it looked fatal or at least that he would never be able to run. He almost become Kerry's running mate. He almost left the Republican party. He helped bring about the S&L debacle. He can't raise his hands above his head. He's pro-life, pro-Iraq, pro capital punishment, anti-gay marriage, pro Bush tax cuts, and the list goes on. He cusses a lot, drinks a lot, shoots first and asks questions later, and is about as "old school" a guy as we could get. I just don't think we're going back to my old school this time. Another sort of a loser / pretty boy son and grandson of royalty. It's just too similar to W, and that's subtext will out down the stretch.

Obama needs to paint McCain as the trigger happy Dr. Strangelove that he is. He needs to make it so that America is more afraid of what McCain would do in an emergency situation than Barack.

Got two responses to this, one from Babe the Blue Ox, the other from Paul Bunyan. Paul says:

I agree, with the minor variance that I think Hillary would lose worse.

If so, then we have an interesting situation. Our fate lies in the hands of a man who has shown glimmers of decency and honesty in the past, but who kissed the ring of the godfather 8 years ago and has been raving like a madman ever since.

The money machine, the stupidity machine, the power machine--It's not meant to be fascism at first, its just rich fat guys rolling around in piles of money. It leads to fascism, terror, bankruptcy, and failure, but that's a byproduct.

Normally it would not matter so much who wins, but we need someone to stop the bleeding. To stop the Scalias and the Wolfowitzes and the David Addingtons and the Roves (Injustice, War, Torture, Deceit, respectively). There's a chance McCain might stop those things, but that chance rests on the idea that he has spent 8 years pretending to be evil in order to be president and do good. It seems a dark prospect. By the way, McCain, just today, voted against a bill to ban waterboarding. It passed the senate with 51 votes.

Babe wrote me:

On a flight from Burlington, Vt., to Warwick, R.I., on Thursday, Mr. McCain volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, “has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands” and that she earned it by “dealing drugs.” Previously, Mr. McCain has identified Ms. Buchanan as “Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,” “bipolar,” “a drunk,” “someone with a lot of boyfriends” and “just out of Betty Ford.”

It is only a matter of time before some viewer, listener or reader complains — recovering addicts, for example, mental illness sufferers, or, for that matter, Pat Buchanan himself.

One of the trademarks of Mr. McCain’s rebel image has been his inability to cloak his emotions, especially anger. He has been prone to volcanic blowups over the years. And while he would hardly be the first president with a temper, Mr. McCain has been ever vigilant of late about resisting provocation.
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So says one of those wry NY TImes campaign articles. Nobody has gotten away with this kind of humor in front of reporters since Johnson and Nixon. You gotta have very big balls to do it these days.

By the way, can somebody explain why the right-wingers hate this guy? As far as I can tell, he is as right wing as Satan, with the one single exception of stem-cell research.