Motherfucking John McCain.
I’m sick of him. I’m sick of hearing his voice. And I’m most of all sick of hearing all the utter bullshit that comes out of his damn mouth.
Weathervane McCain is at it again. After an comically embarrassing dive to the hard right to save his political hide in 2010, McCain is hoping to take advantage of the nascent, if inevitably doomed, partisan détente as cover to crawl back to the political center. The move is, of course, total garbage, and it comes almost 2 years too late to salvage McCain’s reputation in my opinion.
The Senator wrote an op/ed for the Washington Post this weekend in which he tried to thread the political needle in the wake of the Tucson shootings: He attempted to simultaneously praise President Obama’s speech, defend Sarah Palin’s victim-complex ‘blood libel’ histrionics, and run away from the irresponsible, undignified type of language and rhetoric that he himself had used, or endorsed, during the past two campaign cycles.
In addition to McCain’s confession of responsibility for his role in the coarsening of the discourse, he now claims to disavow the vicious attacks against Obama, including those his questioning his loyalty, and love of America;
"I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals.”
Really? Who is he kidding? The monster he created has made millions doing just that. The movement that he eagerly tea-bagged in order to get elected is led by people and groups who regularly accuse the President of every heinous crime imaginable. And most of his fellow Republicans in Congress are unable to speak more than five words about Obama without one of those words being 'socialist,' or 'tyrant,' or 'anti-American.'
He 'rejects the accusations'?? Come on.
It would have been nice – it would have been believable – if this change of heart had come after the presidential campaign in 2008. Or before the town-hall summer of hate in 2009. Or before the 2010 Congressional elections would have been nice. But it didn’t.
And, now that Mac has 5 years before he needs to curry favor with the tea party crazies again, he sees an opportunity to seize upon the Tucson tragedy to try to position himself as a voice of reason in a party dominated by extremist neo-conservatives – a position similar to the one he held during most of the Clinton and W. Bush administrations.
Well, as they say; he’s a day late and a dollar short.
From the day he introduced the world to Sarah Palin, and allowed her to attack almost every ‘policy and belief’ ever espoused by Obama, he has been bereft of any credible claim to being anything remotely describable as a moderate voice within the GOP. Funny that McCain says that he ‘rejects accusations’ against the President but has never actually ‘refudiated’ any of Palin’s outrageous accusations.
McCain insults the intelligence of the readers with this insincere tripe. I don’t need to list every snide remark by Palin calling into question Obama’s ‘worthiness’ to lead the nation or explaining his ‘opposition to the founding ideals’, do I?
He may try to straddle the fence, defending free speech while denouncing the irresponsible speech of others, but he can’t now say that he rejects the accusations when his running mate and chief surrogate was one of the main people running around making accusations. He can’t denounce the character assassins when, in 2008 as the presidential candidate and titular leader of the party, he had the opportunity to actually change the tenor of the discourse by example, but did not.
So while it’s nice that McCain was, as he wrote, ‘comforted,’ ‘inspired,’ and ‘encouraged’ by the President’s speech, the fact remains that McCain bears no small measure of responsibility for the level of the rhetoric. And he cannot simply say that he “rejects accusations that [Obama’s] policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals” without ever doing anything about it.
01.16.11 MSNY
