McCain: Hurtling Toward the Edge
McCain is at it again. His propensity for lying in only thinly veiled disguise is pretty stunning. A week or so ago, he said that our troop levels are at pre-surge levels, then he denied he was wrong, trying to pretend he never said “pre-surge” in a way that was pretty blatant. Today, he’s lying even more outright–listen:
So, essentially, he’s saying that he’s not for privatization, those damned nasty liberul Democrat Party meanies will twist his words and claim he’s for privatization, but he’s not. Instead, all he wants to do is allow for people to put money that would otherwise go to Social Security payments and instead place them in personal accounts. In other words, privatization. (Oh, no! I just twisted John McCain’s words! I’m going to hell for sure now!)
Josh Marshall points out how Republicans, similar to the way they blamed their own “nuclear option” terminology on Democrats, backed off from “privatization, saying the that Democrat Party™ was responsible for it all along. They switched to ”private accounts,“ and when that didn’t work, ”personal accounts,“ the language McCain just used in aggressively denying he was for privatization. It’s kind of like watching an intelligent-design proponent vigorously deny he’s a creationist when all the time he’s thumping on a bible.
Undoubtedly, we are taking him out of context yet again, which is now McCain’s knee-jerk response to any public mention of his numerous lies. So, for context, here is the word from John McCain himself:
So, what do we have just recently? McCain claiming that Obama lacks knowledge and experience about Iraq, while claiming that our troops are at pre-surge levels, and that all violence in Iraq will magically disappear soon after he takes office. (This built upon repeated McCain gaffes and blunders about Iraq, from his famous ”marketplace stroll“ fantasy to his inability to discern Shiite from Sunni.)
McCain claiming that Obama will raise Americans’ taxes by ”thousands of dollars,“ that ”Americans of every background would see their taxes rise,“ claiming that McCain is the middle-class tax-cutter when in fact, Obama would cut middle-class taxes much more than McCain, and would only raise taxes on people in the upper class while giving small businesses and middle-class workers big cuts; McCain, meanwhile, gives the lion’s share of his tax cuts to the rich.
According to McCain, Obama is dirty because one of his Veep Vetters simply worked for Fannie Mae, while McCain’s own Veep Vetter was a paid lobbyist for Fannie Mae.
And that’s just in the past week or so. Keep going back and it’s practically anunending string of stuff like this–reversals, lies, and double-standards.
My question is, how long will it take for the media to recover from the softening effects of the Kool-aid-drinking McCain barbecues and start reporting even half the obvious truth about McCain, showing him up to be a liar, a flip-flopper, and a hypocrite on levels that makes even George W. Bush pale?
Five minutes after that happens–if it ever does–expect the right-wing PR machine to go into high gear, claiming that the (a) Liberal Media™ has (b) gone back on the May-I-Get-You-A-Pillow-Senator-Obama Bandwagon and (c) is unfairly demonizing John McCain for no good reason.
I have said it before, probably here, but if not here, elsewhere, that McCain is a ‘self-check’.
That means, McCain will self destruct between now and the election. Sooner over later, but if later, all the more so when the pressure of an election comes crashing down on him, and he starts getting his positions all screwed up while losing ground to Obama who barely looks like he’s breaking a sweat.
‘Self-check’ was a derogatory term we used playing pickup basketball while growing up. First you pick teams, then you start to play, but right before the game gets going, every body would have to say who they were guarding – but we used the term check: You’d quickly say who you’re gaurding, “I’m checking Robert’s” and someone else would say, “I’m checking Hoffmann” etc… but if it didn’t go off right they might say, “wait a second, who’s checking Kane?” and if they wanted to give a dig they might say, “Don’t need to check Kane, he’s a ‘self check'” meaning, I can’t play basketball, which of course causes you to turn it up a notch.
So I’m saying McCain is a self-check.
It’s great that Os team have set up rapid response units to fight slurs and innuendos – thats part of a competent campaign but in the end, they don’t need to check McCain too much. He’s a self check. He’s going to self destruct. He’ll either make a gaffe, or blow his top, or a combination of the two. It doesn’t help that he’s over 70. It’s too easy for him to get boxed in rhetorically. Obama, if he wishes can play rope-a-dope with him. If anything, he has to make sure that he doesn’t come off as being too uncharitable to McCain, – the helpless old man – or there might be a backlash.
Barring any unforeseen events, or miracles on McCain’s behalf, I think he’ll implode and he might end up losing every state, if people come to the realization that he’s no longer fit for the job.
One can only hope; it certainly seems like it. I worry, however, that the media will continue its propensity for ignoring stuff which, were it Obama, they would swarm over. The only real exception I recall was the speech he gave with the green background–but that was so over-the-top bad, and McCain himself pushed it out as a big event, they couldn’t have ignored it. But violating FEC rules and campaign finance laws? All we heard from the press was crickets.
Yeah, McCain gets away with murder.
But if he does a “Dean Scream” and I think he will, or he’ll do something so much more worse than that, just like the lime-aid speech, they can’t very well sweep that under the rug.
I am predicting that McCain is going to do some things that are very public that undermine his candidacy. So much so that it will become a kind of vicious cycle where he starts to dig his way to China. Then once he’s caught in that vortex, then he’ll simply just start to lose it, or conversely, once Obama starts pulling away from him, and he sees himself like a person on a boat approaching Niagara Falls, well, it could get very interesting.
The cameras are going to be on him more and more. There will be opposition research at every event, he can’t afford so much as a Macaca moment, and I am predicting that he’ll will have one, and it will make Macaca look small in comparison. I make this prediction, based upon all the mistakes and misques he’s done so far and the fact that the pressure is going to be amplified a hundred times greater, and the fact that he’s over 70 running against an Obama who is in the prime of his life and is the best natural politician, by every measure, that we have ever seen in this country.
McCain’s up against an incredible head wind, coming on the heels Bush’s disasterous presidency and the only thing he has going for him is that the media likes to carry his water. But soon, Obama will be able to compensate for that with his own media buys. The press can cover up the fact that he’s a law breaker, but that doesn’t mean Obama has to. The only thing Obama has to do is make sure he doesn’t come off like he’s taking a pipe wrench to a 73 year olds head.
This is just a prediction. Knock on wood, and all of that. I don’t want to jinx things. But I can’t help but think that McCain was just the lowest common denominator for the Republicans. If he was 55 years old, he wouldn’t be running now. He’d wait until the public had forgotten the Bush years. Now he’s in his 70s, he’s not mentally sharp enough, and he’s still prone to temper out bursts.
He could still win it. After all, Bush won in 04, and that made no sense to me at all. But I think he’ll get blown out. Maybe he’ll win Utah.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping Obama gets us to 60 senators (not including Lieberman of course) and that gets us universal health care. That will release so much purchasing power and reduce competitive pressure on business that the economy will revive on that alone. It will also make life easier for hundreds of millions of Americans who either have insurance, are under insured or are facing the possibility of become so.