I've written about John McCain a few times before, but reading this today is my breaking point. What's weird about this is that I don't really know very much about him, and I don't seek out information about him, but he just keeps astonishing me with his stupidity.
I honestly wonder if maybe he's got some kind of brain damage. He's an elderly man at this point; maybe he's in the early stages of Alzheimer's or something. Seeing what he says and does makes me think that somewhere deep in his brain he has a few core values like "America = good" and "must win war" and "I will be President" but then the parts of his brain that process information and govern rationality are malfunctioning.
So he gets in front of a certain audience, has a few ideas about what that audience values, and tries to spin his own core ideas and the audience's values into a message. But he long ago abandoned any hope of his message being consistent with anything he's ever said before. And now he's at the point where he's abandoned logical coherance as something important in his message.
It is like McCain is a caricature of a pathetic pandering politician, except real. I'm basing all of this off basic reporting of what he says and does, and I'm not sure that it puts me in a position to evaluate this next statement, but I do think that he is almost totally genuine. I don't think he's a diabolical schemer. I think he genuinely believes everything he says at the time he says it, and is genuinely unable to comprehend the contradictions and inanity.
End rant/
1 comment:
As someone who's followed McCain for quite some time, perhaps even rooting for him at some point, I can honestly say that there is no truer statement about his current diametrically opposed interpolating juxtaposition than the one that finishes off the slate article:
"And so, as his campaign faces the purple dusk of twilight time, the man who might once have been an honorable president slips and slides on the stardust."
In his attempt to appeal to the people that will nominate him, he has alienated the people that have long respected him. And in his attempt to stay true to himself and reality, he has alienated the people who might nominate him.
I think if he were willing to take the risk, he would have had considerable pull (i.e. more than Ross Perot) running as an independent or third-party candidate from the beginning. Probably too late for that now, though.
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