Only a few months ago, many Republicans had profound concerns about Senator John McCain's "liberal" record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were "God's children too." Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, asked why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, gave this typical answer: "I'm much more concerned about Obama."
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up [whining] about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.
Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-salesman that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.
This dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation of McCain offers the vehicle for his new platform, which is just the same old ring-around-the-collar fear-mongering horse manure used by a generation of conservatives, warmed over to fit 2008. In fact, in his stump speeches these days, McCain never veers off a strikingly Bushian binary version of reality, in which the world is divided into clear-cut camps of God-fearing American good and un-Christian, bomb-tossing foreign (and foreign-enabling) evil. McCain talks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his evil plans for world domination, Hamas and its rockets that rained on poor Israeli children in their Purim (he pronounces it pyoor-eem) costumes. Also in the "bad" column are Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the "far-left radical outfit" MoveOn.org, the wealthy liberals in Georgetown who opposed the gas-tax holiday for ordinary, decent folk because "they can probably walk to work," and the Democrats eager to impose socialism because "they have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people."
Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn't that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn't cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate. In the present day, it is George Bush who got us into this new Vietnam-like mess and revived the specter of tortured prisoners, but McCain's anger isn't focused in that direction. He's not mad that it's happening again, not looking to blame the people who actually started the fire. Instead he seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave — and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won't hesitate.
So if you thought Hillary was bad, buckle your seat belts: The really dumb stuff is just beginning.
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