Republican’s Confused Performance on MTP Emblematic of His Entire Campaign

All you could do is shake your head at the pathetic hat-in-hand creature that John McCain has become in his ‘man for all seasons’ pandering for votes as he grinningly jabbered, at times nearly incoherent, on Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw October 26th.

There was his complacent, auto-pilot mien coupled with his sometimes bungled Talking Point responses, and his ‘here we go loop-the-loop’ themes, as when Brokaw played a tape of McCain from June 2005 expounding: “The fact is that I’ve agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush,” followed by the McCain of today sketching out his supposed major differences with Junior on the Iraq War, the economy, pork-barrel spending, climate change, deficit spending, the growing size of government, the housing crisis, campaign finance reform, et al in other words, ‘the most important issues of our day.’

Brokaw also brought up his voting with Bush 92 percent of the time (according to the Congressional Quarterly) and McCain fielded that by mystifyingly mumbling, “Well, it may be the way you describe it.” What ‘may be the way you describe it,’ Senator? The portrait Brokaw was painting, albeit in soft watercolors, was of a king-high hypocrite and liar who can’t be trusted is that what you meant?

McCain also expressed his odd sense of ‘pride’ in Palin, apparently earned by attracting and firing up the kind of crowds he couldn’t collect on his own the nutcase GOP base and her possession of some sort of magical ‘executive experience’ while remaining virtually completely ignorant of the world around her or how the government of her own nation works. He also didn’t delve into what part of her abuse of power in Troopergate or the newly discovered crony corruption in her main accomplishment as governor Alaska’s $40 billion natural gas pipeline — inspired what the Bible says goes before a fall.

Along the way he momentarily forgot one-fifth of the former Secretaries of State who have endorsed him sorry, George Schultz; insisted he and Sarah Palin were ‘mavericks,’ a word that has officially jumped the shark into the Land of One-Word Laughs; and parried with Brokaw over polls he failed to recognize that showed him losing big while embracing those that had him down by a only few points, another typical McCain ‘have my cake and eat it too’ moment.

This, then, was the denial-of-reality and schizophrenia of the worst presidential campaign in modern history in the flesh while McCain tries to sell himself as a reformer unpopular within his own party, he turns around in the next instant and claims he shares the “common philosophy of the Republican Party”; while he castigates Obama as a ‘socialist’ for wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy to pre-Bush levels, he refuses to own up that he was apparently a ‘socialist’ himself several years ago when he opposed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich; while he’s been a consistent deregulator and supporter of global corporations in his 26-year career in politics who worships Phil Gramm as an economic genius, he believes in nationalizing banks and buying up bad loans in a crisis to save the economy his policies helped devastate, and therein is the crux of McCain’s overarching problem: he ultimately wants to try and revive the economy with the same trickle-down, unregulated free market, low-tax solutions that caused the crisis in the first place. How many times can you slap yourself in the forehead? If John McCain had any sense left, his brow would be purple from bruises.

McCain is simultaneously for and against the last thirty years of Reagan’s Republican Party — in short, whatever blows your skirt up, McCain’s your man; he can get on both sides of an issue at the same time.

McCain is fond of asking disparagingly “Who is Barack Obama?” — it’s obvious what he should have been asking was “Who is John McCain?”

As the polls he disagrees with show, that’s exactly the question most voters are asking themselves with less than two weeks before the election and the answer most arrive at is, “Who cares who John McCain is — I’m voting for the black guy with the funny name.”