Meanwhile, the other faction of the wrong-wingers are leaving the sinking ship as quick as they can and hoping nobody notices. Like David Brooks, for example, who called Palin "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party" and is otherwise similarly leaving behind his old comrades on the right in article after article he authors. Or Frank Schaeffer, who describes himself as a "lifelong Republican, [who] worked to get [McCain] elected instead of George W. Bush" in 2000, but who now writes: "John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us", I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence." Ouch. Or, Christopher (son of William F.) Buckley, who has endorsed Obama, only to be driven out of the National Review, the conservative journal famously launched by his father back (to the future) at a time when no one was listening to such gibberish. According to Young Buck, he’s "been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement" ever since his act of great apostasy. That’s a great line, as was the entirety of Buckley’s hilariously accurate and embarrassingly realistic script for "Thank You For Smoking". Memo to regressives: It’s not a real good idea to piss off people with such sharp skewering knives. Meanwhile, welcome to the sanity club, Chris. We hope you’ll stay a while. You’ll always be welcome among the fast-exploding ranks of the reality-based community.
So grim has the McCain campaign become, and so diminished are the fortunes of the regressive right, that people are jumping ship now as if they owned stock in General Motors. And why wouldn’t they? This last week in particular has been one of the most horrible ever in American politics. You could start with the fact that a grossly under-qualified nominee for Vice President is already nearly being indicted for abuse of power, and she hasn’t even hit Washington yet. So far, that’s just a reflection on the grossly under-honorable man who selected her, purely to benefit his own career aspirations. But when you add in the fierce devotion that Palin engenders among the legions of the scary right, you can really get depressed.
All of this was on such full display this week that even John ‘Say Anything’ McCain seemed taken aback at one or two events. I think he realized just who it is that his campaign is attracting nowadays. I think he realized his complicity in fomenting such visceral hatred that we now see people attending rallies of one of the two mainstream parties in America screaming out "terrorist" and "kill him" with respect to the man they’re introducing as Barack Hussein Obama. I think he was a little shell-shocked that not only members of his own party were publicly rebuking him, but civil rights hero John Lewis compared him to the racist monster George Wallace. This would be especially devastating if it had occurred in an America where people paid attention to politics, since McCain had just recently named Lewis as one of a few people whose advice he would seek out were he president. That comment, uttered just last August, was already an odd remark, since Lewis is a liberal Democrat, and McCain once opposed making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, and because Lewis let on directly afterwards as to how McCain had never sought him out even for small talk during the two decades they’ve both served in Congress. But now, of course, it’s even more absurd, because the first bit of advice Lewis offered caused the McCain camp to go insane and demand that Obama rebuke Lewis, even though the two have nothing particularly to do with one another.
The truth is that a guy who once possessed a broad reputation for decency and integrity, deserved or not, came to grips this week with the realization that he is not only losing his last bid ever for the presidency, but that he is losing his honor as well. McCain knows that he will not only go down in history as a two-time presidential loser, but also as yet another hate-mongering, horror-show, thug graduate from the McCarthy/Nixon/Atwater/Rove/Schmidt school for the criminally insane. The once proud John McCain, filled up with generations of military values extolling the crucial importance of gentlemanly honor, has become just another ill-smelling hack. Worse yet, he’s a loser hack, who will never have the chance to rehabilitate himself. At least when George H.W. Bush pissed all over his country he won the race, and got to join that most exclusive club, and then he had four years to make people mostly forget about Willie Horton. McCain, on the other hand, has bungled his way into the full-on nightmare vision of a lost election coupled with lost integrity.
But McCain owns this Shakespearean tragedy in full. Part of me is a bit sad to say that, remembering the John McCain who once had the honesty to note that "America has the best Congress money can buy", or who called the freaks of the religious right "agents of intolerance". But most of me is no longer sad. George W. Bush and the regressive movement have devastated the country and planet where I live, and their motive for doing so was ultimately just simple greed. McCain has spent the past eight years facilitating that monstrous and monstrously lethal mass rape. It is therefore fitting that a man who was once highly respected should experience ruin not once, but twice, at the hands of a moral dwarf like George W. Bush. In 2000, Bush used the scummiest of scummy techniques to emasculate John McCain, a man who was infinitely his better in every respect. Now again today, the Chimpster-in-Chief sits in his Oval Office, smirking as ever, sociopathically oblivious as the legacy of his two terms – both of which McCain actively helped him win – sealing the senator’s fate for a second time.
The number of sacrificial victims to the fragile ego of one George Walker Bush is astonishing to contemplate. It’s staggering to imagine that one individual’s personal childhood inadequacies could wreak so much havoc on an entire planet, but indeed they have.
From Tony Blair’s career to the lives of a million Iraqis. From Americans’ wallets to their country’s very honor. From environmental destruction to the Republican Party itself. All relegated to the ash heap of history.
John McCain is only the latest to be added to that list.
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