The smartest move McCain could make right now is to go for Tom Ridge.

Bucky

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Aug-23-08 07:12 PM
Original message

The smartest move McCain could make right now is to go for Tom Ridge.

He won't, of course. He thinks he's got to shore up his right flank. He doesn't. At the end of the day, the wingers will fall in line behind the stay-in-Iraq guy and they'll be forced to like it. McCain, however, lacks the moral courage to call their bluff. After trouncing the nuts, he should be able to pull them under his roof (or at least one of them) and tell them "now that I'm your team captain, you get to vote for me and watch me try and win this game."

But he won't do that. Although he's a categorical conservative running against one guy who looks like a liberal but runs like a moderate, and another guy who looks a moderate but runs like a liberal, he still can't stand up to the rest of the conservative movement, even in their currently withered state, and tell them to shut up and fall in line.

He's spent the last three years of his life showing the world that he is no longer the maverick he once claimed to be. He's spent the last three years pawning off his political backbone for enough cash to run for president on the ideologically rigid Republican side of the fence. Three years of sucking up and they still want him to jump through their hoops like a circus chihuahua. And in the end, he'll do it.

I see John McCain as a street-ravaged prostitute eager to leave a shady decrepit rooms-by-the-hour motel before its rotten foundation gives and the whole structure collapses from termites and corruption, only the psychopathic john who rented him won't undo the handcuffs and keeps screaming "Let the building fall; it's the apocalypse and, dammit, I paid for a whole hour!" Maybe in some lingering corner of his compromised soul, McCain knows he can't win unless he veers away from neoconservatism and back toward sanity. Hell, he probably can't win anyway (so long as the Democrats fight like hell and don't act like wet noodles this time). But he's in handcuffs of his own making; he's shackled to the headless heedless monster of the American political Right, both parties too blinded by ideology to see the ruins they make of all they touch.

On issue after issue, from the tax cuts he's promised to millionaires, to the empty saber-rattling he directs toward Iran, to his wack-a-mole antiterrorism policy, to the off shore drilling bandaid he promises will fix our energy crisis, McCain stands resolutely opposed to common sense solutions because they require hard work. Instead he mouths the words to the fantasy magic bullet solutions Republicans always seem to offer in ways that help them turn profits and never solve a damn thing.

This is what we fight against this fall: ideologues who think science is malarkey, who think tax cuts balance the budget, who think government intrusion into private affairs is a system that won't be abused, who think torture is okay if a Republican president tells you it is, who think foreign aid doesn't make America stronger in international affairs, who think military threats can replace carrot-and-stick dialogues with the world's dictators, who think immigrants don't enrich our country, who trust large corporations, who don't care what our morality is so long as our politicians say the right words.

These views are held by conservatives half of whom are dangerous and the other half of whom are dangerously naive. Together they have rented John McCain for the coming hour. They will not permit him to show any sign of independence or moderation; not because it won't help them--it would in fact--but because they themselves would rather finish up their hour of delusion rather than leave the corrupted building of conservatism as it crashes about their shoulders.

One caveat, however. If the Republicans win in November, this analogy of a rotting building will not be about the conservative movement. The building will come to represent the damage done to the United States by these dangerous and ignorant people. Something's going to crash--it will be the Republican party or it will be all of us. You votes and your efforts will be what determines which of those two it is.