The Tragedy of McCain III

"Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover...
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days." (R3 I.i.24-30)

Like Richard III, McCain is an odious individual, both in appearance and temperament, who, in the potential absence of war in a post-Iraq America, has no reason to live, nowhere to unleash his villainy. He is truly frightened of a world without war, one that he and his family have never known. McCain is the family failure, admitted to Annapolis solely because of his pedigree, only to sink to the bottom of his class and a well-known career as POW, directly related to his incompetence as a pilot. I respect the fact that he actually fought in Vietnam(even though he didn't seem to have many options as the son and grandson of admirals), unlike his chicken-hawk supporters and the current war criminal president, who ran for their lives when it was time to actually support America in a war instead of calling Drug Limbaugh, god of the draft dodgers. I mean, really, who can take any draft dodging baby boomer seriously? They are quite simply cowards, but they are all very willing to send other kids to Iraq.
These are the "people" who support the tragedy of McCain the third, a man who, according to a kid at Dairy Queen, would have no chance for a job serving ice cream cones (I asked a kid behind the counter if they would hire a 72 year-old man who cannot operate a computer and has never had a real job. He said McCain's application would be tossed in the garbage). Indeed, how many of McCain's supporters would hire someone with his background for any job?

"But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,
I, that am rudely stamped..
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature...
So lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them." (R3 I.i.14-23)

Indeed, McCain--and not really anyone else-- seems obsessed with the fact that Obama is better looking, more popular, and much more interesting than McCain is. Personally, I don't think any of that will make Obama a better president, but McCain is now locked in the tiny prison that is his mind, pathetically fighting the war we lost in Vietnam, while whining and crying to his media "refs" about how Obama gets all the calls. Shame on Obama for speaking to 200,000 Germans while McCain rode around in a golf cart with another fossil, Bush I, and held court in front of the cheese rack at a supermarket. Does the guy have advisors to protect him from himself? A man or woman who has the self-confidence to be the leader of the free world is not content to simply mock his or her opponent but should be able to offer real ideas, a plan, yet there is McCain sadly content to call Obama a "celebrity," as if that's going to turn America against him. Most voters really do want to have a sense of the candidate's values and are not interested in a grumpy old man yelling at the young kid to get off his lawn, yet that is the picture McCain has produced--the angry old man, who, as Obama said, is "proud of his ignorance."

It is clear to anyone paying attention that this election will turn on America's comfort level with Obama. McCain is basically irrelevant, just as he was in the primaries. He is the default candidate, no more and no less. He was there to fill the void for voters who could not stomach the JV lineup the GOP trotted out there in January and now he is the rebound boy for voters who simply cannot vote for a black man. The debates will be critical, as the juxtaposition of the candidates will make it painfully clear that McCain is more suited to running for his retirement home's activities director than leader of the free world. One look at McCain standing next to Obama will be an epiphany for many Americans, the moment when they will ask themselves, "How can I vote for this guy?" Obama, like Kennedy, needs to convey a sense of maturity and make Americans comfortable with the notion of a 47 year-old man with limited national experience leading the country in a time of war and economic devastation. Americans are rightfully concerned about Obama's lack of experience, but he needs to accentuate the reality that McCain is older but much less wiser than he was even a decade ago, as it is clear the current McCain really has nothing in common with the moderate from a decade ago. McCain sold his soul to the the extremist GOP base and is simply another oil industry whore. It was well reported that shortly after he took $285K from big oil interests he suddenly reversed his opposition to offshore drilling, which he now touts as the cure for America's energy woes. The same oil men who pimped Bush for eight years now want to elect McCain so they can roll over and put their pants on. They don't like McCain, but as the old saying goes, you don't pay a whore to stay, you pay her to leave...

I, too, pity McCain, as he is a man with no salient life experiences that are not related to the military. I had my first private sector job at age 12(delivering the Mail Tribune), yet McCain has never gone out and actually earned a job, relying on his rich wife's daddy to hire him for a few weeks but even that was too much so he ran back to the "do nothing" Congress(as the Republicans say), and for three decades he was a master at doing nothing except extorting funds illegally--google "Keating Five"--and having his rich wife's family buy his way out of jail. As Frank Rich observed, "Given that McCain's sole private-sector job was a fleeting stint in public relations at his father-in-law's beer distributorship, he comes by his economic ignorance honestly. But there's no A team aboard the Straight Talk Express to fill him in." Indeed, he has surrounded himself with fellow bitter old men like Gramm and back benchers like Carly Fiorina, famous for running Hewlett-Packard into the ground before she was fired--and given $21 million in cash to stay gone. These are the people who are going to turn around the economy that Bush has destroyed? The only change and hope they represent is the answer to Democrats' prayers that '08 will be the most devastating Republican defeat in history. The Republicans are so hopelessly incompetent and out of touch that their only viable "message" is that they are not Obama and he is not one of "us." You know, the fat(Obama's too thin), ugly(look at McCain), uneducated(Obama went to Harvard) and bitter(GOP is losing in every state where people can read) "us" that the Republicans cling to.

This type of background--along with dumping one's disfigured wife for a young heiress and banishing her with hush money--is enough to damage one's self esteem and provides some insight into McCain's relentless attack on Obama's "celebrity," as fly boy McCain has been exposed for what he is: an empty flight suit with no moral foundation and certainly no intellectual standing, a "wrinkled old white dude" who doesn't know when he's being mocked by Paris Hilton, so clueless he offers his wife up for a pornographic biker "beauty contest." One can only imagine the response if Obama showed any signs of being the type of idiot McCain has shown himself to be. The New York Times rejected an Op-Ed essay he wrote not because the editor didn't agree with his views (they've published many of his essays) but because he couldn't even define victory in Iraq, let alone explain how to achieve it. This is a man who raves about the "surge" being a success but not enough of one to bring the troops home. It seems like a logical question to ask for a plan to bring American soldiers home and stop sending American tax money to a country Americans do not care about. America is in dire economic straits, yet here we are continually borrowing money to fight a war that was proven to be a fraud from the beginning. I guess that's the Vietnam syndrome, having no sense of when a war is over. Countries--at least ones with the catastrophe that defines America's economy--should not babysit countries for 100 years, especially when they are not wanted and even despised. And the war criminal Bush is so ignorant that he is paying to rebuild Iraq with Americans' tax dollars while allowing Iraq to have an $80 billion surplus while we are trillions in debt.

Moreover, McCain's idiotic comment that Obama somehow wanted to "lose" the Iraq war is laughable. How do we lose the war when Hussein is dead? The war criminal's stated purpose for invading Iraq was to overthrow Hussein and seize his huge supplies of WMDs; therefore, we should have declared victory and left on the day he was hanged, rather than installing an Iranian puppet government. McCain is simply a profound, bumbling embarrassment in a GOP year that has featured one after another, yet he remains viable as a potential president because it will probably never be easy for a black man named Obama to be elected in this country. McCain's in it because this is still a racist country in many ways, a fact that all but the most ignorant acknowledge. America has progressed in ways that most countries never will (where are the Obamas in "progressive" Europe?), but there are millions of uneducated bigots in this country, more than enough to swing this election.

There are obviously no easy solutions to extract our country from the Iraq fiasco, but it is quite clear that a man as shockingly ignorant as McCain is probably not the answer. He thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan and has to be tutored by Lieberman--a Democrat--in the difference between Shia and Sunni, something most 8th graders probably know after a war that has dragged on longer than our effort to help defeat Hitler. This man is going to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of American troops, young men and women who have repeatedly answered the war criminal's call, even while he told most draft age adults to go shopping and not to worry about the war? In his great article, "It's the Economic Stupidity, Stupid," (7-20-08)Frank Rich excoriated McCain's commander in chief qualities, noting that "you have to wonder if even General Custer's learning curve was faster than his" in response to McCain's hapless understanding of Afghanistan and the Taliban and the reality that we simply don't have the troops to engage an enemy that may indeed pose an actual threat to our country, unlike Iraq.

I doubt any candidate would do the right thing and reinstate the draft, with no exceptions for any reasons. How many wars would we fight if rich kids were going to die? My guess would be zero, unless we were attacked. What a notion, defending your own country...In the nuclear age, ground wars are a relic of the past, yet the war criminal and McCain are content to send more and more men and women to die for the most dishonest war in this nation's history, and Americans worry more about the cost of gas, too ignorant to connect the dots and make the connections. If Americans elect McCain, we will certainly all get what we deserve. This is a democracy, and democracy isn't pretty when one looks at it too closely. The man whose "brain"(Gramm) called the worst mortgage meltdown in the nation's history a "mental recession" and who has repeatedly stated that he really doesn't understand the economy, or "those issues" as he said, McRambo will be free of that pesky economy situation so that he can get back to his war games:

"But if the cause be not good, the King himself
hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads,
chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all,
'We died at such a place'--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it..." (HenryV.4.1.133-143)

Amen, brother Shakespeare.