G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
It's the End of the Road for John McCain
By Matt Taibbi
Created Oct 8 2007 - 8:49am
I've now seen John McCain in South Carolina twice this election season. The
first time came last spring at a Republican debate, where the
fatigued-looking seventy-one-year-old senator all but pulled a Monty Python
crack-suicide-squad act onstage, standing up during a hail of political
gunfire in a televised repartee about the torture issue.
One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging,
by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless
enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy
Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal
who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the
cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could
think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon
queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge
who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to
one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."
Both answers elicited approving roars from the blood-lusting South Carolina
crowd, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tom Tancredo or Duncan
Hunter pulled a car battery out from behind the podium and pledged himself
ready to torture someone, anyone, right now, if it would win him red-state
votes. But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp
in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. "If we torture people," he said
sadly, "what happens to our military people when they're captured?" After
the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of
America's choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do
you know where that was invented?" McCain asked. "In the Spanish
Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish
Inquisition?"
In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain's poll numbers
dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems
amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish
Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage.
In the absurd black comedy of the American electoral process, our
presidential candidates are mostly two-dimensional monsters, grotesque
approximations of human beings born by some obscene asexual reproductive
method in the demeaning celluloid muck of the campaign trail. They might be
manicured, market-tested pieces of ambulatory political product like Mitt
Romney, or bottomless pits of vengeful little-guy ambition like Rudy
Giuliani -- but they are almost never fallible, thinking, multi-dimensional
human beings. And yet that is what John McCain sometimes is. He is a relic
in these proceedings, a man who will sometimes say what he actually thinks,
even if it costs him politically -- like calling Jerry Falwell and other
televangelists "agents of intolerance," or ripping ethanol as "a product
that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it,"
or copping to an "act of political cowardice" for having supported the
flying of the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse. In such
moments, McCain is like a guy who walks into a bar mitzvah reception and
kicks off dinner by saying grace.
That supposed straight-shooter quality already cost McCain dearly in South
Carolina once, when his refusal to fight back against a sucker-punching
George Bush in 2000 sent his political career into a spiral, indirectly
sending the rest of us careening into an ill-considered invasion of Iraq.
Now, in mid-September, I watch him return to the state as a prisoner of
Bush's idiot policies in Iraq. This time around, by some curious leap of
Stockholm-syndrome logic, McCain has chosen Bush's cruel and asinine
Mesopotamian war as the great principle he will not betray. This leaves him
looking like a morbidly tragicomic figure, the doomed last rat stubbornly
remaining on the deck of his one-time enemy's fast-sinking ship. As he makes
his fateful return to the state where it all started to go wrong for him
eight years ago, you can almost see a flash of pained recognition in his
eyes, as if he is seeing his mistake too late, as the water rises up to
drown him in obscurity.
It was obvious right from the start that things had changed decidedly for
the sadder since the last time McCain campaigned in South Carolina. Back
then, in 2000, McCain was the hottest name in American politics, a Newsweek
cover boy fresh from his victory in New Hampshire. This former POW came to
South Carolina on an all-time high, expecting to win this state in a rout
and be crowned nominee of his party and probable next president of the
United States. In those days, his candidacy's signature image was his
campaign bus, a decked-out vehicle with STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS plastered on
the side that was received as a campaign co-star bigger than even McCain's
war record or his doe-eyed, former-pill-popping wife. That, of course, was
before the so-close-you-could-touch-it fantasy turned completely to **** --
amid a strange firestorm of whispers and rumors about McCain having gone
crazy in Nam and later fathering an illegitimate child with a black
prostitute, rumors the Bush-Rove camp winkingly denied thinking up for the
pre-election amusement of these simple rural folk.
Fast-forward to September 2007. Buzz all gone, campaign coffers nearly
empty, having suffered the indignity of finishing behind Barack Obama in a
survey of Iowa Republicans, McCain limps into South Carolina a whipping boy
for the loser-hating national press. This time around, he has named his bus
after a failure. While rivals Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney
all ride in pimped-out circus vehicles with geeky names (the "Mitt Mobile"
is an all-time low), McCain's bus looks like it was rented off a lot in
Paramus, New Jersey. It features no stenciled flags, no proud-looking
eagles, nothing -- just a single green stripe with a sad little
double-entendre inscription on the side reading NO SURRENDER. As in, No
Surrender in Iraq, as well as No Surrender in My Doomed Campaign. That
someone in the McCain camp thought it prudent to advertise, on the side of a
bus, the desperate nature of the candidate's situation should say everything
that needs to be said about how his campaign has been run all year.
On the trail, McCain looks equally pathetic -- slow-moving, soft-spoken and
physically frail. With his lecturing tone and corny jokes ("Governor
Schwarzenegger and I have many similar attributes"), he recalls the
moralizing granddad who's not a bad egg overall but who embarrasses the ****
out of you by waiting till your late thirties to give you the
birds-and-the-bees speech. Unable to summon up his bipartisan appeal of old,
McCain now preaches exclusively to the converted, stumping at one lonely VFW
outpost after another in sleepy kudzu towns like Anderson, Sumter, Aiken and
Lexington. His crowds are predominantly septuagenarian war vets hunched over
mean portions of colorless barbecue, their canes propped up against their
cafeteria tables and their ceremonial Army caps proudly tilted on their bald
heads as they listen for some hint that someone, somewhere in this country
gone to hell still understands their sacrifice.
It is as if McCain has decided to spend his final days with his own. His
stump speech has been reduced to ten minutes of Poconos jokes ("I sleep like
a baby -- sleep two hours, wake up and cry, sleep two hours, wake up and
cry.") followed by ten more minutes of hugging old soldiers and ending with
ten minutes of worn-out, Hannity-esque talking points about Iraq, which he
makes no attempt to distinguish from WWII or Vietnam.
If McCain has a serious and compelling reason to continue to tie his
political fate to the disastrous occupation of Iraq, he doesn't disclose it
at these stops; instead, he wearily jacks off these crowds of frightened old
vets with early-Bush-era rhetorical relics like "if we just get out of
there, they will follow us home" and halfhearted swipes at standard-issue
"anti-war" villains like MoveOn.org and The New York Times. Then he hugs a
few more uniforms and bolts.
The pre-South Carolina McCain of 2000 was viewed as a candidate who could
talk to the whole country, a man of decidedly conservative views who could
"cross the aisle" and "work with the other side." But the McCain of 2008 is
as good as dead to the seventy-odd percent of the country that wants the
troops home. So in his waning days he contents himself with trading in the
quack syllogistic reasoning of pop conservatism. There's the always popular
Because Terrorists Are Bad, We Must Fight Them in Iraq, Where They Weren't
(if suicide bombers kill Iraqi kids, "what are they willing to do to our
children?"). There's the still more popular When Liberals Defame Soldiers,
Soldiers Die in Iraq (on MoveOn's criticism of Gen. Petraeus: "I don't think
there's a place in this country for impugning the integrity and honor of
those who serve"). And there's the greatest of all pro-war sophisms, the
brilliant We Invaded Iraq Because Someone Kind of Like the Iraqis Attacked
Us First ("The enemies we face there harbor the same depraved indifference
to human life as those who killed 3,000 innocent Americans").
By now there isn't anyone left "across the aisle" who'd even think about
buying this ****, but that's OK, because McCain is no longer talking to
"everybody." The comments from McCain supporters after his appearances make
it clear who this candidate is embracing during his last days in the
foxhole. Rusty Houser likes McCain's stance on the war; when I ask him why
we are in Iraq in the first place, he tells me, "To get rid of Al Qaeda."
When I point out that Bush himself has admitted there was no connection
between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Houser shrugs. Bush, he assures me, "doesn't
always let people know what he knows."
Another McCain supporter named Johnny Mack who is pushing "No Surrender"
petitions at a VFW appearance in Anderson says he didn't know that there was
no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the war, but that doesn't
matter, because "I'm just a dumb country boy" who nonetheless knows of
"secret reasons" for the war from his time running nightclubs in the
Midwest, where he learned "things I can't disclose."
A third supporter, Lynn Fowler, says she agrees with McCain's assessment
that we need to fight the terrorists in Iraq because otherwise they will
come here. "I never understood that one," I say. "If the terrorists want to
fight us here, how are we stopping them from coming by going to Iraq? Are we
tying up the air-traffic controllers or something?"
She frowns. "They are here," she says. "They're all around us! They have
prayer mats in schools! In New York, there are taxi drivers who won't let
you in their cab if you're carrying alcohol!"
"Yeah, they're already here," agrees a guy in an Air Force T-shirt. "All
over the place."
I look around at the empty state highway. "Everywhere? If they're all over,
why aren't they attacking?"
Rusty has an answer for that one. "They're passing information from this
country to that country," he says.
"Yeah," Air Force guy says. "Information about the relatives of our
soldiers."
This is the part of McCain I can't figure out. If this man has too much
scruple to indulge Middle America's torture fantasies, then how come he's
not above peddling equally wrongheaded rhetoric about Iraq? There are a
great many ways a man like McCain could play things, if he really thought
staying in Iraq is the right thing to do. He could insist that we have a
responsibility to prevent a bloodbath, or he could talk openly about our
strategic and economic interests in the region. Instead, he says we have to
stay in Iraq because a bunch of Internet liberals insulted an American
general and because our occupation of Baghdad is somehow preventing
terrorists in Jalalabad from finding a flight to New York.
I try to ask McCain about this outside his bus after his event in Aiken.
"Senator," I say, "you've said many times that if we don't fight them over
there, they're gonna come over here. Why can't they just come over here
anyway?"
"Because," he snaps, "we're not allowing them to establish bases there or in
Afghanistan."
"But they didn't have a base in Iraq before we went there."
"Uh, in case you missed it," he says, "they had bases in Afghanistan, and
those bases were training grounds, in which Al Qaeda was very effective."
"But we're not talking about Afghanistan," I say. "We're talking--"
"We're talking," he says, sighing, "about the likelihood that Iraq turns
into Afghanistan. Which is exactly the scenario that I envision, and most
experts agree. Even General Jones and General Petraeus have said it's now
the central battleground in the War on Terror."
"Yeah, but." I begin, then let it go. The look on McCain's face says it all.
His answer doesn't have to make sense; it just has to work with this crowd.
If you can tour the countryside and get away with telling a bunch of poorly
educated Middle American fear addicts that bin Laden will be showing up at
their kids' soccer games if they don't keep up the war effort, then you do
it. Because that's how you win elections in this country, by scaring the
**** out of people. That's a far cry from "Straight Talk" -- but then again,
that "Straight Talk" **** was a long time and many ugly poll results ago.
The cruelest irony of the McCain campaign is that had Bush not invaded Iraq,
we might be looking at the runaway favorite for the presidency. McCain
always made more sense as a "centrist" candidate, acceptable to Republicans
and at least somewhat tolerable (by comparison to other Republicans) to some
Democrats; in peacetime he would have blown away the likes of Romney and
Giuliani on stature and credentials alone, and the main event with Hillary
probably would have been a cakewalk.
But this war in Iraq has revealed McCain's Achilles' heel. A fighter pilot
who had his broken body dragged to a hole after his plane crashed and was
left to rot for five years by an exacting enemy, McCain appears genuinely
incapable of viewing Iraq through any prism but that of soldierly
experience. On the trail, he brings with him a team of comrades from his
Vietnam POW camp and talks again and again about needing to continue the
fight in the Middle East to honor the sacrifice of soldiers, and that "the
best way to prevent future sacrifice is to win." But Iraq isn't Vietnam, and
the notion that wars are fought not to protect real national interests but
to avenge the suffering of soldiers is another of those problematic
syllogistic formulas that politicians have used for decades to snow the
public into military action. Just because we can find enemies overseas who
are willing to deal harshly with our young men and women doesn't mean we
should have been looking for them in the first place, or that it's right to
keep letting them have that pleasure. But it's hard to see it that way when
you're the one taking the bullets, as McCain was once.
Twice now, George W. Bush has ruined John McCain. Once was in a vicious,
unforgivable political ambush here in South Carolina eight years ago. But
this time, McCain is just collateral damage in Bush's invasion of Iraq, a
war that has sent him back in time to combat nonexistent ghosts at precisely
the moment he should have been seizing the present. It's a story we've seen
too often with soldiers in both Vietnam and Iraq: They volunteer for duty,
suffer for their country, then realize either too late or not at all that
they have been betrayed not by the enemy but by their own commander in
chief. That's sad for John McCain, who has chosen tragically to carry the
cross of Bush's war in this race. But let's hope it stays his personal
tragedy -- and doesn't become, by means of some terrible accident at the
polls, ours.
_______
About author Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Matt Taibbi
Created Oct 8 2007 - 8:49am
I've now seen John McCain in South Carolina twice this election season. The
first time came last spring at a Republican debate, where the
fatigued-looking seventy-one-year-old senator all but pulled a Monty Python
crack-suicide-squad act onstage, standing up during a hail of political
gunfire in a televised repartee about the torture issue.
One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging,
by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless
enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy
Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal
who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the
cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could
think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon
queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge
who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to
one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."
Both answers elicited approving roars from the blood-lusting South Carolina
crowd, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tom Tancredo or Duncan
Hunter pulled a car battery out from behind the podium and pledged himself
ready to torture someone, anyone, right now, if it would win him red-state
votes. But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp
in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. "If we torture people," he said
sadly, "what happens to our military people when they're captured?" After
the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of
America's choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do
you know where that was invented?" McCain asked. "In the Spanish
Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish
Inquisition?"
In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain's poll numbers
dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems
amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish
Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage.
In the absurd black comedy of the American electoral process, our
presidential candidates are mostly two-dimensional monsters, grotesque
approximations of human beings born by some obscene asexual reproductive
method in the demeaning celluloid muck of the campaign trail. They might be
manicured, market-tested pieces of ambulatory political product like Mitt
Romney, or bottomless pits of vengeful little-guy ambition like Rudy
Giuliani -- but they are almost never fallible, thinking, multi-dimensional
human beings. And yet that is what John McCain sometimes is. He is a relic
in these proceedings, a man who will sometimes say what he actually thinks,
even if it costs him politically -- like calling Jerry Falwell and other
televangelists "agents of intolerance," or ripping ethanol as "a product
that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it,"
or copping to an "act of political cowardice" for having supported the
flying of the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Statehouse. In such
moments, McCain is like a guy who walks into a bar mitzvah reception and
kicks off dinner by saying grace.
That supposed straight-shooter quality already cost McCain dearly in South
Carolina once, when his refusal to fight back against a sucker-punching
George Bush in 2000 sent his political career into a spiral, indirectly
sending the rest of us careening into an ill-considered invasion of Iraq.
Now, in mid-September, I watch him return to the state as a prisoner of
Bush's idiot policies in Iraq. This time around, by some curious leap of
Stockholm-syndrome logic, McCain has chosen Bush's cruel and asinine
Mesopotamian war as the great principle he will not betray. This leaves him
looking like a morbidly tragicomic figure, the doomed last rat stubbornly
remaining on the deck of his one-time enemy's fast-sinking ship. As he makes
his fateful return to the state where it all started to go wrong for him
eight years ago, you can almost see a flash of pained recognition in his
eyes, as if he is seeing his mistake too late, as the water rises up to
drown him in obscurity.
It was obvious right from the start that things had changed decidedly for
the sadder since the last time McCain campaigned in South Carolina. Back
then, in 2000, McCain was the hottest name in American politics, a Newsweek
cover boy fresh from his victory in New Hampshire. This former POW came to
South Carolina on an all-time high, expecting to win this state in a rout
and be crowned nominee of his party and probable next president of the
United States. In those days, his candidacy's signature image was his
campaign bus, a decked-out vehicle with STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS plastered on
the side that was received as a campaign co-star bigger than even McCain's
war record or his doe-eyed, former-pill-popping wife. That, of course, was
before the so-close-you-could-touch-it fantasy turned completely to **** --
amid a strange firestorm of whispers and rumors about McCain having gone
crazy in Nam and later fathering an illegitimate child with a black
prostitute, rumors the Bush-Rove camp winkingly denied thinking up for the
pre-election amusement of these simple rural folk.
Fast-forward to September 2007. Buzz all gone, campaign coffers nearly
empty, having suffered the indignity of finishing behind Barack Obama in a
survey of Iowa Republicans, McCain limps into South Carolina a whipping boy
for the loser-hating national press. This time around, he has named his bus
after a failure. While rivals Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney
all ride in pimped-out circus vehicles with geeky names (the "Mitt Mobile"
is an all-time low), McCain's bus looks like it was rented off a lot in
Paramus, New Jersey. It features no stenciled flags, no proud-looking
eagles, nothing -- just a single green stripe with a sad little
double-entendre inscription on the side reading NO SURRENDER. As in, No
Surrender in Iraq, as well as No Surrender in My Doomed Campaign. That
someone in the McCain camp thought it prudent to advertise, on the side of a
bus, the desperate nature of the candidate's situation should say everything
that needs to be said about how his campaign has been run all year.
On the trail, McCain looks equally pathetic -- slow-moving, soft-spoken and
physically frail. With his lecturing tone and corny jokes ("Governor
Schwarzenegger and I have many similar attributes"), he recalls the
moralizing granddad who's not a bad egg overall but who embarrasses the ****
out of you by waiting till your late thirties to give you the
birds-and-the-bees speech. Unable to summon up his bipartisan appeal of old,
McCain now preaches exclusively to the converted, stumping at one lonely VFW
outpost after another in sleepy kudzu towns like Anderson, Sumter, Aiken and
Lexington. His crowds are predominantly septuagenarian war vets hunched over
mean portions of colorless barbecue, their canes propped up against their
cafeteria tables and their ceremonial Army caps proudly tilted on their bald
heads as they listen for some hint that someone, somewhere in this country
gone to hell still understands their sacrifice.
It is as if McCain has decided to spend his final days with his own. His
stump speech has been reduced to ten minutes of Poconos jokes ("I sleep like
a baby -- sleep two hours, wake up and cry, sleep two hours, wake up and
cry.") followed by ten more minutes of hugging old soldiers and ending with
ten minutes of worn-out, Hannity-esque talking points about Iraq, which he
makes no attempt to distinguish from WWII or Vietnam.
If McCain has a serious and compelling reason to continue to tie his
political fate to the disastrous occupation of Iraq, he doesn't disclose it
at these stops; instead, he wearily jacks off these crowds of frightened old
vets with early-Bush-era rhetorical relics like "if we just get out of
there, they will follow us home" and halfhearted swipes at standard-issue
"anti-war" villains like MoveOn.org and The New York Times. Then he hugs a
few more uniforms and bolts.
The pre-South Carolina McCain of 2000 was viewed as a candidate who could
talk to the whole country, a man of decidedly conservative views who could
"cross the aisle" and "work with the other side." But the McCain of 2008 is
as good as dead to the seventy-odd percent of the country that wants the
troops home. So in his waning days he contents himself with trading in the
quack syllogistic reasoning of pop conservatism. There's the always popular
Because Terrorists Are Bad, We Must Fight Them in Iraq, Where They Weren't
(if suicide bombers kill Iraqi kids, "what are they willing to do to our
children?"). There's the still more popular When Liberals Defame Soldiers,
Soldiers Die in Iraq (on MoveOn's criticism of Gen. Petraeus: "I don't think
there's a place in this country for impugning the integrity and honor of
those who serve"). And there's the greatest of all pro-war sophisms, the
brilliant We Invaded Iraq Because Someone Kind of Like the Iraqis Attacked
Us First ("The enemies we face there harbor the same depraved indifference
to human life as those who killed 3,000 innocent Americans").
By now there isn't anyone left "across the aisle" who'd even think about
buying this ****, but that's OK, because McCain is no longer talking to
"everybody." The comments from McCain supporters after his appearances make
it clear who this candidate is embracing during his last days in the
foxhole. Rusty Houser likes McCain's stance on the war; when I ask him why
we are in Iraq in the first place, he tells me, "To get rid of Al Qaeda."
When I point out that Bush himself has admitted there was no connection
between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Houser shrugs. Bush, he assures me, "doesn't
always let people know what he knows."
Another McCain supporter named Johnny Mack who is pushing "No Surrender"
petitions at a VFW appearance in Anderson says he didn't know that there was
no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the war, but that doesn't
matter, because "I'm just a dumb country boy" who nonetheless knows of
"secret reasons" for the war from his time running nightclubs in the
Midwest, where he learned "things I can't disclose."
A third supporter, Lynn Fowler, says she agrees with McCain's assessment
that we need to fight the terrorists in Iraq because otherwise they will
come here. "I never understood that one," I say. "If the terrorists want to
fight us here, how are we stopping them from coming by going to Iraq? Are we
tying up the air-traffic controllers or something?"
She frowns. "They are here," she says. "They're all around us! They have
prayer mats in schools! In New York, there are taxi drivers who won't let
you in their cab if you're carrying alcohol!"
"Yeah, they're already here," agrees a guy in an Air Force T-shirt. "All
over the place."
I look around at the empty state highway. "Everywhere? If they're all over,
why aren't they attacking?"
Rusty has an answer for that one. "They're passing information from this
country to that country," he says.
"Yeah," Air Force guy says. "Information about the relatives of our
soldiers."
This is the part of McCain I can't figure out. If this man has too much
scruple to indulge Middle America's torture fantasies, then how come he's
not above peddling equally wrongheaded rhetoric about Iraq? There are a
great many ways a man like McCain could play things, if he really thought
staying in Iraq is the right thing to do. He could insist that we have a
responsibility to prevent a bloodbath, or he could talk openly about our
strategic and economic interests in the region. Instead, he says we have to
stay in Iraq because a bunch of Internet liberals insulted an American
general and because our occupation of Baghdad is somehow preventing
terrorists in Jalalabad from finding a flight to New York.
I try to ask McCain about this outside his bus after his event in Aiken.
"Senator," I say, "you've said many times that if we don't fight them over
there, they're gonna come over here. Why can't they just come over here
anyway?"
"Because," he snaps, "we're not allowing them to establish bases there or in
Afghanistan."
"But they didn't have a base in Iraq before we went there."
"Uh, in case you missed it," he says, "they had bases in Afghanistan, and
those bases were training grounds, in which Al Qaeda was very effective."
"But we're not talking about Afghanistan," I say. "We're talking--"
"We're talking," he says, sighing, "about the likelihood that Iraq turns
into Afghanistan. Which is exactly the scenario that I envision, and most
experts agree. Even General Jones and General Petraeus have said it's now
the central battleground in the War on Terror."
"Yeah, but." I begin, then let it go. The look on McCain's face says it all.
His answer doesn't have to make sense; it just has to work with this crowd.
If you can tour the countryside and get away with telling a bunch of poorly
educated Middle American fear addicts that bin Laden will be showing up at
their kids' soccer games if they don't keep up the war effort, then you do
it. Because that's how you win elections in this country, by scaring the
**** out of people. That's a far cry from "Straight Talk" -- but then again,
that "Straight Talk" **** was a long time and many ugly poll results ago.
The cruelest irony of the McCain campaign is that had Bush not invaded Iraq,
we might be looking at the runaway favorite for the presidency. McCain
always made more sense as a "centrist" candidate, acceptable to Republicans
and at least somewhat tolerable (by comparison to other Republicans) to some
Democrats; in peacetime he would have blown away the likes of Romney and
Giuliani on stature and credentials alone, and the main event with Hillary
probably would have been a cakewalk.
But this war in Iraq has revealed McCain's Achilles' heel. A fighter pilot
who had his broken body dragged to a hole after his plane crashed and was
left to rot for five years by an exacting enemy, McCain appears genuinely
incapable of viewing Iraq through any prism but that of soldierly
experience. On the trail, he brings with him a team of comrades from his
Vietnam POW camp and talks again and again about needing to continue the
fight in the Middle East to honor the sacrifice of soldiers, and that "the
best way to prevent future sacrifice is to win." But Iraq isn't Vietnam, and
the notion that wars are fought not to protect real national interests but
to avenge the suffering of soldiers is another of those problematic
syllogistic formulas that politicians have used for decades to snow the
public into military action. Just because we can find enemies overseas who
are willing to deal harshly with our young men and women doesn't mean we
should have been looking for them in the first place, or that it's right to
keep letting them have that pleasure. But it's hard to see it that way when
you're the one taking the bullets, as McCain was once.
Twice now, George W. Bush has ruined John McCain. Once was in a vicious,
unforgivable political ambush here in South Carolina eight years ago. But
this time, McCain is just collateral damage in Bush's invasion of Iraq, a
war that has sent him back in time to combat nonexistent ghosts at precisely
the moment he should have been seizing the present. It's a story we've seen
too often with soldiers in both Vietnam and Iraq: They volunteer for duty,
suffer for their country, then realize either too late or not at all that
they have been betrayed not by the enemy but by their own commander in
chief. That's sad for John McCain, who has chosen tragically to carry the
cross of Bush's war in this race. But let's hope it stays his personal
tragedy -- and doesn't become, by means of some terrible accident at the
polls, ours.
_______
About author Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson