The Prematurely Presidential McCain

Below is the new web ad the McCain campaign has released. It's entitled 'Tolerance' and it pleads with us to be...er...tolerant. Of each other. Nay, it urges us to go beyond mere toleration of those who differ with us on the great questions of the day. It is our moral duty to respect each other no matter how profoundly we may disagree.

Right across the political spectrum from Arianna Huffington to Rush Limbaugh we are all sincerely dedicated to the betterment of America, just coming at the issues involved from diverse perspectives. Vigorous, principled but always civilised debate between rational men and women of unquestionable good will must be the order of the day.

Here endeth the civics lesson! Niceness guru Dr. Forni will be chuffed.

What a load of twaddle and what a dreary, dreadful ad. The horse manure piling up here is so fresh if you look closely you can see the steam still rising. It is so much pious nonsense. Tone and attitude in an election are determined only by the cut and thrust of the campaign itself, the pivotal events both staged and sudden, the ebb and flow of support, the attacks and responses, the inevitable October surprise and not by anodyne aspirations that each of our moms will bake equally swell apple pies.

The imperatives inherent in a candidate's overall strategy and the varying tactical approaches that grow from it, some of them premeditated, many made up on the fly, are - or should be - paramount. If gentlemanly discourse works, fine, if not, well so be it. This is as it should be, indeed as it always was. Democracy by its nature is a rollicking robust rambunctious affair and the intensity of the passions aroused are directly related to the importance of what is at stake.

In Presidential electoral politics, apart from George Washington's unopposed elevations, there were no 'good old days' when opposing pairs of bewigged grandees or top-hatted dandies promenaded about the public square exchanging philosophical pleasantries with each other while dispassionate and judicious citizens gravely made their choice between a Republican Kant and a Democratic Hegel!

In every election from John Adam's first triumph to John Kerry's defeat the contending parties all ended up, in Johnny Cash's immortal words, "kickin' n' gougin' in the blood and the mud and the beer". McCain, an irascible and contrary critter, knows this of course and is temperamentally well suited to it. Click the menu button on the clip below and view some of the torpedos his campaign launched broadside against Mitt Romney's Presidential yacht that ended up being all sail and no rudder.

These ads are pugnacious, merciless and bloody. And rightly so. Romney is such a phony he should have gatecrashed the Dems' debates and given those triplets of tendentiousness, Edwards, Clinton and Obama, a real run for their money. Did McCain take the high road when confronted with Mitt's puerile posturing on a par with John Kerry's 'reporting for duty' salute? Did he hell! He tore into the Pro-Life abortion defender and left the life-long rifle-toting gun control advocate as dead as one of his imaginary "small varmints".

The ad is also self-satisfied and self-indulgent and way too wordy. The internet is cheap as spit and encourages verbal and visual flatulence. The voice over is repetitious and quietly hectoring like a Politically Correct uncle telling you not to talk to strangers but to take care not to hurt any leering pervert's sensitivities at the same time. Refuse interaction with a friendly smile before you run like hell away.

In addition to the funereal pacing the visuals are clunky, static, samey and weirdly old-fashioned as if directed by some old codger who cut his teeth on the Donna Reed Show way back when Christian Archibald Herter was Secretary of State. If this is any indication of the dynamism we can expect for McCain's assault on the White House it's gonna be a long long summer and a dismal autumn.

Indeed McCain seems bent on taking the high road, no doubt in contrast to the Dem's daily display of midget mud-wrestling but also - and more worryingly - because it appeals to his inner smug, of which he has more than a wee smidgen. It makes him look presidential but it also enables him to feel presidential. Hence the self-serving magnanimity of the ad. He is graciously exhorting the rest of us to strive to achieve to his high standards.

This is also the reason why he can be so vicious to fellow Republicans but so emollient with Democrats. Indeed the more extreme the Democrat the smarmier the Senator from Arizona becomes. Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, take a bow. Such anomalous and, at times, reprehensible behavior shows his moral superiority to the world but also and more importantly to himself. John McCain is a man who believes he has a lot to personally live up to and he spends much too much time and energy living up to it.

This psychological flaw was the cause not the result of his over-reaction to his association with the Keating Five scandal in respect of which even the New York Times agrees he was completely exonerated. That would be enough for most of us. We did nothing wrong and we were seen to do nothing wrong. Case closed. Not Mac.

The mere breath of scandal about him sufficed to make McCain react as if he were actually contaminated. Like an hysterical bride fixated on some tiny flaw in her gorgeous gown, his sense of immaculateness was violated. His compulsive-obsessive need to reach across the aisle on the most inappropriate of issues was the result. The Maverick of the Senate was born! What better way to display one's sinlessness than high-minded cooperation with the bitter enemies of one's Party and noble, though at times brutal, at times snide, repudiation of one's own colleagues? If this is integrity it has its own peculiar pathology.

Thus the silliness of his crypto-Leftist stand against tax cuts "for the wealthiest 10% of Americans".

Thus his quasi-totalitarian impoverishment of the democratic process with the ludicrous McCain-Feingold Act which in the name of restricting the evil influence on political campaigns of unlimited funds ensured that only multi-millionaires are in a position to even contemplate launching a Presidential bid.

Thus his unlooked for apology on Martin Luther King Day for having opposed its establishment, a strangely irrelevant distraction which is completely superfluous to his current political requirements.

This is John McCain's Achilles heel and both he and we are stuck with it. It is a serious political weakness and it could prove his downfall. Whichever opponent he faces will have at their back the wind leaking from George Bush's tires. Nor, despite the predictable pieties, is there anything remotely gentlemanly or gentlewomanly about either of them.

They both secrete a ravenous ambition in their bodily fluids. They each have no scruples about exploiting, manipulating and inflaming the worst partisan passions of the electorate. They are both past masters at recruiting substantial millions of useful idiots and/or innocents to their 'cause'.

And one or other of them will stand at the head of a chronically failed party which, whenever entrusted with power, has unsurprisingly spawned spectacular failure both at home and abroad with the profligacy that only the congenitally unprincipled can achieve. The last successful full-term Democratic Executive was the Truman Administration and even the redoubtable Harry had the dogs in the street whimpering at the end.

Their last moment of real glory was when the Kennedy brothers faced down tyranny and Nikita Khruschev in October 1962. The surviving sibling is a ghastly measure of the degradation of what was once a mighty, wise and generous political party which in its day nurtured the American melting pot and from it forged a Super Power that kept the world free.

The present Democratic candidates are to their great forebears what Warren Harding was to Abraham Lincoln on the other side of the political divide. JohnMcCain is, I'll hazard, no Lincoln but, as man and politician, he is orders of magnitude both better and greater than those who now face him.

The party which he leads is by orders of similar magnitudes better and greater not only than their domestic opposition but is far and away the greatest and the best on the face of the globe in terms of philosophy, principles and personnel.

For all these reasons Senator McCain needs to do vigorous and unremitting battle against his opponents from now until November 4. Let him quell any neurotic urges he may feel to treat kindly a treacherous enemy simply because they are his the enemy. Let him resist any temptation he may feel to fashion a toothless Presidential persona more aloof than alluring. He need not get down in the gutter with his opponents but neither should he make believe that this will be anything but a bitter, bloody mother of all battles. He is in for the fight of his life and he needs to be ready to throw his best punches "from day one", so to speak.

Then when it's all over he will be in a position to display the only magnanimity that it's safe to show in politics - the generosity of the victor.

Spitzer - A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy!

As New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's career slips inexorably into a cesspit of his own making, the Left Wing, the ever-vigilant watchdogs of everybody's morality but their own, are beginning to circle the same media wagons which successfully held off Ken Starr's Comancheros in Buffalo Bill Clinton's day. Harper's Magazine sniffs out the real culprit in this whole sorry affair and it's not the horny Hillary-supporting Democratic Super Delegate. Nor is it the brothel keepers who oversaw a nationwide prostitution network from their New Jersey apartment. It is - yes, you got it in one - the Justice Department. The Bush Justice Department, to be absolutely precise which reporter Scott Horton indignantly informs us "has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican". Finally the progressives have found at least one preferential quota system they're more than happy to denounce!



Governor Eliot Spitzer unable
to conceal his dismay at
the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
about to engulf his crusading
reform Administration




But Scott wasn't satisfied with mere number crunching. He consulted the almanacs, lunar cycles, tidal data and various other arcane record sources and discovered that "a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles". Seem to have been tied? Considering that the US, probably uniquely among the world's democracies, holds national, state and local elections every two years with long primary campaigns beforehand, it would be astonishing, nay impossible for "a number" of anything - baseball records, jaywalking convictions, births of ginger-haired infants - not to seem to correlate with increased polling booth activity.

Horton waffles on about the White-Slave Traffic Act which was passed in 1910 - imagine 1910 - which apparently makes it really too old to actually, well, enforce. This Act is, he proclaims, "highly disreputable"? Why? Because some well-known and some not really well-known folks were convicted under it way back when. Jack Johnson, a black champion boxer, Charlie Chaplin, an English comic actor, some professor from Chicago and a woman from Canada who wrote books. Oh yes, and they were all really horny.

Another give-away concerning this investigation is that enough resources were "dedicated" - smell the zealotry - to it so it could be done properly! But the real smoking gun is that the DoJ nailed Spitzer because "they were looking into Spitzer's payments". (Emphasis in original) A bank, concerned with the Governor's peculiar movement of monies, had informed the IRS, as they are mandated to do in these troubled times. In this way the Public Integrity Section of the Bush Department of Justice got involved.

Horton is exercised that the investigation discovered the prostitution ring through its probing of Spitzer's financial shenanigans (he was muddying the money trail that paid for his hooker habit through phony off-shore accounts) rather than the other way around! There is, apparently, a politically correct order in which crimes must be uncovered that the vast army of PR enforcers failed to inform the rest of us about - a unique oversight. The fact that the IRS and "a bank" were involved more or less clinches it for Harper's that this is "a politically motivated prosecution".

What next? The "discovery" that the Bush FBI suborned one of the kitchen staff to slip a fistful of Viagra into poor Eliot's o.j. every morning so that the rising Democratic star and anti-corporate White Knight became a helpless victim of his pharmaceutically inflamed libido?

This is beginning to take on a weary familiarity. It is Bill's legacy to us all. A President, who accepts fellatio oris linguaeque in the Oval Office, is still feted as the Great Leader. Why should not a humble Governor, who had the decency to pay the lady handsomely for services rendered in a mere public hostelry, not finish his term?

So, are we in for another display of Clintonesque lawyerizing? "Ah did not have safe sex with that hooker...uh...Mistress Kristen."

More toe-curling Bubba-like baring of the soul? "Ah have caused pain in muh marriage."

Further psychopathic clinging to power in the face of popular repugnance while media shills busily gnaw away at what's left of public integrity because the sanctimonious prig who disgraced himself is a Democrat and ipso facto as inviolate as...every other Democrat?

For Chrissake, Spitzer, you were caught with your fandango in the cookie jar three ways to Tuesday fortnight. Resign already!

And if he does quit, it's still not safe to breathe without a mask . Elect Hillary in the Fall and we will have the sewage running through our living-rooms for a further four years!






John McCain (R - Az)
prepares for yet another
Clinton Administration

Hillary - The Ads And The Reality!

The Night Before Armageddon

'Twas the night before Armageddon, when all through the White House

Not a creature was stirring, not even Bill's, er, mouse;

My pantsuit was hung on the chair with aplomb,

That little grey number that makes me look strong;

My aides were nestled all snug in their beds,

While policy statements danced in their heads;

When right by my side there arose such a clatter,

I sprang up in the bed to see what was the matter.

It rattled and clanged, Bill uttered a moan,

I shuddered with horror; 'twas the Red Telephone.

The ultimate nightmare! With a hand that was lead

I lifted it up and listened with dread.

My stomach it churned, I let out a wheeze,

No lawyer from Yale should hear facts such as these:

In the Mid-East I'd done what Code Pink had decreed

And withdrawn all the troops with the greatest of speed

Now all was in chaos and ruin and wrack:

They told me bin Laden was back in Iraq!

And nearby Iran had perfected their nukes

To eradicate Israel by hook or by crook;

And Moscow had called the whole country to arms

And would be in Warsaw before the next morn.

I gave Bill the elbow. He continued to snore

And mutter of Monica and one or two more.

I looked at the damn phone; they needed an answer.

Oh I wish I had died at fifty with cancer!

Or stayed in the Senate and continued to drone

of Tubman's Post Office and Treasury loans.

I thought of my staff, all four hundred and forty,

But they were as dumb as the rest of the Party.

There was only one answer I saw in a flash

To stop the whole world turning to ash.

I held up the receiver, my voice was quite steady,

I had the experience, the ads said I was ready,

But when reality bites, it's not quite the same

So I told them quite clearly: "Get John McCain!"

Adapted from 'Twas The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore, who may not have written it at all! See the fatuous ad here and read Camille Paglia's trenchant comments thereon.

NYT - Really Deep Or Just Plain Abysmal?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famous poet and critic of the Romantic era and friend of William Wordsworth, once declared 'Unless you understand a writer's ignorance presume yourself ignorant of his understanding'. Never was a text more suited to such an approach than the New York Times' hatchet-job on Senator John McCain, undisputed leader of the Holier-Than-Thou-And-Thou-And-Yes- -I-Mean-Thou wing of the Republican Party.

Yes, I know, all of us who live on planet Earth or simply still have relatives there realize that the Old Gray Lady has long morphed into a toothless hag. It's the Toilet Paper of Broken Record. It pimps out it's reporters to the Democratic Party and its constellation of Loony Lefties. It promoted Jason Blair beyond his, er, competence. No doubt the shade of Dan Rather's Career appears nightly to publisher Pinch Sulzberger in the parking garage to hoarsely urge him to 'follow the memos'. Yet. Yet.

Yet, indeed! The 3000 word love letter to journalistic malfeasance that frontpaged - above, gasp, the Fold - last Wednesday had all the substance of the hole in a donut. Rush Limbaugh denounced it as Page Six tabloidery but that is to denigrate the subtle art of the gutter journalist who at least practises his nudge and wink with the deft sliminess Peter Lorre trademarked in Casablanca. This piece of twaddle, on the other hand, was character assassination unworthy of a 7th Grade playground. The aforementioned Jason, coming up empty for the Nth time, at least had the cojones to make something up. Decent man that he is he felt obliged to pay that much respect to his readers' - and his bosses' - expectations. This story, no, this piece - as in 'piéce de (pas) resistance' - is akin to the Emperor yelling out to his adoring subjects "Look, look I'm really butt-naked'.

Bill Keller, the august editor who foisted this farrago on us, is no Jason Blair. He has been, as we have learned to say, 'vetted'. Earned his stripes, so to speak. Worked his way up. A hard-bitten hack wise in the ways of his rough and tumble profession. Old Blood 'n Guts himself. Lou Grants' Lou Grant. A guy you'd be happy to have a Bud with. In other words, he can walk, talk, scratch his nose and chew gum all at the same time. What dark spirit moved him, we ask, to kamikaze himself like this? It's so, so, what's the word? Yes, pointless. Self-defeating is another word. Stupid, inane, wrongheaded, career-disenhancing. That's a bunch of other words.

All of which brings us back to old Sam Coleridge who could be sharp as a tack when he wasn't stoned out of his fine mind on opium products.

'Unless you understand a writer's ignorance presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.'

What applies to writers applies a fortiori to editors.

There has to be more to this, surely. Are Bill and Boss Pinch launching a kite in the hope that a sudden squall from nowhere will send it soaring? Are they just biding their time and waiting for what British Prime Minister Harlold MacMillan called 'events, dear boy, events' to finish the job for them?

As the photographer said to the porn star, 'We must await developments'.