JOHN McCAIN IN VANITY FAIR-- A PORTRAIT OF A PROFOUNDLY DISHONEST MAN

VANITY FAIR again! I just used their cover like 2 days ago! They are so with it-- Lindsay Lohan one day, John McCain the next! Anyway, the McCain puff piece starts with a man-and-dog-in-the-outback pic and you know immediately it's going to be another link in the McCain p.r. armor the mass media has built for him over the last couple of decades. I guess there was a time they could play up the crooked pol angle, when he got caught as part of the Keating Six, or they could play up the independent maverick war hero angle. Without ever explaining it-- unless the shit on his tongue speaks for itself-- Todd Purdum begins by anointing him "American media's favorite politician."

Oh, Purdum takes some gentle pokes at McCain-- only a paid propaganda writer could look at him and not notice the man will say anything and everything it takes to please anyone and everyone who might vote for him for president, the only thing in the universe he cares about at all-- but in the end, it's just another piece that doesn't expose John McCain for the craven political sham he's always been.

"John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six years, trying to "fix it," trying to square the circle: that is, trying to make the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of a Republican presidential front-runner. McCain opposes a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but supports a ballot measure that would do just that in his home state of Arizona. (It would fail in the midterm elections.) His short-term reward for the Hardball bunt on gay marriage? Boos from the audience and a headline on the Drudge Report, the right wing's favorite screechy early-warning system, reading, mccain: gay marriage should be allowed? McCain needs to square that circle, and the hell of it is, he just can't."


Even without trying and without wanting to Purdum's piece shows McCain as the biggest, least truthworthy and most pathetic hypocrite in the entire Senate. "He began this mid-October day in Sioux City, appearing at a fund-raising Siouxland Breakfast for Representative Steve King, an immigration hard-liner. Recently he had called McCain an 'amnesty mercenary' for daring to work with Senator Ted Kennedy on a compromise bill that would provide an eventual path to citizenship for the millions of immigrant workers already in the United States illegally. A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. 'In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,' he said. 'In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you'll pay a heavy price.' Then he added, unable to help himself, 'By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it.'" [Art by Jesus' General' Vanity Fair must have forgotten to use it.]

Even McCain knows he's a repulsive hypocrite, unfit for any kind of leadership-- and alluded to it directly in his own book a few years ago. After straddling, in a particularly cowardly fashion, the racism issue inherent in flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina state capitol, McCain writes:

By the time I was asked the question for the fourth or fifth time, I could have delivered the response from memory. But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph to reporters that I really didn't mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president.

(Just like the coerced confession he gave the North Vietnamese after he was captured)

John McCain is an inherently dishonest man, not just dishonest but so dishonest that he doesn't even think there might possibly be something wrong with dishonesty. He's a complete creature of the Beltway and any independence and maverickness he may have once owned has been completely supplanted by un unquenchable, even psychotic, thirst for power. John McCain has consistently been voted the most unliked and least cooperative member of the Republican Senate caucus... by Republicans.

Purdum's approach can be best understood from one seemingly innocuous sentence midway through his unexciting piece. "Together with Mark Salter, McCain has built a franchise of best-selling books out of his reputation for personal and public integrity." One world, inserted between "his" and "reputation" would cast some doubts on the degree of intentional lapdoggery inherent in Purdum's approach. And there are so many words that would fit-- anything that conjures up how McCain's p.r. machine has been able to manufacture and propagate his undeserved reputation as an independent or a maverick. McCain has a staggeringly right wing, extremist voting record in the Senate. Even his big brassy exception-- unlike Bush, who remembers being tortured by having his allowance cut off for 3 weeks when he came back from a Mexican whorehouse with clap once, he's against torture-- was 99% sham when push came to shove. He French-kissed Bush's ass and pretty much supported the Bush Regime on torture and wrecking habeas corpus and figured if it's unconsitutional the Supreme Court-- Alito? Scalia? Thomas?-- would work it out. Some leader!

And on Iraq, other than the bloodthirsty Lieberman, he's the Senate's most outspoken hawk and the legislator pushing the neoCon Middle East agenda for escalation the hardest. When confronted with harsh realities by Republican supporters looking for answers he tells them the answer is... prayer. Yep, another one like that! And he actually says occupying Iraq is the only moral thing to do. He's clearly delusional and flirting with senility. He's is unfit to be elected president and unfit to be re-elected in to the Senate. But until the mass media stops pulling punches and starts letting people know what a worthless turd he is, he'll still be, absurdly, on the path to power.