THE TWO CROSSED EYES THAT SANK THE McCAIN NOMINATION-- SUPPORTING BUSH ON IRAQ AND SUPPORTING BUSH ON IMMIGRATION

no soul

Poor old Grandpa McCain! People always feel sorry when they see someone falling apart in front of their eyes. He wanted to be president so bad for so long that he was willing to sell his soul-- if a politician like him can be presumed to have a soul-- to lowlife slime like that dead religionist charlatan and to Karl Rove.

For the last year, in the whole U.S. Senate, only Lieberman has been a bigger and more shameless Bush-Cheney shill on Iraq than McCain. A man who built his political image as a maverick decided, catastrophically, that the way to win the presidency would be to saddle himself to the most unpopular and most divisive and hated president in American history. Poor judgment? Senility?


But that stand has completely undermined him with whatever moderates in the country still count themselves, for whatever bizarre reason, as Republicans. The far right never trusted McCain, even though his voting record is as far right as anyone can be while staying within in the vicinity of the bounds of conventional sanity. And with his stand on immigration-- a stand that is actually in sync with that of most Americans and most Republicans-- the final nail has been pounded into McCain's political coffin, at least as far as the Know Nothing wing of the GOP. The Know Nothing wing might not be that big but it is that loud... and it utterly controls the nominating process for their presidential race. McCain, once the presumptive front runner, is struggling to keep up with an empty suit and satanic cult follower like Mitt Romney-- and is too far behind actor/lobbyist Fred Thompson and "pro-abortion/anti-guns/pro-gay" Rudy Giuliani to have a serious chance to catch up.

"McCain is sinking," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

The apparent collapse of McCain's campaign has stunned longtime Republican fundraisers and activists, who only last year scrambled to donate money and sign on as political advisers.

..."It's over unless the other candidates self-destruct," says Sabato. "He should have stuck with what he was - a maverick. Instead he tried to become the George W. Bush of 2008. He is never going to be a George W. Bush. It's antithetical to his nature."

He is widely viewed as the Establishment candidate rather than as the maverick candidate; Bush's candidate.

Indeed, several of Bush's biggest fundraisers and political aides signed on early to McCain's campaign-- not necessarily an asset when facing an American electorate eager to see the White House's current occupant retire to Texas.

"One of the challenges faced by every Republican hopeful in 2008 is to show that they would be different from President Bush, while also remaining a loyal Republican," says Scott Rasmussen, director of the Rasmussen Report polling firm. "McCain, at one level, had seemed a natural for that role. His jostling with the president was a constant feature of the early Bush years ..."

But now, Rasmussen notes, "McCain is in lockstep with the president."