Can the Fraternal Order of Media Whores for McCranky pull the plug on the monster they created?

Well, for once Young Johnny didn't lie -- when he told us
the economy isn't his strong suit. [Click to enlarge.]

"'I broke my promise to always tell the truth,' McCain said [after the 2000 South Carolina primary]. He has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised."

-- Village gasbag Richard Cohen, in his Washington Post column
yesterday, "The Ugly New McCain"

by Ken

You have to figure that the Washington Post's Richard Cohen had some idea of the ridicule he was opening himself to when he acknowledged in his column yesterday trashing his onetime hero, Young Johnny McCranky: "I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty."

With just the hint of a tear, the Old Gasbag remembers how in 2000 his hero the Old Shithead --

did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

(Confidential to campaign genius Steve Schmidt at McCranky HQ: Shouldn't Young Johnny be campaigning on this seemingly superhuman ability to keep a secret? To this day, does anybody -- except the Old Gasbag, that is -- know that the Crankyman "actually abhor[s]" the Confederate battle flag? Would anyone in, say, South Carolina care to field this one? Of course it could just be simple forgetfulness that causes the Crankyman to neglect to mention this anytime he's on formerly Confederate soil.)

Now of course, unbeknownst to the Old Gasbag, by 2000 Young Johnny had told so many lies that if he were Pinocchio his nose would have circled the globe. Once again, I refer one and all to Cliff Schecter's indispensable The Real McCain.

DON'T TELL ME THERE'S (GASP!) A MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARD!

Say, isn't it fascinating how little attention the infotainment news media pay to The Real McCain, a work of actual verifiable research by a serious, responsible fact-based journalist, even as they scratch their asses while lending credibility to, even orchestrating media blitzes on behalf of, out-and-out fictional, undisguisedly malicious hatchet jobs published about Barack Obama? Nope, no double standard there! (I'm just saying.)

The Old Gasbag can even pinpoint "the precise moment of McCain's abasement." The moment of truth, as it were, came during Young Johnny's appearance last week on The View, when Joy Behar (God bless her) called the Crankyman on two of his campaign's more preposterous ads, the "lipstick on a pig" debacle and the sex-ed-for-kindergarteners bullshit:

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

And that did it for the O.G. He explains, you see, that his "years of being in the tank for McCain" were attributable, not to the famously chummy insider access of the favored media whores riding the Crankyman's Double Talk Express, but to his perception of the Old Shithead's "integrity":

What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

Ack!

Talk about a defective (or more likely absent) bullshit detector! Well, they say when you can fake sincerity, everything else falls into place. And it appears that the O.G. and his fellow Media Whores for McCranky are preternaturally gullible.

And if you can fake integrity . . .

Of course Young Johnny didn't internalize "the code of the McCains." As anyone at all familiar with his biography knows, he spent his early manhood and his military career thumbing his nose at the starchy naval forebears the Admirals McCain. Or is internalizing-the-McCain-code another thing that's supposed to have happened to him during his time as a POW? You know, along with learning to love his country, which apparently he didn't before.

What can be tricky about the McCranky "integrity" is that, at least to an extent, the lying son of a bitch believes in it himself. This appears to be one reason why he manages to live a life of thoroughgoing ethical sleaze even while claiming to be the purest of the pure -- he really thinks everything he does is morally beyond reproach.

Remember that, unlike the other U.S. senators who formed the Keating Five in the heyday of the S&L greed-and-selfishness scandals, Young Johnny had a personal relationship with Charles Keating. The guy did (sleazy) business with the Crankyman's (sleazy) father-in-law, from whom came the lovely Cindy's bulging coffers, which have always bankrolled Young Johnny's political campaigns when he couldn't hornswoggle innocent civilians to pony up enough cash. But in Young Johnny's mind he is so integritatious that he is above any possible suspicion of "pay for play" political

So when his Senate votes reflect uniform fidelity to the corporate interests that bankroll him, how could anyone even suspect "corruption"? Can't we recognize a "conscience at work"? Similarly, why should it occasion as much as a second thought when he turns his entire political operation over to lobbyists, the people whose job it is to buy, or leastwise rent, government officials for their corporate masters? After all, he's Young Johnny McCranky, God's own earthly anointed saint. Makes that Jesus fellow look like a small-timer.

The Legend of the Maverick McCranky

Now while the O.G. may have been clueless about the Real McCranky until Joy Behar unmasked him, for many people -- even people who were taken in by the Crankyman's phony "maverick" persona, the Legend of the McCranky Integrity began unraveling sometime between 2004 and 2008 -- or possibly even during the first term of the Bush regime. It was the moment when the Crankyman realized that he still still had one last shot at the White House, but that it would have to be not just literally but "spiritually" as the successor to the anointed zealot of the Oh-So-Far Right, George W. Bush. While Chimpy the Prez went about his work destroying the country, Young Johnny was frenetically reinventing himself as the New Chimpy, trying to make himself the new darling of the Far Right fanatics and loons whom the "maverick" McCranky had once scorned.

Okay, so the O.G. and the rest of McCranky's Media Minions were kind of slow on the uptake. (Sometimes all it takes is paying attention.) Nevertheless, if you're campaign genius Steve Schmidt (a Karl Rove disciple, of course), you can't be thrilled to read stuff like this:

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not. . . .

He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work. Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

For several months now campaign genius Steve Schmidt, who undoubtedly deserves credit for turning the moribund McCranky campaign around with his whirlwind of anti-Obama whoppers, has been pursuing a parallel strategy that has struck me as dubious, and potentially disastrous for his enterprise. He more or less declared war on the media.

Dr. Frankenstein was here

The conventional wisdom is that you can never go wrong waging war on the media -- at least if you're doing it from the Right. At this point the infotainment news media are safely owned by, or at least safely in thrall to, the Money-Grubbing Right, and can generally be counted on to do their bidding. Still, the myth of the "liberal media" dies hard, and if some media members who didn't get the memo have the temerity to not just report the blithering imbecilities squealed by McCranky's nincompoop running mate, who after all seems largely responsible for the resurgence of the McCranky campaign, but to point out that from the fact-based standpoint just about every word out of her mouth is a demonstrable lie, well, that's media "bias," isn't it?

So why do I describe this bash-the-media strategy, as employed by the McCranky campaign, "dubious"? Well, you can always get away with a certain amount of media bashing -- the voting public almost demands it. But there are limits, especially when your candidate was invented by the media. The Legend of Young Johnny the Truth-Talking Maverick is a media invention.

The people who propagated that myth either know, or are in a position to know, where the bodies are buried. If they turn against Young Johnny, is it possible that the whole miserable mishmosh could fall apart?

Or, then again, it may be too late. Is it possible that the monster, once created, takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of its creator? Isn't that the unfortunate lesson poor Dr. Frankenstein learned?

For example, even as the insane popularity numbers of Governor Who??? plummet, a staggering number of potential voters stand by their original crackpot judgment that "we like Sarah." No matter how unfounded that judgment may have been, people tend to be reluctant to let go of it. Look how long it took the public to discover that maybe Chimpy the Prez wasn't who or what they thought way back when they, you know, voted for him -- twice. And now they seem to be dealing with this uncomfortable discovery by wiping the memory. George W. Who? Nope, name doesn't ring a bell.

Still, I wonder whether campaign genius Steve Schmidt really appreciates the risky course he has charted, snubbing the very media minions who created their candidate. Hell hath no fury like a media whore scorned.


POSTSCRIPT: MARK CRISPIN MILLER SUGGESTS GOVERNOR WHO???
WAS CHOSEN AS A COVER FOR MORE GOP ELECTION-STEALING

NYU media professor Mark Crispin Miller (most recently author of a book on election fraud called Loser Takes All, from stalwart progressive publisher Ig Publishing) is a serious guy, and I take him seriously. Now he's advancing an alternate theory for the selection of Sarah Palin as McCranky running mate.

Realistically, Mark argues, Palin couldn't have been expected to do much more than energize the Republican "base." That's not enough votes to swing the election, but he suggests that it could be enough to provide cover for another Republican presidential-election theft.

In 2004, he argues, there was no late "surge" of support for Chimpy the Prez, notably in Christian-conservative strongholds like southern Ohio, by Christian "values" voters. It's a myth invented by GOP strategists to conceal what really happened: rigging of the election count, ironically (but crucially) dismissed by the media as a myth. And everybody bought it, losers as well as winners. Poor John Kerry was undone by that late surge of "values" surge.

But Mark points out that there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing happened, and even if it did, it couldn't have happened in anything like the numbers necessary to swing the election. However, if you scratch the surface, he argues, there is plenty of evidence, not just of voter suppression but of serious vote miscounting -- enough to steal the election.

The logic for 2008, he suggests, is that another stolen election can once again be covered with a myth of surging "values"-voter support. It's an interesting argument, and not surprisingly from Mark it's persuasively argued.

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