McCain's Cynicism Poisoning The National Soul

-by DeCay

I've always been afraid of cynicism creeping into my soul and poisoning my life. And I look for clues every day in my thoughts and actions and try to overcome the creep. When I saw John McCain's 
latest move, my heart dropped in the face of the level of cynicism he injected into our national experience. Does he truly have no idea of the importance of the debates to our process, no sense of how important-- whether he does well or not-- it is for us to see the candidates together, face to face?

No matter what our preferences or the dire conditions we are facing, we base our continuity as a nation on the process continuing unabated through the confusion; that process is where the possibility of real change lies. And as one of our two candidates for President, Mr McCain owes us the debates, Presidential and Vice-Presidential. It seems to me to be the most important democratic process outside of actually voting and serving.

No matter what the economic situation, or esp because of the economic situation, I want to see and hear the dialog that my future president engages in-- how he sounds, what his demeanor is under fire, what his ideas are in real-time, face-to-face, and not from Washington. In the open, unprotected, in a word-- leading.

Mr. McCain has decided to take that moment from me, my family, and from the public he would lead. He wants the power, but doesn't want the responsibility that goes with it. And, he wants to hide that fact under the cloak of stepping up to assume another "greater" responsibility. The irony of course is that he'd be stepping up to be responsible for solving a crisis he was instrumental in creating, and for which he will take no responsibility.

I'm trying to imagine what Barack Obama must be feeling. If I were Mr Obama, I'd be staring into a vacuum of Mr. Bush's irresponsibility and Mr. McCain's complicity in it all, and feeling the momentum of events rushing at me, and gathering my courage to slow it down and try to turn it around should I be given the responsibility to manage it.

Mr. McCain is not only trying to pull the rug out from under Mr. Obama, he's now trying to upend us all, in the cause of his and his handlers' winning. Mr McCain is not leading us. He is misleading us, and endangering our most fundamental process.


UPDATE: PUT MITT ROMNEY IN CHARGE????

Just before McCain ambled off to Washington-- and then finds and gets reacquainted with his office-- so he can parachute in on the ongoing negotiations and mark the bailout with his scent, he rushed over to NBC, presumably not part of his "suspended" campaign. We were appalled to hear him suggest that predatory capitalist, Mitt Romney-- one of the nation's worst outsourcers and a veritable one man machine of Americans job destruction-- be given some role in overseeing the $700 billion. But even worse, was McCain's admission that he hadn't even read the three page bill he's jumping up and down over! Watch: