Sure, Young Johnny McCranky has made himself an object of ridicule, but don't kid yourself, he's still "The Real McCain"

Oh no, do we really have to talk about

Young Johnny again? Alas, 'fraid so!

"It is depressing to watch Sen. John McCain transform himself from the refreshingly independent voice he once was to the snarling partisan he has become."

-- start of a Newark Star-Ledger editorial yesterday

by Ken

Let me be the last to comment on the latest antics of Young Johnny McCranky. Young Johnny, you'll recall, announced after the passage of the health care bill that we wouldn't have congressional Republicans to kick around anymore on account of they're gonna cease providing all the cooperation those indomitable bipartisans have contributed to the legislative process in this session.

Now you just stop laughing out there! I'm sure when we check the videotapes we're going to find you've already bust a gut laughing over this. No more Republican cooperation, eh? Okay, that is pretty hilarious, I admit, no matter how often you hear it. If Republicans had extended any less cooperation in this session of Congress . . . um . . . any less cooperation . . . sorry, I just don't have a punch line for that one. "Republicans" and "cooperation" in the same sentence just seems so bizarre.

It's going to be hard to persuade you that this is, nevertheless, serious business. Not so much Young Johnny himself. Oh no, there's nothing serious about the Crankyman -- unless you count the fact that he occupies a seat in the U.S. Senate, and is pressing his Arizonan constituents to send him back for another six years. Still, when you look at the growing collection of jugheads and clowns who share the distinction of occupying space in the U.S. Senate, it hardly seems that special -- unless you count the deadly serious role this carnival of freaks is supposed to play in our governmental process.

Howie has been keeping an eye on Young Johnny's latest self-reinvention, as a Teabagger-friendly obstructionist, as he fights for his life against a Senate primary challenge from the right. (Late word is that tomorrow none other than Princess Sarah will be in Arizona campaigning for him.) The point to remember is that the Crankyman's periodic metamorphoses are as phony, and go about as deep, as the lovely Cindy's makeup. As our friend Cliff Schecter documented all too well in his zealously researched book The Real McCain, Young Johnny's political career, which seems so puzzlingly all-over-the-place ideologically, becomes as predictable as clockwork once you focus on the one overriding consideration: What's good for me personally?

Once upon a time, it suited Young Johnny's purposes to present himself as a Man of Principle, the war hero who stood up to all that torture and maintained his fearless integrity against ideologues of Left and Right. I don't entirely rule out the possibility that on some level he believed it himself. But as Cliff demonstrated so thoroughly, the image had nothing to do with reality.

Even the "war hero" record is a lot more equivocal than our Johnny represents. And he was always the cynically opportunistic wheeler-dealer who traded in his first wife, when she no longer served either his personal pleasures or his political ambitions, for the lovely Cindy and her family's beer-distribution fortune, which he parlayed into a political career -- one that was then perennially riddled with corruption as he struggled to make himself a Man of Means independent of his wife's family's.

One of the scandals of the 2008 presidential campaign was the general failure of the Infotainment News Media to acknowledge what "everyone knew" (everyone on the inside, that is) about Young Johnny's unprincipled past, especially when he was campaigning with a minimum of two positions on every issue of public interest. Now that he's once again let the protective sheet slip off his sleazy, grubby self, Cliff is remembering ruefully how dismissive the Infotainment Newsers were of The Real McCain, without regard to the care that went into its research. Until Young Johnny's campaign had virtually self-destructed, when some of those mainstreamers finally began peeling off their erstwhile hero, it wasn't considered proper in Village precincts to question his character.

I raise these matters now for two reasons that go beyond the immediate case of Young Johnny to fundamental questions of how we govern ourselves in our increasingly imperfect democracy:

(1) This is the man who ran the nation's first all-lies all-the-time presidential campaign. The Bush campaigns had at least been somewhat discreet about its lies. Presumably under the tutelage of Karl Rove, the campaigners mastered the art of telling different groups what they wanted to hear. Remember "compassionate conservatism," to which not even lip service was paid once they seized control of the White Hosue? Rove understood that all that mattered was the electorate's emotion of the moment, that as long as they were careful with their campaign promises, nothing they said in the campaign would in any way limit what they could do once in power. (Remember the scornful dismissal of "nation-building," never heard from again?)

But after eight years of Bush regime lies, and the discovery that there was never a price to pay for them, whereas opponents could almost always be eviscerated for attempting to speak the truth, and the regime's total rejection of any obligation to reality, the various sets of McCranky campaign strategists seemed to agree that truth and reality were only for suckers, and as they got away with it, the lies became ever more encompassing and egregious -- and it became ever so much easier once Barack Obama was the sole opponent, with his campaign's steadfast refusal to make an issue of the fraudulence of right-wing rhetoric and governance.

What scared the dickens out of me was that, after a campaign in which Young Johnny made no rational case whatsoever for his candidacy, he still got 47 percent of the vote. As I've said frequently, I didn't see how that could possibly be good news for the country's future governability. I'm not saying I anticipated the rise of the Teabaggers, but I knew that nothing good was likely to come of so many voters having severed their ties to truth and reality.

(2) Sorry, Newark Star-Ledger editorial board, but if you were to read The Real McCain (which unlike all those right-wing propaganda tracts put out by the publishing presses of the Right-Wing Noise Machine, like Regnery, was actually based on verifiably factual research), you would know that "refreshingly independent voice he once was" existed only in your imagination. It was just a persona he used when it was convenient, and one he played masterfully with an awful lot of journalists who should have known better, should have known they were being played. The bogus "maverick" persona didn't (a) temper the extreme conservatism of McCranky's actual voting record or (b) change all the financial shenanigans he was engaging in all those years both inside and outside the Senate.

But the Infotainment Newsers have been so thoroughly coopted that even now they don't acknowledge what was available for them to know about Young Johnny in 2008. Now that "The Real McCain" has reemerged, the sad truth for our friend Cliff is that the only thing that offends the Village media more than challenging their orthodoxies is challenging their orthodoxies and being proved right.

Which is a lesson we have learned before, no doubt many times over. But once again I call attention to that remarkable Bill Moyers Journal broadcast, "Buying the War," which looked back at the performance of news-gatherers and pundits during the Bush regime's run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which -- contrary to the bogus version Karl Rove is apparently peddling in his new tell-all-lies book -- was clearly certain once the regimistas realized they could use 9/11 as cover for the military adventure their various factions were already salivating over. Here is a sample:

What Bill and his reporting team found was that with depressing consistency the journalistic whores who had uncritically toed the official regime line, and been wrong every step of the way, were rewarded, while the truly intrepid reporters who somehow managed to see what "nobody could have foreseen" were punished, and may never be forgiven in polite circles for having been right. As I pointed out when I last wrote about this, in November, "a DVD of "Buying the War" is still available, and two and a half years later seems every bit as pertinent." (At the moment the PBS website lists it as back-ordered, "but leaves warehouse in 2-4 weeks.")

A thought for the day: Wouldn't it be nice if those rewards and punishments were reversed?

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