5/27/2008

John McCain to Soldiers: More of You Will Die If I'm President:
One of the funniest sights in politics these days is a pissed off John McCain. With his wee stature, his comically distended chipmunk cheeks, his achy arms painfully half-waving, and his squeaky little voice, it's just so damn...cute. Watching McCain fume and jump about is like watching a particularly petulant leprechaun leaping mad because he can't find his shillelagh or a circus dwarf who almost got his foot run over by a clown car or a cartoon rodent who just can't get that goddamn cheese from the trap. McCain gets all jumpy and twitchy, and you wanna point and laugh while you get the hell off his lawn before he walks out there and tries to stiffly swing his cane at you. Watch his reaction to criticism of his opposition to funding greater benefits to current war vets. It's hi-larious.

In his Memorial Day speech in Albuquerque yesterday, McCain was a bundle of tics, his voice occasionally raising and then lowering into that sonorous tone of his. After offering the troops lubricious oral gratification and then defending his vote on the recent Webb amendment to the war funding bill with his "benefits will make the servants uppity" argument, the Senator from neighboring Arizona went to town on how the Iraq war is just so fuckin' important.

First he went with the "hey, I get it" ploy: "As we all know, the American people have grown sick and tired of the war in Iraq. I understand that, of course. I, too, have been made sick at heart by the many mistakes made by civilian and military commanders and the terrible price we have paid for them." There's a fine but important distinction he's avoiding: see, Americans don't want the goddamn war and no longer wish it to be fought. Period. That'd be the "sick and tired" part of it. We're not "sick at heart" about the "mistakes." Oh, no, Johnny Mac, we're sick of everyone telling us that the dog that's been run over by a Hummer will be okay if we can only get it to stand up. Sorry, man. That fucker's dead. You can prop up the corpse, but it ain't gonna be any less dead. You can tell by the guts spilling out of it.

Then, after the "we fucked up" part, McCain went into deep fear mode: "To walk away now -- before the Iraqi government can fully protect its people from ruthless enemies -- would strengthen al Qaeda, empower Iran and other hostile powers in the Middle East, unleash a full scale civil war in Iraq that could quite possibly provoke genocide there, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions." Of course, according to McCain, by 2013, he can make sure that there will be no civil war in Iraq, even though factions have been aching for one for years. But the magic of imposed democracy will soothe centuries of antagonism.

And McCain offers himself up, like, you know, Jesus, to take on this task: "I have one responsibility that outweighs all the others and that is to use whatever talents I possess, and every resource God has granted me to protect the security of this great and good nation from all enemies foreign and domestic." The Rude Pundit read that and thought, "Dude, seriously, if you still believe in God after what you've been through, you're either fuckin' insane or know something the rest of us don't." That's right: John McCain is gonna use his invisible sky wizard-granted superpowers to rescue us from ourselves.

He wants us to believe, motherfuckers: "I will attempt to convince as many of my countrymen as I can that we must show even greater patience, though our patience is nearly exhausted, and that as long as there is a reasonable prospect for succeeding in this war then we must not choose to lose it." Now, McCain doesn't define what a "reasonable prospect" for success is, and, really, by implication, if there's only a "reasonable prospect" for winning, then there's a not unreasonable prospect for losing, and wouldn't we wanna know some odds here? It's like saying if you fuck that whore without a condom, you might not get the syphilis she's carrying.

As the Rude Pundit has said, John McCain's first foreign policy decision was to volunteer for combat in the Vietnam War. His second was to stay in the Hanoi Hilton when he was offered a chance to leave. He was against going into Bosnia. He was for going into Iraq. This is the guy who gets to have credibility criticizing Barack Obama for lack of experience?

Experience doesn't mean shit if you don't know how to use it. You know, there's the people who've had sex with dozens of other people, but when you get in the sack with them, they suck as lovers. Just because someone's been fucked a lot doesn't mean they know how to do the fucking.