Don't vote against John McCain for president because you think, as Chuck Norris does, that the 71-year-old might die during his first term. Vote against John McCain because he's already dead.
The petulant straight-talker of 2000, the fiery candidate who sought to bring dignity back to the Republican Party, has croaked. He rests in the same graveyard as compassionate-conservative George Bush, progressive-pragmatist Joe Lieberman and the many, many past iterations of Mitt Romney.
Presidential ambition is often a fatal syndrome, one that slowly enervates conviction in a way that leaves even longtime supporters grimacing. (Pity on the loved ones forced to watch Mike Huckabee's painful mutation from respectable governor to Minuteman screwball.)
A political autopsy reveals that John McCain was already infected with the pander-bug in the 2000 race. Wooing the never-insignificant Southern bigot vote, McCain defended the Confederate battle flag flying atop South Carolina's State Capitol. In brief remission between presidential runs, McCain admitted in 2002 that his position "was an act of cowardice."
History's morticians may date McCain's expiration to his April 4, 2006, appearance on "The Daily Show." "Are you freaking out on us?" John Stewart asked, aghast. "Are you going into crazy base world?" In a final, honorable surge of straight-talk, McCain admitted, "I'm afraid so." And the lame, conventional reactionary rose from the straight-talking ashes.
He bowed before the "agents of intolerance," courting the support of preachers who blamed Sept. 11 on gays and the ACLU. He changed his mind on tax cuts, deciding budget-busting giveaways to millionaires is just what the economy needed all along. In a comical show of shamelessness at a recent debate, the new McCain said he would vote against his own immigration bill.
McCain has been parading his early calls for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, a claim that his advisers now admit is in unfortunate opposition to the truth. In a rebuke to the environmentally conscious McCain of yore, he skipped a clean energy vote while in D.C. as aides told the Sierra Club he had voted for it. He went from being open to gay marriage ceremonies to endorsing a proposed amendment in Arizona that would expressly deny gay couples all benefits.
On Iraq, the senator's signature issue, McCain traded in the Straight-Talk Express for the revisionist bandwagon. "I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time," he predicted in 2002. "I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough," he then boasted in 2007.
In a display of political theater unseen since "Mission Accomplished," McCain claimed his peaceful stroll through a Baghdad market proved Americans are "not getting the full picture." Later, "full pictures" showed he was escorted by 100 American soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. The next day, 21 people were massacred in that market.
Most egregious of all, though, is McCain's sell-out on torture. Whatever his political fortunes were, the POW never compromised on this most basic of moral standards. Passionately rebuking the president and the bulk of his own party, McCain refused to accept the tactics of terrorists. "It's not about who they are," he intoned. "It's about who we are."
Last week the monster who replaced the maverick descended upon the Senate floor and voted against a bill that would prohibit the CIA from torturing, freeing interrogators from the very Army Field Manual he had once defended as honorable and necessary.
May John McCain, the respected contrarian, rest in peace. And may John McCain, the Dick Cheney-wannabe, never enter the White House.
Jacob Shelly is a junior in the School of Public Affairs and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
