Crackpot Theories on McCain

crossposted from orange

I am going into speculative territory here about John McCain.

There’s something bugging me about him.  Yes, I know the press treats him as they do all Republicans — with even a little added approval because he knows how to play them.  The press loves the whole “maverick” conceit, keeps them from having to think about who he really is and analyze what he says and does from a rational point of view.

But the more I think about who John McCain is, the more I come up with a blank, a disconnect I find disturbing.

It seems to me that McCain has gone way beyond pandering; I get the sense he is utterly contemptuous of the political processes of a Presidential campaign.  Given the lunacy of our present electoral apparatus, I can’t say I find that surprising.

I think many Americans who are not political junkies still think of John McCain as a war hero and one of those “reasonable” Republicans, sort of middle of the road.

Of course his voting record says otherwise.  Here is a man who was tortured in Viet Nam and yet voted to uphold this misAdministration’s torture tactics.  That alone is breathtaking.  Unfortunately, in today’s corrupt and criminal culture, there is no time given to allowing the average citizen to focus on much of anything but constant and relentless spin.

So what is breathtaking becomes “ho-hum.”

Why does John McCain want to be President?  Does anyone really know?

He will pretty much say anything to anyone at this point, with no real concern as to whether he is contradicting himself or not.

Some would say (yeah, I’m using the phrase) that means he is a flip-flopper.

I think maybe it’s something else.  Maybe he is so cynical about the political process, after having gone through his own Rovian swift-boating experience, that the lesson he took away was that no one really listens to anything anyone says so it doesn’t really matter what you say to the press or to folks who come to see you give a speech on the campaign trail.

Maybe that cynicism has created such a contempt for the press, for the people, for the whole process, that John McCain feels very comfortable throwing out whatever answer comes to mind, and that at this point he is running for President simply to be President.  It’s all calculation now and no humanity.

I have never gotten a sense from McCain of what he would actually do in office.  He’ll say anything, make shit up on the spot and then blow off any criticism of inconsistency with the same lack of gravity and respect as when he made those inconsistent statements.  Who knows, maybe that’s why the press love him – because his cynicism and contempt mirrors their own.

And I think there are some McCain admirers who have their own tin-foil fantasies that once he gets in office he will turn out to be a superhero who was just waiting for his moment of power to make everything all right.

Well, I think there are a lot of Americans right now looking for that kind of mythical superhero, so I’m not surprised if this crackpot notion would have some truth to it.

Of course, you never know what a person will do once they gain this powerful an office.  Events and political factions challenge one constantly.

But I don’t get a sense at all of what he would do in office.  Most of all, I don’t get a sense of why on earth he wants to run for President.  No, not as a Republican or a politician, but as an American whose story we all know better than, perhaps, we’d like.

I am hoping that citizen bloggers will rip the lid off this charade, and in the coming months we will see who we are really dealing with when it comes to John McCain, in 2008.

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  1. … is that it is a good idea to know as well as possible just who John McCain is … in order to defeat him.

    I don’t see enough either in the lamestream media (h/t lasthorseman) or on the blogs that deals with this.

  2. about his cynicism about the process as a result of his experience last time around. He seems like a totally different candidate this time (not that I had any affection for the last one either, mind you). It does leave us with a pretty blank slate to try and fill in.

    Its either that, or he’s gone completely bonkers. A “crackpot theory” I wouldn’t totally dismiss. LOL  

    • Edger on May 4, 2008 at 17:17

    and doesn’t care what people think for the same reasons Bush never seemed to care what people think.

    Analysis of an Electronic Voting System [.PDF]

    Johns Hopkins University Information Security

    Institute Technical Report TR-2003-19, July 23, 2003.

    We discovered significant and wide-reaching security vulnerabilities in the version of the [Diebold] AccuVote-TS voting terminal found in [9] (see Table 1). Most notably, voters can easily program their own smartcards to simulate the behavior of valid smartcards used in the election. With such homebrew cards, a voter can cast multiple ballots without leaving any trace. A voter can also perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early.

    We identify several problems… We conclude that this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general election.



    Saturday, November 6, 2004

    Election night… I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he’d lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. “Bush took the news stoically,” noted the AP report.

    But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

    “Exit Polls are almost never wrong,” Dick Morris wrote.

    He added: “So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.”

    Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

  3. I think I’ve heard that his father, who was Commander of the Pacific Fleet at the time, preemptively pardoned him for all the radio tapes he made for North VietNam, giving rise to charges of treason. And wasn’t he also pardoned for his part of the Keating 5 scam, for taking bribes?

    Having gone through those two experiences, and not hearing anything about them now would give rise to why he is so cynical, and carefree about the truth, IMO.

    And why don’t we hear about these things, even the leftoshpere seems to have forgotten them. Is my memory of these things faulty? This is truly possible, given my lifestyle during those times, but 17 years of clean and sober, and what I have read in these years say I’m not wrong.

  4. he strikes me( as KO says) as a really creepy Manchurian Candidate. The war hero thing really does me in. The rehabilitation of the Viet Nam war is so sick I just gag. I do not understand revering ‘the troops’ to the point of declaring anyone who went to kill for American ‘interests’ supportable. It was as pointless and evil a war as this one, it didn’t even have oil as a motivation. It was for geopolitical dominance. I have sympathy for those who were drafted but the ruling elitist class who joined in the killing, none.

    I have even less respect for those who joined like Kerry and McCain for political? resumes. Kerry sold his soul, then redeemed himself only to once again use the killing of people as part of his “war hero’ resume to prove he was manly or tough. “Send Me” right.

    He’s the Dr Strangelove candidate, one who loves war. I think he’s broken in body and spirit. He also seems to be either senile or mentally damaged to the point of not grasping the scenario he is in. Perhaps it all becomes one war to him indistinguishable enemies all out to get us, all terrorists. Maverick and moderate, seem to be harder to play as he ages.

    Whatever he would do as president is not something I care to have the world have to live through. He is like Cheney and Bush from the dark side. It’s strange though because he does not seem to have the role right. He seems detached with none of the ‘patriotic’ fervor, or cultural red meat, for the rights agenda. An empty shell of a puppet this time with arms that don’t work right. I think he is dangerous as he would be totally malleable for the Military/ war machine/ big money dudes, with no concept of anything else. It would be like just leaving the safe open for the looters to continue on their rampage unchecked, with another soulless psycho selling it to the public as security. Is Rove going to be his brain too?    

     

    • DWG on May 4, 2008 at 19:09

    You hit the nail on the head that he decided to join the dark side rather than fight them after being smeared in 2000. He has been very careful to criticize Bush to create the public impression of distance while actively, if not aggressively, supporting the Bush agenda, including on torture. The man is just plain fucking repulsive.

  5. McCain is no doubt in my mind very, very bitter about the shit that went down in 2000.  In his “mind”, he was inevetible (see Gary Hart).  

    He truly felt that his “schtick” of POW hero and “mav” made him the guy that America would just die to elect.

    He was lazy.  You know the outcome.  

    School of thought 1.  I deserve it because, dammit, I earned it and was BF’ed out of it.  When I am elected, Americans are just going to have to get used to MY dictatorship.  Heh!

    School of thought 2.  McCain just wants to JAM the Republican Party by getting into office and then inacting all the domestic policies that all Americans deserve, and doing it really quickly.  Health Care for all!  Heh!  You neo-con bastards asked for it, you deserve it, here it is!  

    This, of course includes his warmongering to keep his ego and the Republican base from fucking freaking out.

    I’m going with neither, although I only gave two options.

    Sue me, ‘K?    ðŸ˜‰

    McCain has an ego.  He wants it massaged in the ultimate manner.  End of story.

    • kj on May 4, 2008 at 20:10

    there are some people i know who have blogs and they never, ever put up a story/essay about McCain without showing a picture of “The Hug.”  ðŸ™‚   Just as a reminder of his “true colors.”  

  6. He’ll know what he’s going to do when the special interests tell him, if they bother to let him know.  That’s my read.  I feel the same way as you do about McCain.  It has led me to a vague theory that, far from being the tough-as-nails maverick people expect from a former POW, he is suffering from PTSD.  Perhaps his time as POW, (in which he was NOT in solitary confinement as he has claimed) left him needing to feel firmly embedded in an authority structure.  I mean that famous photo of him hugging Bush is weird.  He looks like he’s clinging to his lifeline or something.

    Ever since Reagan, Republicans have loved the front guy who want get in the way of corporate policy.  A little like this guy:

  7. It seems to be a trend among politicians.

    I am not refering to the familiar fact that you can’t know what someone is like just from seeing them on TV.  And I’m not refering to the idea that people mold their messages and to an extent their personalities to suit a political campaign — that is, out of expedience.  

    Like NPK says of McCain, there is something else about Bush the Younger.  Bush and McCain have a certain “there’s no there there” except for the fact that there is something there, you simply can’t put your finger on it.  It is elusive; it keeps quirming out from under your grasp.  

    I am reminded of a line about Jack Torrence in Stephen King’s novel The Shining.  Dick Holleran, the chef, and Danny, the son are talking.  Danny asks Dick if his father Jack has The Shine — clairvoyance.  Dick says, “No . . . but he’s got something.”  Something Dick hasn’t seen before and can’t name.  Something dark and dangerous and hard to articulate.  Bush is like that.  He’s got something.

    Cheney, by contrast, is perfectly legible.  You can read his mind off his words and actions.  However evil he is, he is not inscrutible.

    Going back to McCain: his continual “slips” (100 years; we’re there for the oil; Al Qaeda are Shiites) are written off as momentary forgettings.  But it does beg the question NPK asks: if McCain has so little interest in why we’re in Iraq and who we’re actually “fighting” over there . . . then why does he want to be there?  Why does he want to be President in a “war” against “whoever they are and stop bothering me about it.”?

    What kind of America is he seeing, or does he care about, when he says things like this:

    McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.

    Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain’s job offer.

    “I’ll take it!” one man shouted.

    McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”

    In all seriousness: Where does he think he is and why does he want to rule it?  Who does he think “Americans” are?

    Maybe he is merely befuddled.  But no: merely befuddled people don’t marry up.  They don’t make friends with the press.  They don’t run for President.  

    I don’t know.  I haven’t thought about McCain as much as Bush.  But I guess it’s time to start.

    Great post, NPK.  Thanks.

  8. We all know who McCain is and how bad that would be but you all should know I consider all of them Manchurians.

    Strange as it may be the lunacy of a McCain pResidency might just be the thing that wakes people up.

    I think is will be a “close” call but in the end there are signs that the globalists will annoint a Dem this time.

  9. is really grating on my nerves at this point–not to mention that it is providing great soundbites for McCain’s campaign.  According to Dems, McCain is a “hero”, etc, etc.  

    Other combat veterans  have run for office and been considered fair game by their opponents:  Kennedy, Kerry, Gore, and even Bush I, to mention a few–so, what’s up with the Dems fawning all over McCain?

    He has a lot of vulnerabilities that should be on an endless loop of criticism by the Democrats.  There’s the “100, 1,000, million years” in Iraq, there’s the “flip-flopping”, there’s his non-support of the new GI bill, there’s his coziness with lobbyists, there’s the “Keating Five” scandal, and–the issue “that must not be talked about”:  His health and his refusal to disclose his medical records.  The media and the Dems apparently don’t think that there’s any problem with an almost 72 year old Presidential candidate, with a history of at least two bouts of melanoma, (the one in 2000, requiring a 5 hour surgery) refusing to disclose the results of his more recent medical exams and tests.  

  10. i await the day that this fat rat-bastard gets tied around the neck of the mcclincain’s campaign…  

    why hasn’t it happened yet??????

    please, dear readers, take the ten minutes to watch this fucking maniac:

  11. Former Presidential advisor, David Gergen said: (emphasis mine)

    “…There’s a sense that, with McCain, the way to solve problems is through the military,” said Gergen, who advised Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton…”

    The Bloomberg article by Edwin Chen describes McCain as follows:

    “…McCain’s life, career and global outlook are informed by war and its consequences…”

    McCain himself describes how he felt on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, when he was on an aircraft carrier awaiting possible orders coming at any moment from the President to carry out bombing attacks on Cuba:

    “…He (McCain) also wrote that during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he was aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise and “excited as hell” at the prospect of flying combat missions…”  

    Some people may look on this world view as heroic.  Others might consider it short- sighted, unnecessarily aggressive and lacking any concept of long range costs and consequences.

  12. saying on the campaign trail and see his bizarre policy positions, his campaign will implode, just like Giuliani’s did when primary voters started paying attention.  

    The corporate media has been able to protect McCain the last couple months, but that can’t last.  

    In this new CBS poll Obama is now ahead of McCain 51-40 and Chelsea’s mother leads McCain 52-40.

    Democrats took Hastert’s seat in a very red district, and took that LA seat last night that the RePugs had held for more than 30 years.

    RePug candidates are in deep shit, and so is McCain.

    • Mu on May 5, 2008 at 16:04

    Same as Bush(1) and Poppy Bush: he doesn’t really want to do anything as President, he just wants to be President.

    Mu . . .

    (1)  Of course, Baby Bush wanted to “do” lots of needless and senseless war.

     

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