The fall of john mccain: a candidacy wasted

Every time we get worried about the '08 Democrats beating each other up- we read something like For GOP, A Void on the Right, and realize: we'd rather have our problems, thank you very much.

Grumpy Republican meaneocon Robert Novak bemoans the dearth of candidates satisfactory to  conservatives. Most notable, he reports is how deep the rancor is for John McCain by the party's paleocons as well as the moraliticons. He's truly distrusted and despised.

He stuck his foot in it again last night when he told David Letterman, "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."

Obama caused a shitstorm from the shocked, shocked and patriotically correct Republicans when he recently said American lives were "wasted" in the Iraq war. He apologized. Now McCain has said the same thing and is feeling the heat, not only from the DNC, but more devastatingly from party wing nuts who are on him like sugar bees on a rump roast.

(What would you call lives taken in a war that was dishonestly conceived, perniciously sold, and incompetently prosecuted?)  

The responses to the inscrutable yet breezy puff piece on McCain this morning by Don "Front Page" Ward on the Seattle Republican sounding board (sounding bored?) Sound Politics gives us a local view of the Republican conundrum. Self-described as a reporter, he says he was on his way out the door "to do some interviews I don't have time to give my complete list of thoughts. (sic)" 

His incomplete thoughts, and nearly comprehensible typing included such glowing (yet controversial) affirmations as "John McCain is a man of his word" which were enough to cause a little shitblitz among the cranky conservative choir over there.

With the vitriol usually saved for single moms and the homeless, a few said they'd actually sit out the presidential if it were between McCain and the hated Hillary (or Hitlery, as a commenter called her). One poster refers to McCain as "that bloated toad (TBT).

We'd say the state Republicans have a problem (brilliant analysis, no?). Mainstream Republicans supported McCain in the past- Ralph Munro headed up his 2000 campaign- and Mainstreamer Attorney General Rob McKenna, one of the few Republicans elected statewide, has come out already with an endorsement of the Arizona Senator. Ex-Senator Slade Gorton Republican eminence grease supports him as well.

The other end of the party- slyly and well articulated by those who call themselves the Reagan Wing link the morally retarded Dick Morris to pronounce the McCain candidacy dead. 

There was a time when we thought McCain was a threat to Democrats in 2008. We were afraid people wouldn't realize how conservative he really is beneath all that self-deprecating reasonable schtick.

That was before he attached himself to the Bush war doctrine, and felated Jerry Falwell.

All McCain's posturing was for nothing; his rightward acrobatics served merely to piss off the moderates who have long been snookered by him. 

Novak and many other right-wingers are saying Newt Gingrich is the guy to watch. But the former speaker has been tainted for the moraliticons after it was revealed he'd been schtupping his 30-something aide Callista Bisek (said to creepily resemble Hillary Clinton) for years- even while pecksniffing Bill Clinton's peccadilloes. Gingrich dumped his wife of 18 years, Marianne over the phone while she was celebrating her mother's 84th birthday. 

This doesn't fly well in the Carolinas or Kansas or Eastern Washington; and to the rest of us: Gingrich is still the same longwinded asshole he ever was.

So who to do? That's the question for the GOP in a presidential year many are saying that any Democrat can win over any Republican.

It's way too early to buy that- Democrats have always had an amazing talent for wresting defeat from the jaws of victory; but meanwhile, they have the most attractive, qualified, and well-positioned candidates in memory.

Having too many good candidates has its problems, but having few-to-none is a helluva lot worse.

Comments

[KS]

Dems should hope that Al Gore jumps in the race. He may have the best chance of them all to win. If it came down to McCain vs. Gore - I would hold my nose (as I would for anyone else) and probably vote for Gore. Obama or Shrillary - nope.

[Pugetsound]

KS
Welcome back. Can Audioslave and Edmonds Dan be far behind?