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"My Opponent"

by: hannah

Thu Aug 28, 2008 at 06:53:17 AM EDT


John McCain flatters and deceives himself if he thinks Barack Obama is his opponent.  An election is not a cock-fight.  It's a selection process and the selecting is being done by the American people.  So, when one candidate trashes the others, only the people itching for a contest are going to be turned on.  And those same people aren't likely voters anyway.
hannah :: "My Opponent"
Of course, if John McCain wants to debase himself and appeal to other men's predatory instincts, that's his business.  However, his abasement of his wives (abandoning one as insufficiently attractive and offering the other to the prurient interests of aging bikers) is truly despicable and should be denounced from every pulpit in the land.  Though, if it's not, it may well be because the embarrassment is too great to even bring it up.

That's a problem.  Some behavior is so over the top that people find it hard to talk about.  That a man who's a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States would degrade his spouse in public is truly shocking.  But then, John McCain seems to delight in leaving outrage in his wake.  He tells parents of young children that they're going to have to send them off to war.  He tells the recently unemployed that they're going to have to get used to being without meaningful work.  He breaks into song at the thought of bombing the people of Iran.  And he hates the people who saved him from drowning in Vietnam, even though he'd been bombing and killing civilians for a month.

Perhaps that's how John McCain defines himself--in terms of his opponents.  Perhaps, if there's no-one standing in his way, he can't see himself.  "My opponent."  It's a claim of ownership, isn't it? Just one more of a long series of assets belonging to John McCain.  "My father, the Admiral" was followed by "my wives" and "my children" and "my squadron" and "my fellow POWs" and, finally, "my friends."  And none of them are real.  They're like all those houses which aren't really his.  

The renovation of the first McCain Mcmansion in the name of Eldon Smith has nothing to do with it.  John McCain owns nothing because he doesn't know what to own something means.  He doesn't own up to his mistakes, at least not in the sense of making sure that he doesn't make the same one again.  That's how he managed to rack up FIVE crashed planes and why he can say "I intercepted a missile with my plane"--taking blame for something he actually didn't do.  

Clearly, John McCain doesn't know what "my" means; that ownership equates to responsibility, obligation and identity, an awareness of others as an extension of oneself.  Of course, if there's no self there, it can't be extended. From which we can conclude that it really doesn't make any difference whether John McCain refers to "my opponent" or "my friends."  They're both meaningless phrases as far as their predictive value is concerned.  If John McCain has been dubbed a maverick, it's probably because nobody knows where he's coming from or, for that matter, where he's going.  "Erratic" would probably be more accurate.  But, Americans are always willing to give a fellow the benefit of the doubt.  There must be a good reason for all that awfulness.  Right?

BTW, dubbing McCain the "Prisoner of W" is clever, but I doubt that's the case.  Whoever thought George W. Bush would be a useful tool and was disappointed in the results, has even less chance of achieving success with McNasty.  If the Republican Party really goes through with this farce, it will be proof positive that the party is lost.

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