In the end, it’s the middle-aged housewife who gets to him. On a blistering June day north of Phoenix, John McCain, short and sprightly in a baby-blue gingham button-down, has been harangued repeatedly by an antiwar demonstrator during his town-hall meeting. A couple of hours earlier, he’d had to stand red-faced while a transsexual woman made a speech about a nondiscrimination bill in Congress (“I’ll go back and review it again,” he said stiffly).
Then, during an event in a YMCA recreation facility in the suburb of Carefree, he can’t hold it together anymore. A woman takes a paper from her purse and begins reading McCain’s own concession speech from the 2008 election. After he was beaten by Barack Obama, the senator from Arizona promised “to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences.”
“That was your words,” says the woman. “I was very heartened when I heard these words, and my question is: ‘What happened?’ ”
Blinking rapidly, McCain develops an expression like a grenade about to detonate.
“Simple,” he snaps. “This administration has decided to govern from the far left without any consultations or negotiations or any compromises to be made with the other party!”
His supporters applaud, and McCain’s face twitches. “You know how many times I’ve been asked to go over to the White House to negotiate on any issue?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “Zero,” he says with a huff. “Zero.”
McCain ends the exchange with a starkly disingenuous “Thanks very much,” the smirk on his face doing nothing to conceal his annoyance. “Next time,” he says, “please bring another speech.”
I'm sorry, John McCain is SURPRISED that he has not been asked to negotiate with the White House? Seriously?
McCain has run so far to the right that he almost completely unrecognizable as the man who spoke out against the Religious Right and slammed the Bush administration for using torture against terror suspects.
And when McCain was in the same room as President Obama he used the opportunity to attack him.
McCain zinged Obama for going back on a campaign promise to put all the health care negotiations on C-Span. Obama shot back, "We're not campaigning anymore. The election is over."
McCain grinned and allowed that he was "reminded of that every day."
McCain has literally become the cranky old man with the shotgun yelling at the kids to stay the hell off of his lawn. He has lost every ounce of his integrity and seems to fight to retain his political office, not out of a sense of duty, but from a jealous desire to keep what he believes is rightfully his.
"Hey you J.D. Hayworth! Stay the hell away from my Senate seat!"
However even if he manages to win this upcoming election, it will NEVER erase his disastrous decision to lift Sarah Palin out of the obscurity of Alaska and inflict her on an unsuspecting nation.
The most complicated decision McCain had to face involved his own political Frankenstein monster. Until the fall, McCain wasn’t sure Sarah Palin, his political creation and now a catalyst for the tea party, was going to be politically advantageous for him. When asked by an adviser to reach out to her last summer, McCain growled that “it’s not the right time.” And as her book, Going Rogue, was about to launch in November, it looked like it might be too late. When asked by advisers to recruit her in the fight against Hayworth, McCain complained, “She won’t even return my calls.”
"She won't even return my calls." And why should she? She had already infected McCain with her own personal destructive virus and moved on. Leaving John McCain a shadow of his former self, trashing every one of the values that helped to define him, and fighting desperately to stay relevant in a Republican party that seems to be feeding on its own.
The skin cancer that John McCain has been fighting for decades is nothing compared to the cancer that he discovered in Wasilla Alaska.