by Damozel | This piece is cathartic. Rich---a/k/a "The Butcher of Broadway"---analyzes McCain's brand of political performance art as exemplified by his "suspension" last week of the campaign. It pulls together every single thing you thought but couldn't quite articulate with how every bit of further posturing by McCain reveals him to be less and less credible as a candidate for the presidency....never mind Sarah Palin.
It's like this is one of those lame, written-by-a-committee political comedies where the bad pols are so clownishly over the top that the story is drained of any vestige of enjoyable tension and you can see the jokes lurching toward you like zombies from half an hour away.
But this is reality and in reality, the Republicans have been shockingly successful at marketing ineptness and political theater as down-to-earth courageous "straight talk" and passionate, square-jawed conviction.
When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.....(NYT)
Rich analyzes to the background events from which McCain seems to have been desperately attempting to deflect attention: the connections between his campaign manager, lobbying firm Rich Davis, and disgraced mortgage titans Freddie and Fannie, currently living on the public dole.
What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation (NYT)
When other tactics failed, "Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark
that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced,
clearly, since World War II.” (NYT).
But of course, things actually were going better before he decided to turn this crisis, like Hurricane Ike, into a political stunt and diversionary tactic.
By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis....He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office. (NYT).
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