An American guy is capable of many costumes -- Riverboat Gambler, Sensitive Aesthete, Wilderness Scout, Lounge Lizard, House Husband, Dangerous Radical and Scourge of Society, Aging Preppie -- and I've tried out most of them, but as you enter your golden years, your interest in masquerade naturally diminishes, and so it's interesting to see America's Oldest Presidential Candidate out on the hustings transforming himself into a yahoo and a cracker. Whatever consultant told him to do this is being paid way too much.
The political exploitation of wounded American soldiers by Sen. McCain and his eagerness to introduce race into the race was yahoo behavior, but never mind -- if you lived through the Nixon years and then read the transcripts of the tapes, you are not surprised by anything in politics whatsoever. A bitter, paranoid man of towering personal insecurity, Nixon talked like Broderick Crawford and thereby beat a decorated war hero, George McGovern, even as Nixon was directing an American retreat and defeat in Vietnam that he (and Sen. McCain) blamed on student protesters. And the famous G-man J. Edgar Hoover was gay. He and his lover, Clyde Tolson, brought Alvin Karpis to St. Paul for the trial. So what? It's an amazing country.
It's an amazing country where an anthrax researcher working for the Defense Department may have carried out a murderous campaign with anthrax and thereby succeeded in winning vast new appropriations for the anthrax program.
And it's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir.
Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that Mr. McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling. It's like admitting that you've never clipped your own toenails or that you didn't know that toothpaste comes out of a tube because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world does Mr. McCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail. Does somebody plan to show him how it's done and will they explain to him what "LOL" means?
Source: http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/08/06/mccain/
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