Up Yours, McCain

I used to think that John McCain was not a horse's ass. In fact, I actually felt bad for McCain when the BushCo Attack Machine went after him in 2000:

It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"

It was a classic Rovian attack -- it took a strength of an opponent and turn it against him. But it was an ultra-slimy attack even by G.O.P. standards, and anyone with balls would have hit back hard and would have never forgiven BushCo for doing such a thing. In fact, McCain should have considered Bush a personal enemy from that point on.

But that's not what McCain ended up doing. You see, McCain wants to be president in a Big Way. In fact, McCain later made appearances with Bush on the 2004 campaign trail (that's where the disgusting picture on the left came from). I guess McCain figured that such a move would help him in 2008. That was political cowardice, in my opinion, just like it was political cowardice for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to vote for the Iraq War in October 2002.

Now McCain has taken his support for Bush one step further. Here is what McCain had to say a few days ago about John Murtha:

John Murtha is "a lovable guy," but "he’s never been a big thinker; he’s an appropriator." Using language that Bush never could, McCain tells me that Murtha has become too emotional about the human cost of the war. "As we get older, we get more sentimental," McCain says. "And [Murtha] has been very, very affected by the funerals and the families. But you cannot let that affect the way you decide policy."

Wow -- McCain attacked Murtha for being stupid and old, and did it all in one interview. Nice.