McAble?

You have to wonder about the people that John McCain surrounds himself with.

His running-mate seems to be conducting her own campaign for the nomination in 2012. His spokespeople are redefining reality daily (or trying to at least), making pronouncements about an impending McCain victory that would seem to defy both reality and logic. And his advisors are routinely giving bad advice.

At least, I assume that it’s his advisors that are responsible for his mistakes; the alternative is that he’s the one making the mistakes, that he’s ignoring the sound advice of his people, and that brings up a question of John McCain’s fitness for the job.

We’ve seen all of the old election tricks coming out of the Republican camp in a year when the old tricks just haven’t been working as well as they should. Yet still they hold to the same old strategies: the bitter practice of smearing your opponent with innuendo, half-truths and outright lies; the cynical practice of attacking a person based on things which have nothing whatsoever to do with their candidacy; the desperate practice of throw-everything-into-the-cesspool-and-see-what-floats politics that, in the past, both parties have practiced but which conservative Republicans have come to excel at.

These tricks ain’t working so well this time out.

(And yet these same tricks remain the pillars supporting the McCain campaign—and, it has to be admitted, they may still work well enough to win this thing for McCain. I hope not; I hope that we’ve finally moved past all of that rot. But I may be hoping in vain. We’ll find out in four days.)

The wonder isn’t that such tricks have been used in this campaign; the wonder is that the McCain campaign continues to rely on them almost exclusively at this very late stage.

I can only think of three reasons:

One, that McCain is getting bad advice, and that brings into question the quality of his advisors. His choice of advisors, in this case, is faulty, and this faulty judgment would make McCain, in my opinion, unqualified for the Presidency.

Two, McCain is ignoring the good advice of his people and forging his own way, going against their better advice and judgment. In this case the fault, the bad judgment, is entirely McCain’s and this would make him, in my opinion, unqualified for the Presidency.

Three, whoever is responsible for keeping McCain on this course, they’re right, and McCain will come away from this election as the president-elect. But he will have done it through appealing to the electorate’s fears and suspicions, not to their reason, to their baser rather than their higher natures. This would make McCain, in my opinion, unfit for the Presidency.

And I still feel that any victory through the electoral college that loses the popular vote, as a McCain victory is likely to, is going to leave such a bad taste in people’s mouths that there would be no hope of reconciliation, no hope of unity, no damn hope.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it for a few more days (or longer, if all goes badly for Obama): America needs hope right now, hope that (I feel) Obama brings and McCain kills.

But as Dennis Miller used to say, "Of course, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong."

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.