McCain's Character
Kevin Drum:
McCain likes to present his past as past and his time in a prison camp as a transformative experience, but the fact is that his experience as a POW transformed nothing. In fact, it amplified his fundamental belief in his own self-righteousness, something he's used ever since as an unending justification for his worst impulses. He was 31 years old when he was captured by the North Vietnamese and 36 when he was released. When he was 43 he abandoned his injured wife for a younger woman and married into a fortune. When he was 51 he intervened with regulators on behalf of his pal Charles Keating and ended up enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal — a scandal he initially tried to blame on his wife when his role became public. When he was 61 he was amusing a partisan crowd with boorish jokes about Chelsea Clinton. When he was 64 he was pandering to Southern racism by refusing to condemn the confederate flag flying over South Carolina's statehouse.
Hey, maybe by his second term he'll have grown out of it! Or maybe he'll be a senile vegetable. Or maybe he'll be dead. The thing is that for McCain his "born-again" experience (and that is what we're talking about here - a marginally secularized salvation experience that panders to the religious right while not alienating independents) doesn't mean he can no longer commit huge lapses in judgment - just the opposite! It entitles him to make lapses and still consider himself a straight-talking maverick. And the media is basically complicit in this.
McCain likes to present his past as past and his time in a prison camp as a transformative experience, but the fact is that his experience as a POW transformed nothing. In fact, it amplified his fundamental belief in his own self-righteousness, something he's used ever since as an unending justification for his worst impulses. He was 31 years old when he was captured by the North Vietnamese and 36 when he was released. When he was 43 he abandoned his injured wife for a younger woman and married into a fortune. When he was 51 he intervened with regulators on behalf of his pal Charles Keating and ended up enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal — a scandal he initially tried to blame on his wife when his role became public. When he was 61 he was amusing a partisan crowd with boorish jokes about Chelsea Clinton. When he was 64 he was pandering to Southern racism by refusing to condemn the confederate flag flying over South Carolina's statehouse.
Hey, maybe by his second term he'll have grown out of it! Or maybe he'll be a senile vegetable. Or maybe he'll be dead. The thing is that for McCain his "born-again" experience (and that is what we're talking about here - a marginally secularized salvation experience that panders to the religious right while not alienating independents) doesn't mean he can no longer commit huge lapses in judgment - just the opposite! It entitles him to make lapses and still consider himself a straight-talking maverick. And the media is basically complicit in this.
posted by hellisotherpeople at 6:45 PM
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