Matt Taibbi, journalist at Rolling Stone and sometimes guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, has a new MUST READ article called Full Metal McCain that does a superb job of calling out McCain as just another Republican "liberal-bashing fearmonger", despite McCain trying to push his image as a "maverick" or "reformer". The article is biting and sarcastic as only Taibbi can make it.
Paragraph by paragraph, Taibbie methodically takes apart John McCain's campaign and sees it as just another typically Republican campaign built on playing to the electorate's most basic instincts through fear and manipulation.
Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.
Taibbi also delves into the metamorphosis that McCain has undergone since 2000 and even in the last few months. Give it another 30 days, and you won't be able to tell McCain from any other Republican B list politician like Tom Delay or Rick Santorum.
Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator's "liberal" record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were "God's children too." When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: "I'm much more concerned about Obama."
And the Flip Flops Abound!
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
The article veers into a pessimistic view of the 2008 elections, with prognostications that this type of campaigning and pandering to the basest human emotions will once again work in November, but on the whole it is a sharp edged, witty take down of John Sidney McBush.