The factotums of Bomb McCain sound exceedingly silly, vowing that their man could not possibly have availed himself of the opportunity to listen in, ahead of time, on the questions that would be asked of him, there two weeks ago, at the Saddleback "faith forum."
Sure. Of course not. Monomaniacally pursuing the presidency, nursing an eight-year losing streak, desperate to reverse his luck, why would McCain take advantage of an opportunity to furtively peek at the cards . . . especially when no one but his own people would ever know?
Because he's the same as any other man or woman who these days seriously seeks the presidency. Because he, as they, is, in all the important ways, at one with Chinatown's Noah Cross. Who, when confronted with the fact he had sired a child on his own daughter, replied:
I don't blame myself.
You see, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.
According to the New York Times, faith-forum ringmaster Rick Warren "seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building" when Warren posed the same questions to Barack Obama that he would later pose to McCain. Warren intended that during Obama's oratorio McCain would be sequestered in some Saddleback cell, there shrouded in "a cone of silence."
But McCain--no doubt "running late"--was not yet in the building: instead, he was en route, ensconced in his motorcade. Though the vehicle bearing the Bomb was certainly equipped with radio, television, computer, and all manner of texting devices, McCain spokesmouth Nicolle Wallace told the Times he "had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions."
Right. Horseshit.
Let us now praise famous men:
John Kennedy fabricated a "missile gap" that he knew did not exist to stampede frightened voters to his standard.
There is evidence that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both ascended to the presidency by giving aid and comfort to the nation's enemies: Nixon by covertly convincing the South Vietnamese to "wreck" Vietnam peace negotiations; Reagan by covertly persuading Iran not to release its American hostages until after he had become president.
To secure his second term, Nixon rampaged up and down the Penal Code, sanctioning crimes from burglary to perjury, firebombing to "ratfucking," while meanwhile transforming such agencies as the IRS, the FBI, and the CIA into extensions of his re-election campaign.
Decades after much of the nation believed we had all grown beyond such shameful behavior, George I attained the Oval Office by tarring his opponent as a flag-scorning swarthy foreigner who set loose Crazed Negroes to cut and pistol-whip the white man, then force him to watch as his fiancee was savagely raped.
Bill Clinton executed a black man to become president.
George II serenely reduced the US 2000 presidential election to something straight out of a banana republic: assigning his brother to corrupt the vote in a state that brother controlled, his brother in turn directing a cat's paw to corrupt the counting of the vote, both sitting idly by as thugs acting in their interests shut down democracy in Miami-Dade, the whole thing sputtering to a stunned conclusion as corrupt justices appointed by George II's daddy, and George II's daddy's don, selected as president the man who had not, in fact, won.
Four years later, George II methodically deployed multiple multi-colored fear-engendering "terror alerts", and ultimately even Osama bin Laden, to seize the presidency from John Kerry.
A man (or, we now know, a woman) who gets close enough to smell the presidency will do anything. As Hunter S. Thompson observed, "a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut[.]"
The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him . . . but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.
The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in rut will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.
A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally he will hire out--or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician.
The presidency is as far as he can go. There is no more. The currency of politics is power, and once you've been the Most Powerful Man in the World for four years, everything else is downhill--except four more years on the same trip.
So it is balderdash to suggest anything other than that Bomb McCain took full advantage of his fortuitous perch there in the motorcade to sneak a peek at the questions he would be asked by the orotund Mr. Warren.
And for the desperately spinning Ms. Wallace to ululate to the Times that "the insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous" . . . well, that likewise leads nowhere.
Anyone who knows anything about American POWs in Vietnam knows that their entire lives were built on cheating. To begin, they daily cheated death. Both their military training and their in-camp commanders taught them to cheat their captors of accurate information: they showered upon their jailers and interrogators fountains of lies. Under torture, they sought to cheat their own bodies and minds, to withstand the agony for as long as possible. When, inevitably, they broke, they tried as hard as they were able to cheat their tormentors of the full fruits of their savagery.
(And it is entirely possible that the five years he spent immersed in a culture of cheating, over there in Vietnam, made it easier for Bomb McCain, once returned stateside, to cheat on his earliest wife.)
Of course McCain cheated at Saddleback. As of course it is reasonable to assume that, given the opportunity, Barack Obama would have been tempted to do the same. Both men, every day, face the place of Noah Cross: "the fact that, at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything."