A piece in today's WaPo predicts that McCain "will seek to recast the Republican Party's brand in his own maverick image." It’s time for Obama and the Democrats to debunk this trope once and for all.
Sarah Palin’s speech last night – and the relentless wash of controversy that has attended the announcement of her selection as McSame’s running playmate – proves once and for all that, while McCain may have been some kind of maverick at an earlier juncture in his political career, what he is now is a born-again extremist who will bring more of the same only moreso to Washington if the American voting public decides to double down on the Republican horrorshow.
Reciting a speech written by Bush-McCain speechwriters – through lips curled into her best pitbull-in-lipstick snarl – Palin made it abundantly clear that a McCain-Palin administration will adopt an extremist stance on abortion, an extremist stance on civil rights, an extremist stance on the justice system (which only begins with McSame’s promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who will work to overturn Roe-vs.-Wade) – and an extremist approach to American foreign policy, increasing belligerent interventionism and rejecting rational diplomacy.
My friends, these are not mavericks. A maverick is an unbranded calf separated from its mother. No, these are truly pitbulls, self-trained to leap for the throat of American democracy and remorselessly tear its sinews -- our basic rights and beliefs – out of the body politic once and for all.
Wake up America. The maverick is no more. The extremist and his pitbull are ascendant in St. Paul.