I know there will be flames and falmes for this, but you have to hand it to John McCain for finally "unstoking" those flames that he, Cindy and Sarah have been stoking for days/weeks now.
So, okay. How do we react? See below
Whether you can bring yourself to say "good for you" or not, I think we can all agree to the following:
- Why did he let it go this far?
- "Obama the terrorist"? McCain was for it before he was against it
- if you look at how he whipped the microphone from the lady, you know he's thinking to himself, "crap, these guys are my constituency"? gawd, it reminds me of Homer Stokes: "is you is, or is you ain't mah constituency?" (see around 2:50 into the video)
- the meme for McCain's gotta be: pity. I can't say it enough, he's also an "honorable" guy and unfortunately he's thrown his lot behind the political tacticians of Bush, the economics of Graham, the war policy of Neocons and the fundamentalism of Palin. He knows he's sold his soul to the Devil and now he's got cognitive dissonance. NO ONE votes for the pitiful. Embrace that meme and that's the respectful way to throw an anvil to him. Respectful because we're different from them; anvil throwing because we need to put them out of their misery. Call it compassionate libralism.
UPDATE: love reading the reactions. A short summary:
- a minority agreed (eloquently),
- a plurality pointed out that my use of the word "honorable" was over the top. I chose it because McCain chose that word in the clip. In this update, I added quotes around it as a salve.
- a good amount said it was a tactic or not enough to comment on yet. We all look forward to seeing if his change of heart will filter out to the campaign as a whole.
- one guy thinks those questions were a plant (certainly possible).
- and, of course, a few violently disagreed with me as if I was somehow betraying the cause. oh well.
UPDATE #2: well, it was only a matter of time. The 100th comment on this found a snippet from the New York Times pointing out McCain's conciliatory comments but pointed out that he followed them within moments with an invocation of William Ayers. So much for that. I take back the "Good Job, John" stuff. Now it's just a thank you for a sound bite that will undercut your own campaign. At least there's that, huh?