I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. But the McCain campaign has become a severe test to my resolve in avoiding extreme conclusions.
Please bear with me while I work this one out.
I hope Occam's Razor comes in to save the day . . . but if it does, it will probably come in the comments section.
For quite a long time I had a grudging respect for McCain. True, I have never voted Republican in my life. The closest I came was during Nixon's first run, and I was eight at the time, so my vote wouldn't have counted. And it would have been predicated on the typical eight-year-old impulse to vote for whoever your daddy said he was voting for, and at the time my daddy's vote was almost entirely influenced by whoever the NRA endorsed. We lived in northeastern Nevada, there was barely even television there. What else was there but deer season to while away the late autumn days?
Eventually even my dad became an independent, and usually one who (I think) voted mainly for Democrats. But this is a diversion.
What I am trying to get at is that, while I've never bought into Reagan Republicanism, I still had some grudging admiration for John McCain, mainly because despite his party affiliations, he often supported positions that were not that far from my own. I've always tended to be more of a leftist libertarian than a socialist. I feel that government has a necessary role to play in keeping some sort of stability, and protecting people from the predations of other people. But I'd largely rather see its reach limited as much as possible, once it does its basic legitimate functions. And I think government needs to have considerably more oversight than it has had since the inception of the national security state that Eisenhower most famously warned about in his farewell speech.
So, considering that I do not regard McCain as evil, or wishing to create national chaos, what am I to make of what has happened in his campaign in the last few weeks? This diary entry was spurred in large part by reading the Roger Simon essay, "Who's in control of McCain's campaign?".
It seems to me that McCain should have known that adding Palin to the ticket would result in this. So I have to wonder, given that he was denied his preferred running mates (at least that's what the pundits seemed to say) -- perhaps he saw it as his patriotic duty to take an action that would inflict grievous harm on the Party that he's been at odds with for most of his career? Maybe that's not exactly what a Manchurian Candidate does, but he has to be aware that his POW status has always left hanging the question, just what did the Vietnamese (and probable Soviet advisors) do to him during those years as a prisoner of war? Or perhaps, McCain is simply a flawed patriot, doing what's right in the end by ensuring his own unelectability, and exposing in a dramatic way what has happened to the Republican Party as the urge to eat itself alive overcomes it?
John McCain says he hates the bloggers, but it's really a fake out. He knows they may be the last hope of returning the country to its free speech, transparent government roots.
Please share your own conspiracy theories in the comments.