Desperate, angry and bitter. Why the harsh negativity and soft bigotry has breed contempt and lost McCain the race for the White House.
John McCain obviously has a dark agenda: Don’t let the "black man" win the presidency. It would be easy to expound, at length, on all the ways he is trying to use the skills of glib sophistry to propagate a theme of soft bigotry to present his case for the presidency. It is a sneering sleight of hand to conjure up unfounded fears once-thought left behind with Jim Crow and David Duke.
Many are self-evident, such as appealing to conservative’s basal pathos and the use of demagoguery to arm an angry, provincial mob. Even McCain’s own effusive POW resume touting is a canard of contrived legitimacy to make a clever, yet claptrap case against Obama’s ability to lead this nation simply because he is black. These are but a few of the feverish rants of desperate man and his failing presidential campaign.
Simply look at his feral pick of a gambit for his running mate.
McCain’s hired heavy, Sarah Palin, is a classic authoritarian personality plucked for her credulous zeal to shower indiscriminately rabid parishioners of the right with buckets of faint bigotry. She is bereft of circumspection, displays outrageously aggrandized bragging, arrogant immodesty, and total insensitivity. Palin’s unsettling, yet flagrant display of her visceral prejudices, her glib Manichean mindset – a true dualist – a person who sees only the world as good or evil, richly circumscribes her sheer and stunning audacity as unreserved and unrestrained hubris. Yet, Sarah Palin is a pawn; she is a gizmo gimmick lackey being used by a cynical, old man. Her breathtakingly overconfidence – and stunning ignorance – is merely an overt example of her total lack of personal introspection. She is a benighted messenger of malicious hatred, not a messianic savior for the Republican Party.
Apoplectic, as the economy’s own floundering ship needed a bail out, so too did McCain’s.
As been said, art often imitates life and then personifies it. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the tyrannical captain Ahab ultimately dooms the crew and his ship, the Pequod, to death due to his singular obsession with Moby Dick. During the final chase, Ahab hurls his final harpoon while yelling, "From hell's heart I stab at thee!"
McCain has now stabbed from hell’s heart by launching a negative smear ad campaign purely to save a sinking political ship drowning in America’s debt. The ads are all specious, yet they are the most odious form of propaganda – unbridled hate – hoping to stir, once again, the ugly pot of racism and doubt in America. A man fraught with the fear of losing, McCain ignobly chose to steer his vessel down the dark waters of character assassinations and race-baiting against his opponent, Barack Obama.
McCain’s monomaniacal desire to redeem himself – just as Ahab aims to avenge himself from the great white whale – from the unredeemable act of stoking the flames of prejudice may be the obligatory harpoon that inevitably dooms his campaign. Thusly, John McCain is dragged into the cold sea of oblivion, inevitably drowning his bid for the presidency in a pool of misguided and wrongly directed revenge and racism.
A progressive nation leaves behind the outmoded model of hate and racism.
Fair or not, this is what most of 21st century America now sees – An angry, wealthy, white, elderly male, seething with bigotry and consumed with contempt. John McCain’s wrongheaded campaign, and all of its surrogates, is part of the last vestiges of incendiary hate and racism in this nation. They are a dying caste in this nation that once championed an intolerant American panacea of being "separate but equal."
The cacophony coming from the cruel right is attempting to drown out the voice of America; the voice that says we no longer tolerate this ungainly and ugly prejudice. And this nation, undeniably, is tacking toward a more progressive, acceptant America. John McCain’s salvos are merely the empty diatribes of an anachronistic man emblematic of a generation that would make segregationist George Wallace proud of their bitter hate.
The Fait accompli of pride and prejudice paints an ugly portrait of McCain.
John McCain made a Faustian Bargain when he chose the unpardonable political tactic of shameful, racially prejudiced attack ads. In the end, these molestations on Obama’s ethnicity leave McCain looking more like the grotesque and gruesome portrait of Dorian Gray, rather than a gallant man of unquestionable heroics.
If McCain truly believes in his "Country First" motto, then he must first denounce his own biting politics of racial division and then suspend his campaign for the presidency. Otherwise, John McCain will simply be written into history as another Shakespearean hero who fell on his own sword of hubris, burnished in the fires hate.