There's a very interesting thing that has happened, with McCain's Spanish Fly gaffe. His top foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has given us what we need to win this election.
In "The Book of Five Rings", Musashi discusses how to discern an opponents weak point. It's been a while since I read it, but in essence, if you simply attack an opponent on all fronts, the area that they defend the most strongly is likely to be their weakest point.
Randy continues to insist that it was McCain's intention to insult the Prime Minister of Spain. This is an incredibly strong statement, so it bears asking: what is he defending against?
If you look at the other two options presented by Josh Marshall over at TPM, they boil down to:
- McCain really doesn't know where Spain is, or who it's President is.
- McCain misheard the question (several times), and tried to wing it.
There is something in one, or both, of these options that terrifies the McCain campaign. Now, if it was just one of them that revealed McCain's weakness, I would think that Randy would have simply chose the other one as an explanation. So I think it's fair to assume that both of them point to the weakness in some fashion or another.
So what do they have in common?
The first essentially says that McCain's memory isn't so good, because he's mentioned Spain's Prime Minister by name as recently as April.
The second implies that perhaps his hearing isn't so good, and rather than ask for clarification, he would rather jump to dangerous conclusions.
The common thread is the idea of a man losing the battle with Time. He's old, he doesn't remember things, his hearing's not so good, and he refuses to acknowledge it, going so far as to make rash statements with what he must know is bad information.
We've wondered this about McCain for a long time, given some of his other statements, but it's been hard to confirm. However, if the people that know him best and have the most direct access to him(his campaign staff), are worried enough to risk an international incident trying to avoid questions about this topic, that's all the confirmation I need.
McCain is losing it. He lacks the physical and mental fitness to serve as President.
I know some might question going down that road, and I certainly don't expect Obama to, but I think McCain has made it clear over the last year that we really should be concerned about this. Allowing him to become President would be a disaster.
UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one thinking about this:
The Delicate Subject of John McCain's Marbles (HuffPo)
The comments there really cracked me up, especially:
"The geographically challenged McCain can't see Spain from any of his houses. He seems to think it's part of Latin America."
Oh, and here's the Digg for that HuffPo article:
http://digg.com/...