Daddy promises to catch the bad man
Via Steve Benen, here’s our friend Mr. Double-Talk Express at a campaign stop in New Jersey yesterday:
“I will look you in the eye and promise you that I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,†McCain said in response to a direct question from one of the 2,000 people in attendance at the college’s Pemberton campus gym.
McCain said the key to ending the long search for bin Laden was to increase the number of human spies abroad.
“We need better human intelligence. We need people who can swim in the water,†McCain said.
Steve thinks this is a statement to make fun of, apparently not grasping McSame’s allusion to the Maoist slogan that guerrillas move among the people like fish in water (hence, to catch them, you need people who can swim in the water).
What McCain is really doing, though, is making the strong-daddy pitch (as in his infamous 2013 ad) that if we elect him, he’s so manly and decisive that unsolved, complicated problems will dissolve in the face of his will. Not to mention appealing to those who think the White House is like a Tom Clancy novel — the president shouts “Dammit, make this happen!’ to the CIA, and the entire bureaucracy suddenly snaps to attention, smoothly implementing his orders to get better sources inside Bin Laden’s inner circle (as if they never thought about it before!) and getting immediate results.
What I think you’ll see Obama do is point out that George Bush made the same blustery promise, but couldn’t follow through. And that was because while the tough talk was moving in one direction, the decisions and resources went in another — specifically, toward Iraq. Where John McCain wants us to remain indefinitely, with 100-140,000 U.S. troops and the logistical and human intelligence resources to support them, and no clear plan for bringing them home. As Obama has long said, he wants to scale back our Iraq commitment in part so we can reinforce our efforts in Afghanistan, which would strengthen our ability to track down Osama.
So while John McCain makes tough-sounding promises, it’s Barack Obama who will make the tough decisions and take the tough actions that might actually turn that promise into a reality.
Stumble it!
Tags: framing, McCain, Osama bin Laden, WH 2008
June 14th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
He is not ‘daddy’. He is grandpa.
June 14th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
But don’t forget, McCain will solve the Iraq problem by sitting the Sunnis and Shiites together and telling them to “stop the bullshit.”
June 15th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Oh, you dear, sweet, innocent, pale, bad-tempered, short, unhealthy, sexist, old man, don’t you know Osama is much more useful to you alive and free than he is dead? Assuming he isn’t dead already, of course.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
[...] point is that this is just posturing. “Swopa” at Needlenose gets it exactly right – Daddy Promises to Catch the Bad Man. There is a difference in how the neoconservative mind works. The word puerile seems to capture the [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
>He is not ‘daddy’. He is grandpa.
You’re close. Very close!
This will come as a great surprise to many, and perhaps no one more than Obama’s distant cousin Dick Cheney. But Barack Obama IS the black child that John McCain fathered, just as Karl Rove alleged in all those whispered e-mails in South Carolina.
So McCain is not just any grandpa. He’s grandpa to Malia and Sasha, Barack’s daughters. While he has never publically acknowledged the relationship, he occasionally drops by to bring them to Baskin Robbins, where he regales them with stories of his imprisonment during the Boer War in 1902, and tells them of the great honors won by his own father as an admiral during the American Revolution. McCain says he can never remember whether his father was a Whig or a Tory.