Needlenose

Check out seenos’ disgustingly funny juxtaposition of Repug imagery over at Left-Over.

("Bad Reporter" cartoon by Don Asmussen)

Analysts and historians who waste their time in future years looking back at John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign will undoubtedly be struck by the raw, unfiltered ugliness of McCain’s personality during his three debates with Barack Obama.  As Jane Hamsher wrote just after Wednesday’s final match, McCain’s “smirking, snarky tone was decidedly un-presidential… [he] was a nasty, vicious glass of sour milk who can barely contain his temper and can’t quite fathom what is happening to him.“

But now I think I understand why McMean couldn’t control himself.

You see, when I wrote three weeks ago about “McCain’s insistence on seeing the election (and world events) as mere vehicles for his all-consuming personal drama,” and three weeks before that about how “for McCain, being president isn’t about doing anything for the American people — it’s the world’s biggest gold watch… [he] has been a goddamned selfless patriot his entire adult life, and it’s time for you fuckers to pay him back,” I had no idea just how right I was.

I didn’t know what the Washington Post reported on Monday about the origin of McCain’s White House ambitions:

To endure their long ordeal, John McCain and the other U.S. servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: “If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay.”

Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. “He was talking about his father to us and then he said: ‘I want to be president of the United States. Someday I’m going to be president,’ ” Stratton recalls. “If the cell wasn’t so small, we’d have been rolling around laughing.”

. . . Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father’s perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service’s highest uniformed position, didn’t always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed.

“Pursuit of command,” as McCain often referred to it, was an ethos bordering on obsession in his family, and it was in Vietnam that he embraced it.

Over at emptywheel’s blog, bmAZ picked up on the narcissism of McCain’s apolitical desire for power for power’s sake, but that’s only part of the story.  See, it’s not just that in pursuit of his private dream, McCain lied, cheated, backstabbed, married for money, sold himself to lobbyists and all the rest, but for three decades or more, he got away with it.  And after the seemingly definitive failures of his 2000 GOP primary defeat and near-collapse in the polls before the 2008 contests began, this summer he finally, miraculously found himself just one step short of his ultimate goal.

I doubt any adviser could have convinced McCain then that he had only won because his Republican challengers were even more implausible and inept than he was.   From the candidate’s perspective, it must have seemed that fate was on his side.  Why should he need to learn message discipline, or emotional self-control, or (heaven forbid!) gain a convincing knowledge of the issues facing the American public now?   He merely needed to present himself to the world and be granted his destiny.

At least, that is, until Barack Obama came along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Nobody’s brought up Josephine the Plumber yet…

Check out what McCain’s ‘friends’ that he is ‘proud of’ are doing – Sacto & San Bernadino Repugs post sleazy racist attack pics on their website and in their publications. An excerpt:

In San Bernardino County, a Republican women’s organization sent a monthly newsletter to its members that carried a racially insensitive depiction of Obama. “Obama talks about all those presidents that got their names on bills. If elected, what bill would he be on? Food Stamps, what else!” read the caption above an “Obama Bucks” bill cartoon image in the latest edition of the Chaffey Community Republican Women Federated newsletter. The independent community organization is not a part of the state Republican Party, and its newsletter is distributed to a few thousand members in the county.

Next to the senator’s image was a bucket of fried chicken, a slab of ribs, a slice of watermelon and a pitcher of Kool-Aid. Diane Fedele, the organization’s president, took responsibility for the image and apologized “if it offended anyone.”

*Update* The Brown Shirts are vandalizing ACORN offices and making threatening the lives of staffers, following McCain’s B.S. anti-ACORN talking point in the debate.

A bit of added irony: consider the station putting out the clip.

One of the following pictures is not of John McCain at last night’s debate. Can you tell which one?

“Keep a civil tongue in your head” — Shakespeare, The Tempest

vs.

Last time, McCain got through one answer where he followed his coaching, then turned back into John McCain.

Tonight, he got through almost 30 minutes where he followed his coaching, then turned back into John McCain.

All Obama did… or had to do, for that matter… was stay calm and wait for him to self-destruct.

Via TPM Election Central, the Obama campaign cuts to the chase about tonight’s debate:

On the big issues, this debate is one last chance for John McCain to do what he has failed to do throughout this entire campaign: explain to the American people how his economic policies would be any different at all than the failed Bush agenda he has supported every step of the way. It’s his last chance to somehow convince the American people that his erratic response to this economic crisis doesn’t disqualify him from being President.

. . . the real question is not how many attacks McCain can land in the debate, but whether he can finally communicate a vision to turn this economy around.

Not only that, the vision he unveils has to be so convincing that a significant chunk of people who are currently planning to vote for Obama step back and say, “Whoa!  What were we thinking?!”

After all, Obama built his lead during the recent financial meltdown by consistently presenting (in the debates and his omnipresent ads) the kind of policies and temperament that people think are best suited to getting us out of the ditch.  McCain needs not only to show that he can play in the same league, but to convince people somehow that what we saw from Obama over the past month was some kind of illusion.

It’s McCain’s bad luck that after building up a mythology about his awesome leadership potential and supposed ability to take charge in a crisis, an actual crisis and test of leadership erupted in the middle of the campaign, and he failed.

Update 1: Then again, I could be wrong — McCain’s highly focused debate preparation may carry him through.

Update 2: More seriously, if it weren’t probably too late (and beyond McCain’s ability to pull off performance-wise), this is reasonably good advice on how to re-establish his brand from one of the guys who helped him build it.

Now you can find out for yourself:

I wonder if they guarantee the results.