For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism ofthe past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs orfish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knewabout him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every saneperson must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palinis a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Ordid he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now thecore feature of his campaign? -Andrew Sullivan
Well, Andrew hits the nail on the head with something that a few of us, apparently, knew about John all along.
Have a look at how he ran the Florida campaign against Romney, in which he willfully used a set of mis-representations that reduced Romney to a stuttering fool, even though Romney arguably is one of the best communicators in the field...
"Country First"? The mind boggles with that, in McCain's mouth.
McCain believes, as did Bush & Cheney before him, that it is "okay" to "lie", if that is just a 'political distortion' or shading of the truth.
He has shown, recently (and continually), that he doesn't know the line any better than did Bush. His staffers are reportedly even in regular contact with Rove, who clearly understands that you don't have to be truthful, just believable, to win in "small town" America.
McCain's staffers are up in Alaska, "managing Justice" in the troopergate affair, just as the Bush administration did before them, in so many ways.
Palin is hardly a "country first" pick. She is immediately dividing the country into "small town" and "big town", using the other cultural dividing lines, just as quickly as she can. "Country first" from her is just another code-word for them.
So no, "integrity", "maverick", and "straight talk" are NOT apt words, when describing John McCain.
