Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the one-time maverich has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger
By Matt Taibbi
June 26, 2008 Rollingstone.com
[Excerpts:]
"Like Hillary Clinton, an erstwhile vilified liberal who remade herself as a flag-waving, Sixties-bashing champion of 'hardworking Americans, white Americans' once the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama forced her off her old turf, the one-time 'insurgent' McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style."
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"Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator's 'liberal' record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were 'God's children too.' When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: 'I'm much more concerned about Obama.'
"McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, 'One of us! One of us!' all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name."
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"Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. His crude attempts to paint Obama with these brushes are more or less the whole of his argument for the presidency. Obama is terrorist-coddler because he is 'ready to talk in person with tyrants' like Ahmadinejad, he hates soldiers because he refused to condemn MoveOn's 'General Betray Us' ad, and he's a socialist because he favors health-care reform — despite the fact that the Obama plan isn't 'socialized' medicine any more than the universal requirement to buy private auto insurance is socialism."
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"Which means that despite all the talk about 'change,' we're once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world."
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