From John Cole:
1.) Decide that lobbyists are the number one evil in politics, and then staff your entire campaign from top to bottom with… lobbyists.
2.) Spend months proclaiming you want to run a decent and honorable campaign, and then run the sleaziest general election campaign in years, so bad that folks who honestly love you (the media) are not only revulsed, but shocked into such a state that they are committing actual acts of journalism.
3.) Spend months discussing experience and how yours is superior, then decide change is the real message, and that in order to enact change, we should elect the guy who promises to keep doing things the same way they have been done the last eight years.
4.) Make earmarks the central focus of your reform agenda, then nominate an earmark queen and lie repeatedly about her involvement in the central notorious earmark in the past ten years (the Bridge to Nowhere).
And on an on and on. It really is crazy.
It's not crazy, because it's very effective. The word nihilistic is more apt. And then there's the NYT editorial this morning on the Palin interviews:
Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”
Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”
That should have been her answer to the question about the Bush Doctrine: Never Blink. The mentality of the Right in every culture and in every era is about the raw assertion of the will to power, and whoever blinks first loses. It's also at the heart of the primitive "kindergarten politics" I wrote about the other day. It's about never backing down, no matter how ill-conceived and ridiculous your ideas or policies. It's not about whether you're right or wrong; it's about dominating the opponent, no matter how much it costs or how much damage you cause. There is, in fact, a certain glee in the blowing of things up--if you're going down, so is everyone else.
Extra credit: Question: What political philosophy combines nihilism and the raw assertion of power? Answer:
A thought for moderates: Your mistake is to assume that there is good will where there is none with McCain and the people running his campaign. For you to make such a mistake is a sign of your decency and good will, but at least consider the possibility that people people like this have no compunction to take advantage of your decency. McCain, like the rest of us is a complex human with many contradictions. There was a time when McCain had a soul--even recently--but it's becoming clear he sold what was left of it to realize this last ambition.
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UPDATE: I have to say I am encouraged by the widespread media condemnation of McCain's campaign tactics. The shift I first picked up on Wednesday that caused me some optimism seems to have some heft to it. It really is as if people--most importantly the people behind the media elites--have had "enough" of this Republican nonsense. I suppose I should wait to see if there is any effect in the polls. Nevertheless, we never saw anything like this in the MSM when Rove/Cheney were doing much the same thing in the last eight years. Going into November it will be huge if McCain no longer gets the automatic pass from the MSM.