But he's a barometer of sorts for those Tory moderates skirting the edges of Whiggery who are bright enough and well-informed enough to understand what's really going on, but won't until overwhelming evidence forces them to:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country. Read more.
It's interesting that the epigraph on his website is a quote from Orwell: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
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UPDATE: It's clear that everyday is a good day when the McCain campaign can distract the media from looking at the subtance of its positions on the issues. But I'm encouraged that this whole pig lipstick thing seems to be backfiring. The media, like Sullivan, seems finally catching on that McCain is playing them for idiots. Obama's response (or see below) was forceful and appropriate in ridiculing McCain on this. On Letterman he said that the idea that he was talking about Palin makes no sense--the logic of the metaphor would require that Palin is the lipstick and McCain's policies are the pig.
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UPDATE 2: Josh Marshall makes the same point about the media tide shifting among those who once respected McCain here. I guess I find it hard to believe that anybody could still buy his act after what we've seen of him especially in the last two years. But Marshall is particularly forceful at the end of his post:
It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.
I probably don't have enough reason to, but I'm actually feeling a little better this evening than I did this morning. We'll see in the course of the next week or so if there really is a shift underway in the media's perception of McCain. So much depends on the conventional wisdom types in the media like Sullivan, Klein, even Mark Halperin, loudly rejecting this kind of nonsense.