McCain Calls Obama "Decent" as Crowd Jeers, Gasps
McCain looked into the face of the flames of hate and violence stoked by his campaign, and sounded a retreat, of sorts.
We’ve been arguing for years now that the American Conservative movement has run its course. It has been weighed, measured, and found wanting by the scales of history. The Bush Mavericks who promised us a "strong military" lied us into the nation’s worst strategic military blunder, destroying the image of America worldwide and re-introducing the term "quagmire" to the American vernacular. These champions of "small government" have proven nothing but deadbeats, bankrupting budgets with their no-tax pledges and profligate spending from small towns to the nation’s capitol; their policies sucking $8 trillion in value from the US economy this year alone.
Now, with two of the three pillars of the conservative argument permanently cast like demons into ancient mythology, the final pillar is all that the McCain campaign has had to run on. The current state of their campaign exposes the disgusting truth behind conservatism's last remaining lie: the lie of "family values".
These crusaders for "Family Values" from Foley, to Vitter, to Craig and on and on, have embraced degradation beyond imagining (diapers anyone), but the sickening truth of "family values" is not hypocrisy, but intentional bigotry. From Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to Sarah Palin's "American Exceptionalism", conservatism has, by design stoked bigotry, racism, homophobia, sexism, and antisemitism, by design. "Family Values" as used by conservatism has been a mere smokescreen to cover for intentional divisiveness used to capitalize on lower income, less educated, white males for political gain. The Talibanization of America is intentional and deeply damaging to democracy. It is the core of the "culture war" and the foundation of George W. Bush's presidency, but it has previously had the smokescreen of the neocon war profiteers and market fundamentalists to hide the blatant parochial bigotry.
Now, the rock is flipped, and we see what has been crawling in the dark of American politics. The conservatives without conscience who have been running the McCain campaign have been loading the only ammo left in the conservative arsenal. The angry mobs who had rallied to the McCain-Palin banner with cries of "kill him" "terrorist" and "bomb Obama" remained unassuaged, but tonight in the face of a direct question and false assertion that Obama is a Muslim (he's not), something was touched in McCain. After all of the slime, and smears and repellent lies McCain finally found a basic level of decency within himself. Too little, too late, but it's there. The man's soul is not lost completely. Let the angels smile.
Perhaps now McCain has decided that he is not willing to win in a way that proves that he is unworthy of victory. Tonight, Anna Marie Cox said, "now McCain has lost the pitchfork wavers... I don't know who he has left." Who indeed? Perhaps, after this election is finished, and he is back in the Senate or preferably out of public life, he'll be glad he didn't entirely lose himself.
Crosspost at Raising Kaine: the Voice of Progressive Virginia