McCain the Maverick Replaced by McCain the Pandering Pawn of the Right Wing
Harry Hope
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-right-strengthens-its_b_87231.html
February 18, 2008
The Right Strengthens its Hold on McCain, the Media Refuse to Notice
Despite an avalanche of evidence showing that McCain the Maverick has
long ago been replaced by McCain the Pandering Pawn of the Party's
Right Wing, the press refuses to believe its own eyes.
The latest demonstration of the enormous lag time between the
presentation of a new reality and the media's willingness to update
the conventional wisdom comes via those bastions of the traditional
media, The New Yorker and the New York Times.
The latest New Yorker features a loving 7,000+ word profile of McCain
by Ryan Lizza that portrays him as a moderate who has "the rare
opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a Republican."
Let's see, McCain has bowed to the party's lunatic fringe on tax cuts,
immigration, the intolerance of religious bigots, and torture... so
exactly how is he reinventing what it means to be a Republican?
By shortening the amount of time it takes before a candidate is
hijacked by the Right, perhaps?
Don't forget, George W. Bush, circa 1999, was presented as something
of a maverick -- a Republican who espoused "compassionate
conservatism," got along with Democrats in Texas, was going to win
over Latinos, end his party's longstanding hostility toward
minorities, and govern from the center.
"My friends, this is going to be a different kind of convention for a
different kind of Republican," said 2000 RNC chairman Jim Nicholson at
that year's convention.
"Gov. Bush has shown time and time again that he is a different kind
of Republican," echoed Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan on the campaign
trail.
That different kind of Republican evaporated the moment W's hand hit
the Bible on inauguration day.
McCain hasn't waited that long.
He's already offered his proof of fidelity to the Right.
But Lizza doesn't want to buy it.
Even as he lists all the examples of McCain's "brazen pandering," he
insists that McCain is "principled" and "has a record of sticking to a
position even when it puts his political future at risk."
Other than all the times he's shifted his position in order to advance
his political future, I suppose.
The media are so reluctant to give up their entrenched view of McCain
that "principled" and "pandering" are no longer seen as mutually
exclusive terms.
Indeed, that was the animating premise of Nicholas Kristof's
head-scratching column in Sunday's New York Times:
that McCain has become the world's most principled panderer.
"Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of
desperation and with distaste," writes Kristof.
In Kristof's through-the-looking-glass world, it's apparently a higher
order of pandering if you start with deeply held core convictions that
you trash in the name of political expediency while feeling really bad
about it.
Sure, she's a whore, but she wears an abstinence promise ring and
feels totally guilty when she stuffs the money in her bra, so she's
not like all the other whores.
In the New Yorker piece, Newt Gingrich, in full stand up comedy mode,
claims that McCain's looming nomination "is the victory of the
moderate wing" of the GOP -- of which he now counts himself a member!
-- and that with McCain, "for the first time since Eisenhower, you
have someone who has clearly not accommodated the conservative wing
winning the nomination. That is a remarkable achievement."
It says everything you need to know about how strong the Right's
stranglehold on the Republican Party has become that Newt Gingrich,
the original barbarian at the GOP gate leading the 1994 right wing
revolution, is now considered a voice of moderation.
And that capitulating on torture and tax cuts and immigration and
intolerance and out-Bushing Bush on Iraq can be seen as "not
accommodating" the right.
Memo to Newt: making that claim while maintaining a straight face is
the true "remarkable achievement."
Despite the disastrous failures of the Right on everything from Iraq
to the economy to health care to the environment to global warming to
civil liberties to national security, the lunatics running the
Republican asylum are stronger than ever.
That's why Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter have felt so
comfortable taking on the role of rhetorical dominatrixes, forcing
McCain to bow down and lick their boots, and why McCain -- "with
distaste," of course -- has so thoroughly obliged.
Even after all-but-locking-up the nomination, he still felt compelled
to jettison his most deeply held belief and vote against the torture
ban.
"Please, mistress -- may I have another?"
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flip flop flip flop flip flop
Harry