Hitchens Comes Out

One of the interesting post-mortems on the 2004 election was the revelation that Kerry did in fact appear to be a flip-flopper within his own campaign. While the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were unearthed as anything but, the truth was that Kerry wasn't sure who to listen to among the competing voices in his campaign and had a hard time making important decisions on strategy and issues. Christopher Hitchens has just written a piece for Slate.com reinforcing a point that has been in the back of my mind -- that McCain does not seem well-equipped for the rigors of a Presidency at this point in his career:

"Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience." (http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2202163)

Hitchens has been a major disappointment to progressives since 911, when he became an adamant and unapologetic supporter of the Iraq War and, to some extent, conservative doctrine in America. Here I think he unearths a truth that few are talking about. McCain's not just running a bad, dirty campaign -- it seems to indicate a lack of judgment that comes on top of serious concerns about his age and long history of erratic and irrational behavior (including an infamous temper that is not well-suited to the presidency). Lest us forget what happened the last time we had a President who had lost it? Iran-Contra . . .

On a related note, I happened to listen to Sean Hannity today on the way home. The ways conservatives alter the truth would be laughable if it didn't resonate so strongly with their base. He actually argued that Obama ads are the ones that are lying, that the press should be paying more attention to this baseless charges about Ayers and provide more scrutiny of his relationship to Wright -- even as he never mentions the lobbyists that populate McCain's campaign or their relationship to the financial crisis. As if the financial crisis wasn't happening, he then went on to laud capitalism and free markets and said that the tax cuts Obama was offering were a new "welfare" program. This was followed by the tired old deification of Reagan and absurd calls for a return to his failed neoliberal/neoconservative policies including what sounds a lot like the very supply-side economics McCain can't seem to escape, and that most of the architects of the approach discredited themselves in the early 90s. How does this bs go unchallenged? Because it is easy to sequester oneself from the truth in these safe spaces of myth and lies that sound good unless one does the careful, and apparently painful work, of actually thinking. Could we be nearing the end of this absurdity?