Shame on McCain, He's Sold His Soul
John McCain has now become a useful accomplice to an accomplished user.
It's sad to see it, but the senator from Arizona who built his reputation as a straight-talker seems quite content to be used by the President as a political weapon to help fight three Bush-Cheney campaign battles.
First, McCain is being invoked to suggest that John Edwards was somehow John Kerry's second vice presidential choice (after McCain), even though Bush flirted in 2000 with the idea of adding McCain to his own ticket. The senator is also being portrayed as a election-year substitute for Dick Cheney, because the Vice President who is actually running opposite John Edwards on this fall's ballot has negatives so high that he's become a liability to the President.
Taken together, what's ironic and sad about using McCain for these two ends is that the Bush team is claiming McCain was Kerry's first choice at the same moment they're projecting the image of a Bush-McCain '04 ticket that will never appear on any ballot.
The Shinseki Waver & the Falluja Flinch
Let's forgive McCain these first two transgressions, for loyalty-driven partisan politics often requires former opponents to make nice later. Kerry was critical of Edwards, and vice-versa, during the primaries only a few months before their mutual admiration road trip began this week.
But McCain is also being invoked to fight a third battle of triage, namely, as a tourniquet to help stem the declining public perception that Bush is a strong leader on defense and terrorism. In clips from a McCain speech broadcast in a new Bush-Cheney campaign ad, the Senator applauds the President for leading with "moral clarity," adding that Bush "has not wavered, he has not flinched."
Pardon me? McCain cannot believe that Bush has never flinched nor wavered, because very recently the Arizona senator was the single most prominent Republican hammering Bush for not sending to Iraq the number of troops General Eric Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, warned would be necessary. Even if it were not initially apparently that Shinseki was right, the facts on the ground inevitably proved that the general knew exactly what he was talking about.
Yet Bush first tried to scale back troops to around 115,000, and is now invoking desperate military provisions to maintain and even ramp up troop counts by keeping soldiers on duty longer
