Requiem For A Charlatan

"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. "

-Thomas Jefferson

The Manchurian candidate has reached his career nadir, the straight talk express has jumped the track and the maverick has gone dinky dau. The unctuous sunbelt cheesemonger who never met a television camera or open mike that he didn’t like has reached the terminal stage of a long running campaign for the presidency and a slow unraveling has now left him as stripped bare as the naked emperor himself with his disgraceful mockery of a public relations stunt in the Shorja market. Manchurian McCain has allowed himself to be reigned in by Karl Rove and become a laughingstock as a result – turning off any potential voter who once saw his much overrated rebelliousness as an asset in the process.

Not only has McCain embarrassed himself by becoming George W. Bush’s personal lapdog and by kissing Jerry Falwell’s fat ass he has become yet another aspiring politician like Al Gore who has been burned by an alliance with that treacherous little ratfucker Joseph Lieberman. As the old saying about dealing with serpents goes “If you knew I was a snake why did you pick me up?” or something like that so goes throwing in with Lieberman – when will people understand a very basic fact – what is good for Joe Lieberman is BAD for America.

Sunday’s 60 Minutes piece on Senator McCain showed a hypocrite exposed, a dissembling, fudging and babbling old man who has evolved into a gross parody of himself – nothing could have been more disgusting than seeing him refusing to blame Bushist operators for the despicable slandering of him in South Carolina back in 2000. Manchurian Mac has never been the same after the brutal knee capping by Rove’s minions and has become a phony, a charlatan, a fraud, a hypocrite and just another of the braying jackasses out there selling bottles of anti-American, imperialist neocon snake oil. Maybe McCain has always been a fake, after all, in a fear stricken, television addicted nation of poltroons and sheep with the attention spans of gnats who could even remember the Keating Five?

But back to selling the bullshit war…

Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times excoriated McCain in his weekly column Sunday in the Market With McCain (NYT is subscription only so it can be viewed minus the hyperlinks here at our good friend jurassicpork's Welcome To Pottersville blog. Rich’s epic scourging roared out of the gates with:

John McCain’s April Fools’ Day stroll through Baghdad’s Shorja market last weekend was instantly acclaimed as a classic political pratfall. Protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest, the senator extolled the “progress” and “good news” in Iraq. Befitting this loopy brand of comedy — reminiscent of “Wedding Crashers,” in which Mr. McCain gamely made a cameo appearance — the star had a crackerjack cast of supporting buffoons: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who told reporters “I bought five rugs for five bucks!,” and Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”

Five rugs for five bucks: boy, we’ve really got that Iraq economy up and running now! No wonder the McCain show was quickly dubbed “McCain’s Mission Accomplished” and “McCain’s Dukakis-in-the-Tank Photo Op.” But at a certain point the laughter curdled. Reporters rudely pointed out there were 60-plus casualties in this market from one February attack alone and that six Americans were killed in the Baghdad environs on the day of his visit. “Your heart goes out to just the typical Iraqi because they can’t have that kind of entourage,” said Kyra Phillips of CNN. The day after Mr. McCain’s stroll, The Times of London reported that 21 of the Shorja market’s merchants and workers were ambushed and murdered.

The mention of the subsequent slaughter of the market’s barters (maybe even the guys who sold our pandering politicos their cheap fucking rugs) got no mention here in the mockingbird press in Fortress USA. It’s pretty goddamned sad that here in America that it has become necessary to read the foreign press for the truth but thank God that Al Gore invented the Internet in order to make it possible for the handful of us not mesmerized by the ongoing saga of Sanjaya to get our news on the mere trivialities outside of American Idol. McCain’s Baghdad market stunt proves that not only has Bush’s shill reached bottom but has called in a Haliburton exploratory crew to start drilling.

And just when it appeared that things couldn’t get any worse for Senator McCain he also came out in support of racist pundit Don Imus in the midst of the firestorm over scrotumface’s recent comments on the Rutgers women’s basketball team. That fellow GOP hopeful and 9/11 exploiting ghoul Rudi Giuliani did likewise shows not only the extent that the Republican party has institutionalized racism but how badly that the neofascist bunch seeking to produce a worthy successor to the throne of Emperor Bush is out of touch with mainstream America.

And all of that war hero crap is starting to wear thin too. McCain’s stance on torture and the elimination of Habeas Corpus last fall was sheer pandering and a dagger into the back of everything that America stands for. It is inexcusable that someone who was once a former prisoner of war who was tortured would roll over on such an important issue as the codifying the same barbaric practices for the sake of mere political expediency. McCain may have never broken during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton but then again maybe Charlie never realized that capitulation and propagandizing could be easier obtained by simply pushing the right buttons than through repeated beatings and proddings with the end of a pungi stick.

Caving in under repeated torture by the soldiers of Ho Chi Minh could be understood, caving in to the pressure to publicly kiss a rat bastard like Jerry Falwell’s big fat ass and morphing into just another lackey for the ruinous neocon Bush regime by pimping their illegal wars is tantamount to an act of treason. Turns out that the admiral’s son who could have gotten an express trip out of Nam had he just played ball instead of trying to be a hero now has the same degree of integrity as Joe Shit the ragman who sang like a canary, made propaganda films and spewed anti-American statements and as a result avoided spending years of his life getting the living shit beaten out of him instead of being a pig headed sack of shit who would one day roll over for vermin far worse than anything that the VC could produce.

John McCain was supposed to be different, he was actually able to fraudulently push himself off on Americans as a ‘renegade’ and a ‘straight shooter’ and now this. The bus that he once called ‘The Straight Talk Express’ may as well have been a traveling brothel where cut rate blow jobs were dispensed to anybody who happened to have even chump change in their pockets. I have to admit that McCain once had me fooled but that was back before he junked his reformer shtick to act as an outspoken advocate for scoundrels whose values are a hell of a lot closer to those of Bin Laden, Hitler and Khomeini than they are to Jefferson, Madison and Franklin.