McCain’s Bearings are Fine (No Warranty, Express or Implied)
My friends, yesterday we heard Sen. John McCain's grand vision of what the world would be like at the end of his first term in office as the President of the United States of America. By 2013 most of our soldiers would begin to come home from the Iraq war, which would be mostly won. I know what you're thinking: You had me at 2013. But the magic doesn't stop there.
By the end of his first term in office the U.S. Health Care crisis would be solved, not by a government program but by private industry following tax breaks offered by John McCain's administration. Every American would be forced to buy their own affordable healthcare individually and the 150 million Americans who currently receive their health insurance through their jobs would lose all tax benefits and be pressured to drop it in favor of purchasing their insurance individually too. Seniors and people with chronic conditions would have the coverage they so desperately need, assuming the health insurance companies don't figure out there's really no good reason for them to cover any of those people. It will be a wonderous world.
The economy will be flourishing through the use of George Bush's domestic policies, which McCain points out have worked so well for the past seven years that he wants to continue them. Our unemployment crisis and fair trade crisis will be solved by McCain's Guest Worker program, which will encourage illegal aliens to enter the country and take the jobs that unemployed Americans apparently decided they don't need.There will be peace between Israel and its neighbors, the war on terror will have al-Qaeda on the run and Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed by the end of McCain's first term. Americans of all races and religions will ride down chocolate rivers on gumball canoes, floating past candy cane trees, and Jesus will come down from heaven to personally give the winning lottery numbers to every man, woman and child in New Orleans. Except the gays, of course.
Yes, John McCain's first term in office will be fantastic — and I use that word in the original sense: "Based or existing only in fantasy". If you would believe John McCain, everything that is wrong in the world will be set right if we are only wise enough to hand him the keys to the Oval Office. The only problem is that he doesn't seem to have a single realistic plan to accomplish any of it, in fact he doesn't even seem to have a firm grip on reality.
When Bush was speaking at the Knesset in Israel yesterday and made remarks about how negotiating with Iran would be the same as appeasing the Nazis, I expected some underhanded agreement from John "Hey, I didn't say it! I'm just agreeing." McCain, who just last week was asserting that Hamas had "endorsed" Barack Obama for President. I didn't expect White House Press Secretary Dana Perino to say that Democrats only think the comment had anything to do with them because they "think the world revolves around" them, but McCain on the other hand has repeatedly shown he is more than happy to dip his toes in the gutter while motoring along his "high road".
But what did surprise me was that one or more of John McCain's marbles apparently clunked to the floor of the Straight Talk Express and rolled under the seats without anyone in his campaign noticing. Take a look at what he said to reporters asking about Bush's remarks:
"Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,'’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home."
McCain was a U.S. Congressman for Reagan's first term and became a U.S. Senator during Reagan's second term in office. With all of his highly-touted years in office and foreign policy experience you might have expected he would have remembered Reagan himself making this public admission:
"what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."
It's one thing to attack Obama's position on Diplomacy-First (and to be fair, Bush/McCain style foreign policy has worked out fantastically for the past seven years) but for McCain to have a memory lapse like this is no laughing matter. If reality is filed away in his mind as the "Good old days" when Republicans were men and the sheep were afraid then that calls his judgment into serious question.
People get sensitive over making his age an issue, but it's never really been about age. It's certainly not about "ageism". It's partly about whether or not he'll be alive and healthy in four years, but more importantly it's about whether he's in possession of all his faculties. The facts would suggest he is not.
