Post by K-Box on Sept 17, 2008 0:12:55 GMT -8
Reading the posts on comms like ontd_political makes me realize what an old man I must seem like to a lot of these kids now, because I can remember when John McCain was cool.
Granted, that was coming up on eight years ago now, and for young Americans who are voting for the first time this year, that's literally almost half a lifetime ago, so for those who have just recently turned 18, I offer the following laundry list of McCain's flip-flops, to show how truly different he used to be:
The Carpetbagger Report - Jukebox John keeps changing his tune
... It's taken me a long time to try and put into words how McCain's transformation this year has made me feel, and as much as I rail against identity politics, a lot of it is rooted in my own background, as a 33-year-old former enlisted sailor and veteran of the "War Against Terror."
In 2000, when McCain was running against George W. Bush in the Republican primaries, I was still a Navy Journalist, a Petty Officer Second Class (that's an E-5 to you other branches of service), stationed at the Armed Forces Network in Naples, Italy, and my parents - both lifelong liberals - had bought me McCain's Faith Of My Fathers.
Long before Rich Lowry's editorial for The New York Post, asserting that the "Media Miss the McCain That Was Going to Lose," it was already publicly espoused as conventional wisdom among conservatives that liberals and the media (whom they regard as largely interchangeable) only liked McCain because they thought he was going to lose, to which I say to them, that's flat-out bullshit, and you folks on the far right already fucking well know it, and that's the real reason you always hated McCain so much.
Neither my mom nor my dad has any love for the Republican Party, but I remember my dad telling me, all the way back in 2000, that if McCain got the nomination, he'd seriously consider voting for the guy, and so would my mom, and the more that I read about McCain, the more that I realized, holy shit, so would I.
Don't get me wrong, the guy still tilted more toward the right than I would have preferred, but in both his personal ethics and his relatively moderate politics, he represented a clear break from the remorselessly Machiavellian far-right conservatives who made up the GOP's base, and if he'd won either the Republican Party nomination or the presidency in 2000, I still believe that we could have seen him do to the GOP what Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party in 1992, by telling the base of his own party to sit down, shut up and at least listen to what the other side had to say.
And you know what? For all that the National Review and the American Spectator and all the other rag-mags funded by Richard Mellon Scaife insisted that a McCain nomination would mean a GOP loss in November of 2000, they were lying their asses off, because what truly had them scared shitless was that a McCain nomination could have meant a GOP win in November of 2000, but a loss for far-right conservatives, because they were afraid of the exact same thing that I hoped for, which was that McCain would, like Clinton, drag his own party that much closer to the political center, kicking and screaming if need be.
Because in spite of how much I lean to the left, this ever-escalating festival of partisan bullshit just seriously needs to stop. Both liberals and conservatives deserve to have intelligent, rational, even-minded representatives, both in the news media and in elected office, and even if they can't come to an agreement on any number of important issues, they need, if nothing else, to be able to debate those points without demonizing one another, and that's pretty much impossible when the modern state of political discourse reduces the ideological differences between liberals and conservatives to a WWE death-match between guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore, both of whom are shameless disgraces to the human race.
But that's not the personal side of my reaction to all of this.
I served five years in the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 military, and while it was relatively easy, when compared to the rigors of my two subsequent years of post-9/11 service, it always felt like there was something ... missing. We had no big enemies left to oppose us, and no big wars left to fight, and as such, once I got past the hurdles of boot camp and A-school - the Defense Information School at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, where Navy Journalists, Marine Combat Correspondents and the other branches of service's print, broadcast and public affairs personnel are trained - I was pretty much working what amounted to a civilian office job, with the added hassles of uniform and barracks inspections, and the added bonuses of not having to cover any of my cost-of-living expenses.
I mean, I was serving, but what was I serving, and why? I reenlisted at my five-year mark, a few months before 9/11, but that felt more like inertia than anything else, because I didn't really feel like I was serving a purpose.
I was (and still am) deeply cynical about politicians, but when I read about McCain, not just what he had to say, but what kind of life he'd lived, I felt something resonate in myself, and when coupled with his politics - which, again, didn't always agree with my own, but if nothing else, almost always seemed to be arrived at as a result of independent thought on his part - I found myself believing, perhaps for the first time in my life, that somebody who seemed so principled could manage to survive Washington, D.C., with his morals mostly intact.
Christ, just writing this shit is giving me an honest-to-God lump in my throat.
Because I see this tired-eyed, sad-faced old fucker on my TV screen, and he's wearing the same skin as the guy I thought I knew, the guy whose words about his own military service hit me like a diamond bullet between the eyes, back when I was still struggling with what it actually meant to be serving my country, and I want to grab him by the shoulders and fucking throttle him, and scream in his face, GODDAMMIT JOHN, YOU WERE MY NAVY BRO, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP OUTTA THIS SHIT, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP AND BE THE MAN THAT HELPED ME SEE THE MEANING IN MY OWN MILITARY SERVICE, and I feel like Ed Harris straddling Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's unconscious body in The Abyss, pumping her chest and slapping her across the face and screaming GODDAMMIT YOU BITCH, YOU'VE NEVER BACKED AWAY FROM ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, NOW FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT, RIGHT NOW, DO IT, FIGHT GODDAMMIT, FIGHT, but what breaks my heart is the fact that, deep down, I already know that I'd be beating up on a corpse, because the guy who he used to be is already dead inside.
And now, I'm actually crying, for real, because whether McCain wins or loses in the fall, I feel like I'm watching the slow-motion self-destruct of a tragic hero, whose once-noble qualities have failed to save him from his own sins and shortcomings, and it hurts me, on an almost physical level, to see someone with such potential turn into a human ouroboros, devouring themselves and writing the final lines of their own wasted fates.
Even speaking as someone who will never vote for him now, and who's absolutely terrified of what will happen to both America and the world if he wins, I still hope history won't judge John too harshly, even if he has been the author of his own moral and political undoing. I hope he's allowed to fade away as gracefully as he can after this, making whatever peace with the world and his own actions that he can. I even hope that he might be able to redeem himself somehow, after all of this is done, although I seriously doubt it.
The bottom line, though, is that we deserved better from a man like him, and he deserved better from a man like himself, too, and no matter how else you look at it, that's a goddamn shame.
Granted, that was coming up on eight years ago now, and for young Americans who are voting for the first time this year, that's literally almost half a lifetime ago, so for those who have just recently turned 18, I offer the following laundry list of McCain's flip-flops, to show how truly different he used to be:
The Carpetbagger Report - Jukebox John keeps changing his tune
... It's taken me a long time to try and put into words how McCain's transformation this year has made me feel, and as much as I rail against identity politics, a lot of it is rooted in my own background, as a 33-year-old former enlisted sailor and veteran of the "War Against Terror."
In 2000, when McCain was running against George W. Bush in the Republican primaries, I was still a Navy Journalist, a Petty Officer Second Class (that's an E-5 to you other branches of service), stationed at the Armed Forces Network in Naples, Italy, and my parents - both lifelong liberals - had bought me McCain's Faith Of My Fathers.
Long before Rich Lowry's editorial for The New York Post, asserting that the "Media Miss the McCain That Was Going to Lose," it was already publicly espoused as conventional wisdom among conservatives that liberals and the media (whom they regard as largely interchangeable) only liked McCain because they thought he was going to lose, to which I say to them, that's flat-out bullshit, and you folks on the far right already fucking well know it, and that's the real reason you always hated McCain so much.
Neither my mom nor my dad has any love for the Republican Party, but I remember my dad telling me, all the way back in 2000, that if McCain got the nomination, he'd seriously consider voting for the guy, and so would my mom, and the more that I read about McCain, the more that I realized, holy shit, so would I.
Don't get me wrong, the guy still tilted more toward the right than I would have preferred, but in both his personal ethics and his relatively moderate politics, he represented a clear break from the remorselessly Machiavellian far-right conservatives who made up the GOP's base, and if he'd won either the Republican Party nomination or the presidency in 2000, I still believe that we could have seen him do to the GOP what Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party in 1992, by telling the base of his own party to sit down, shut up and at least listen to what the other side had to say.
And you know what? For all that the National Review and the American Spectator and all the other rag-mags funded by Richard Mellon Scaife insisted that a McCain nomination would mean a GOP loss in November of 2000, they were lying their asses off, because what truly had them scared shitless was that a McCain nomination could have meant a GOP win in November of 2000, but a loss for far-right conservatives, because they were afraid of the exact same thing that I hoped for, which was that McCain would, like Clinton, drag his own party that much closer to the political center, kicking and screaming if need be.
Because in spite of how much I lean to the left, this ever-escalating festival of partisan bullshit just seriously needs to stop. Both liberals and conservatives deserve to have intelligent, rational, even-minded representatives, both in the news media and in elected office, and even if they can't come to an agreement on any number of important issues, they need, if nothing else, to be able to debate those points without demonizing one another, and that's pretty much impossible when the modern state of political discourse reduces the ideological differences between liberals and conservatives to a WWE death-match between guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore, both of whom are shameless disgraces to the human race.
But that's not the personal side of my reaction to all of this.
I served five years in the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 military, and while it was relatively easy, when compared to the rigors of my two subsequent years of post-9/11 service, it always felt like there was something ... missing. We had no big enemies left to oppose us, and no big wars left to fight, and as such, once I got past the hurdles of boot camp and A-school - the Defense Information School at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, where Navy Journalists, Marine Combat Correspondents and the other branches of service's print, broadcast and public affairs personnel are trained - I was pretty much working what amounted to a civilian office job, with the added hassles of uniform and barracks inspections, and the added bonuses of not having to cover any of my cost-of-living expenses.
I mean, I was serving, but what was I serving, and why? I reenlisted at my five-year mark, a few months before 9/11, but that felt more like inertia than anything else, because I didn't really feel like I was serving a purpose.
I was (and still am) deeply cynical about politicians, but when I read about McCain, not just what he had to say, but what kind of life he'd lived, I felt something resonate in myself, and when coupled with his politics - which, again, didn't always agree with my own, but if nothing else, almost always seemed to be arrived at as a result of independent thought on his part - I found myself believing, perhaps for the first time in my life, that somebody who seemed so principled could manage to survive Washington, D.C., with his morals mostly intact.
Christ, just writing this shit is giving me an honest-to-God lump in my throat.
Because I see this tired-eyed, sad-faced old fucker on my TV screen, and he's wearing the same skin as the guy I thought I knew, the guy whose words about his own military service hit me like a diamond bullet between the eyes, back when I was still struggling with what it actually meant to be serving my country, and I want to grab him by the shoulders and fucking throttle him, and scream in his face, GODDAMMIT JOHN, YOU WERE MY NAVY BRO, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP OUTTA THIS SHIT, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP AND BE THE MAN THAT HELPED ME SEE THE MEANING IN MY OWN MILITARY SERVICE, and I feel like Ed Harris straddling Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's unconscious body in The Abyss, pumping her chest and slapping her across the face and screaming GODDAMMIT YOU BITCH, YOU'VE NEVER BACKED AWAY FROM ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, NOW FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT, RIGHT NOW, DO IT, FIGHT GODDAMMIT, FIGHT, but what breaks my heart is the fact that, deep down, I already know that I'd be beating up on a corpse, because the guy who he used to be is already dead inside.
And now, I'm actually crying, for real, because whether McCain wins or loses in the fall, I feel like I'm watching the slow-motion self-destruct of a tragic hero, whose once-noble qualities have failed to save him from his own sins and shortcomings, and it hurts me, on an almost physical level, to see someone with such potential turn into a human ouroboros, devouring themselves and writing the final lines of their own wasted fates.
Even speaking as someone who will never vote for him now, and who's absolutely terrified of what will happen to both America and the world if he wins, I still hope history won't judge John too harshly, even if he has been the author of his own moral and political undoing. I hope he's allowed to fade away as gracefully as he can after this, making whatever peace with the world and his own actions that he can. I even hope that he might be able to redeem himself somehow, after all of this is done, although I seriously doubt it.
The bottom line, though, is that we deserved better from a man like him, and he deserved better from a man like himself, too, and no matter how else you look at it, that's a goddamn shame.
