Deconstructing McCain
Technorati Tags: McCain,New York Times
The right (myself included) knew damn well what the left media were up to: influence voters to pick the weakest, viable Republican candidate.
McCain was the “media darling” candidate only until all other candidates fell out. That fall out came with this week’s primaries. Today, the very media that built up McCain and propelled him to the Republican nomination tore him down.
Thursday’s New York Times destroys the Arizona Senator in a premeditated plan to secure the White House for the DNC.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
Take that, Mr. Golden Boy of the MSM!
In McCain’s defense (something I’m not used to taking), the NYT story is salacious pack of innuendo. But it demonstrates what smart conservatives like Rush Limbaugh have been saying for years: the mainstream media are activists, not reporters.
The paper that praised McCain, now destroys him. In the most cold-blooded indictment of motivations I’ve ever read, the paper lays out this quest for power:
Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run.
Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. “People like that appeal to me,” he continued. “I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities.”
For a year, now, I have been warning you that a moderate Republican is a dead Republican. We nominated a moderate, and he’s dead. Nonstarter. Still-born.
Congratulations, GOP. You get to play the minority party for four more years.