I don’t know how The New Republic can possibly take themselves seriously. Jon Chait uses his column space today to talk about why he loves John McCain and has pangs of affinity for the old codger. He actually constructed the following sentence:
And, in the years immediately following that run [2000], McCain established himself as perhaps the country’s foremost progressive champion.
It’s hard to believe that anyone, of any political persuasion, would write such a thing. It’s clear that Jon Chait hasn’t the slightest clue what a progressive is. There’s no accounting for taste, but this next bit is equally appalling:
Yes, people put far too much stock in the candidates’ personalities. (I’d vote for an obnoxious, pampered phony who shared my beliefs over a charming war hero who didn’t.) But personality isn’t completely meaningless, either. A president sets the tone for our public discourse, and McCain is pretty easy to take. His demagoguery comes with an awkward forced smile, which doesn’t make it more forgivable but does make it less irritating.
This is the same man that frightens his Republican colleagues in the Senate with his bad temper, who publicly called his wife a c*nt and a trollop, and who likes to make jokes about women enjoying rape. ‘Charming’ and ‘easy to take’ are not modifiers that I would choose, or that even make sense. Neither does this:
The idea that McCain could establish a reputation as a maverick by standing up to his party on numerous issues, win back his party’s support by abandoning nearly all his heterodoxies, then prevail by portraying himself as an unwavering man of principle is nauseating. Yet somehow the idea of a McCain presidency itself doesn’t terrify me. What can I say? Bush has lowered my standards.
Why should Bush lower your standards? Isn’t the lesson of the Bush presidency that we must urgently raise our standards? It’s easy not to be terrified by the prospect of a McCain presidency if you don’t care about reproductive freedom or whether or not we’ll continue neo-conservative policies in the Middle East. What’s astonishing is how far some establishment writers will go to avoid admitting that John McCain is a phony.
