Inherit the Wind

[Pilotguy]

Watching McCain speak at his campaign rally in Arizona just now reminded me of the great scene from Inherit the Wind when Matthew Brady starts rambling incoherently from the witness stand. And it's at that moment in the film when Brady's wife and everyone else in the court room realizes that old man Brady is making no sense at all and that his long political career is over.

[grantcart]

1. perfect analogy

[tomreedtoon]

2. And after the rambling...Brady dies of a heart attack.

Again, that seems like a perfect metaphor.

And also, as I recall, his opponent - the guy who lost the case, but won the moral argument - said some kind, pitying words about the dead guy. That shocked the journalist - a cynic and anti-religion guy - who couldn't understand why he didn't villainize Brady.

The fact is, at one time, McCain had a degree of virtue to his political views. Remember, he went up against Bush and took abuse from the Republicans.

He lost that virtue. He became an attention whore. It hurts me to see the filth he has allowed on the air, especially in the last 24 hours before the election. It doesn't matter if he disavows the filth; it's his campaign and he was responsible for every message it released.

I work in TV. I've seen all the ads. I've seen a lot of disgusting stuff in political advertising in my life, and I've never seen anything as hideous as the McCain ads.

Oh, if it were only incoherent rambling from a guy undergoing a heart attack and suffering a stroke. It would at least be honest.

[vixengrl]

3. To be nice, I hope it is only his GOTV and any positive poll #'s

he might have, that crumple at the end, and not him. But I do not see how more people have not recognized that he has run, by and large, an incoherent campaign. Little gaffes, like "my fellow prisoners" and "Joe the Biden" and even "Joe the bombe-,uh, Joe the plumber" are one thing, a slip of a tired tongue; but greater gaffes like thinking (or at least saying he thought) that Shi'as in Iran would arm Al-Qaeda, that there was an Iraq/Pakistan border (ah well--if you count the whole of Iran, there's your problem!), talking about President Putin of Germany and Czechoslovakia?

Ay-yi-yi.

It may be so that McCain has forgotten more than Obama yet knows--and this scares me less about Obama, than McCain's forgetting concerns me about *him*. If he has a health deficiency--then I think it should be responsibly seen to, not hidden, and not with the assumption that what is left of him is competent to serve--not with a President Palin in the Wings--who has learned in the last several weeks possibly a hair less than I, a competent but hard-drinking adult in my 30's, may have forgotten. Which is to say, not hardly enough.

(Oh, and for what it's worth, being the arrogant b-word I am, you can search my back-posts on DU and have my energy strategy, my Social Security strategy, figure out where I stand on foreign policy and the Constitution, and gauge my understanding of economics. I think you should be scared if a bull-shit slinging "regular Joe" generally posting with a six-pack or half-a-bottle of wine in her veins can sound more coherent than an actual VP-candidate off-the-cuff. I know enough to know I am not competent--does she?)

I wonder with a touch of horror what it would be like if they somehow eked it out--on squeakers of states where the undecided, lemming-like, booked to the polls to pull for McCain and maintain the status quo--which is nothing much less right now than "failure." Call it a win by 273.

How would a President, old, occasionally incoherent, having run the worst campaign in memory, with a Congress handily controlled by the oppositon and no mandate to speak of, and possessing a VP who is a secretive and possibly conniving and ambitious tool of the pundits and preachers who tr to fill in her gaps, bring abut any kind of change--but for the worse?