The Paradox of John McCain, Praise Be Upon Him

According to AP, Senator John McCain has just been endorsed by Al Qaeda, which is funny, because this is exactly the kind of thing McCain said wouldn't happen to him back in April. Oh, wait, no, that's not why it's funny. It's funny because terrorists support John McCain because they think he's so incompetent and hotheaded that he'd destroy his own country trying to hunt down terrorists. Yes, that might be why it's funny.

It's getting to the point where I'm starting to feel bad for the McCain-Palin campaign, in the way that one feels bad for Jerry Lundegaard at the end of Fargo. Let's just take a walk through this election again, to see the watershed moments of retardation:

Prior to the conventions, McCain's entire narrative was centered around how only he had the experience and the competence to run the country, because he had seen more fucked up things in five minutes out there in the shit than Barack Obama had seen his whole life. Then, he picked Sarah "I'll be mayor of the Senate!!!!" Palin as his running mate and traded the experience and judgment line for the look-how-pretty line. Frankly, the move made no sense other than a cynical swiping of Obama's "change" and "history" tags, but everyone was too busy beating off at how well she was able to pronounce newclear to notice that she was very dumb. After Palin desperately talked her way out of such mindbending questions as "What newspapers do you like to read?" it's become clear that McCain has somehow flipped the competency argument against himself.

Immediately after this, Wall Street farted in its own mouth (shamefully) and McCain's story became about suspending his campaign to go personally the situation with his own withered hands. His criticisms of Obama then were about how little he was doing to help the economy. However, some of McCain's most recent talking points have had Obama painted as having deep socialist leanings and outrageously pink ideas, a lie that I wish in my deepest hearts were true. One could argue that these are contradictory claims, but then again, someone could argue that they are semantically distinct, so whatever. What's paradoxical about this is that McCain really seemed to be one of the bigger proponents of the bailout. Even if he was decrying its some of the pork attached to it, he suspended his presidential campaign just to make sure that something like it passed. He then went on to bring out his ill-fated government mortgage-buyout. I may be wrong about this, but I think in the next two or three days we're going to see a "Is John McCain the REAL Socialist?" arc spread throughout a lot of the media, just as was shown in the Daily Show clip. In fact, it looks as though Obama is starting to spread this himself.

And now, we have terrorism, the McCain camp's most stupid and easily-refutable, and thus most effective, charge against BHO. This Al-Qaeda endorsement story might not pick up as anything other than a novelty, but theoretically, we now for real have McCain's single most outlandish claim turning against himself. McCain has gone from the cool-handed, fiscally responsible American war hero that would be a moderate and perhaps even ineffectual interrim president to the crazy, bumbling, socialist terrorist wildman that will drive this country into the ground faster than a...well...navy plane, I suppose.

With Obama rubber to McCain's glue, what does the Republican candidate have left? With a large amount of famed conservatives and even the most disillusioned of liberals endorsing Barack, who does he have left? Oh, yes, that's right. The whole reasoning behind the Palin pick. The base. Thus, we see the final piece of the puzzle that has become this campaign: McCain exists like the protagonist of some magical realism novel: The opposite of every one of his desires appears to come true, and when he finally does something to make sure he gets what he wants, it becomes twisted and malformed. In order to secure the nomination during the primary, he threw away everything that anyone decent liked about him in the first place to boost his numbers among the base. He could have run as a centrist and won, but instead opted to run as some kind of megarepublican. Now, the only people that still ardently support him are either stubborn straight-ticket republicans or the very die-hard, fuckin'-muslims, HOOSAYN types he grew famous for not pandering to, because he based his campaign on pandering to them.

McCain will leave this campaign in these last two weeks in a very similar fashion to Fargo. I'm thinking in particular of the arrest of William H Macy's tragic villain: A weak smile, a deluded sense of confidence fueled by imminent salvation, always sure that his next trick is going to be the one that is going to be the one that rescues him, until his reckoning finally comes and he, pathetically, screams and wails at the unfairness of it all. You're tempted to feel bad for him, for he indeed was cheated out of the 2000 nomination with possibly the sleaziest and most offensive campaign of attacks seen in American elections. But my empathy can only go so far, especially when he starts doing the exact same sort of thing to his current opponent.

EDIT: Robert Draper of the NYT just published this excellent and eloquent discussion of the McCain campaign's meltdown, with emphasis in the struggle for his narrative. It's really well written and you should all just stop whatever you're doing and read it right now, please, okay, do it, thanks.