McCain's Year 2013 Speech

Just as its Killed Thousands of Americans and Iraqis, the War Will Kill McCain's Candidacy

If McCain's speech had been advertised as some sort of sardonic parody of the alleged vacuousness of Barack Obama's "Change-Without-Specifics" campaign, it would have been spot-on, as a parody at least.

But this was, apparently, intended as a serious proclamation about, uhmm, ahhh,...the State of the Union, circa 2013, I guess.

It was sort of a Quantum Leap speech: we are here; in 2013 we will be there. The intervening time period gets conveniently ignored. Absolutely not a single word about we get from here to there---literally not a word!

I think Conason is correct when he suspects this speech was an attempt at inoculating McCain from the "vision-thing" issue that plagued Bush 1 during his re-election campaign. But the attempt was so clumsy, so cornball, so lacking in content, as to be nothing but ridiculous, or, better yet, pathetic.

The most telling line in the speech was, "The United States maintains a military presence there,..." It emphasizes how McCain is still stuck on some sort of WWII mentality regarding the Iraq Intervention. We stayed in Germany and Japan for decades after the war ended; therefore, we do the same in Iraq.

Except Iraq didn't attack Pearl Harbor or invade Poland and France and bomb London. Iraq's government certainly wasn't a pretty picture, but, essentially, all Iraq did was BE THERE.

Until McCain understands and articulates the grievous error that the Iraq Intervention was and is, he is hopelessly trapped in the tiger cage of being nothing more than Bush 3---something neither Republicans nor Democrats are going to inflict upon themselves again,

-- FredrickBernanke
[Read FredrickBernanke's other letters]Permalink Friday, May 16, 2008 08:17 PM