Big surprise | Big letdown
"So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so."
Andrew Sullivan seems to be questioning whether John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate (and leader of the free world if McCain is elected and doesn't live to the age of 125) was a bad call. Not a really "country first" kind of decision.
The old Straight-talker caved in to the Karl Rove crowd in a last ditch lunge at glory. So Mr. Sullivan feels "let down." Apparently, he had high hopes for a McCain Presidency.
Question: Why don't these Kool-aid guzzlers see? McCain has been a reckless egomaniac all his life. He claims to have grown some humility after the he got a solid ass-kicking from Vietnamese he'd been incinerating from the seat of his Navy jet-bomber. Is this credible? By his own account, McCain got special treatment as a POW as soon as his captors realized his pop was a big-shot admiral.
''McCain's cell door burst open, and The Bug rushed in, saying, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital."
It had taken some time, but the North Vietnamese figured out that McCain's father, Jack, was a major U.S. Naval commander.
They started calling McCain "The Crown Prince." ''We assume that McCain had a terrible, terrible time of it in prison. And he probably did. He was injured when his plane crashed, and he says he was beaten and denied proper medical attention -- at least until they found out they had Navy royalty locked up there.
Of course that's largely based on McCain's word. Maybe for a crash-prone Navy pilot who'd almost been burned up recently along with more than 100 other men on the deck of his own ship, cooling his heels away from the action wasn't the very worst thing in the world. Especially if his captors were serious about the crown prince business.
Maybe it's just galling that he's been willing and able to cash in on his imprisonment so reliably for so long, right up to the GOP convention, where his account of what he did in the war was produced as an IMAX-scale movie, not much less spectacular -- or manipulative -- than the super-sized Hollywood treatments of legends like Beowulf or The Dark Knight.
When he was released from imprisonment, McCain says, he was a changed man. No longer a slave to self, to ambition, to personal greed or egotism. It sounds very much like a religious conversion. Nothing less than a transformation, like a drunk or an addict who has hit bottom, surrendered to a higher power, and been released from the bondage of self.
''I was never the same again.
I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's.''
How then did the changed man conduct himself?
1. He divorced his crippled wife.
2. He parlayed his hero status into a fast-track political career, and a marriage to a beer heiress.
3. He did unseemly favors for the rich and powerful. And got caught.
4. He cleansed himself of scandal by throttling up his impulsive, egotistical nature. He became known for his lack of loyalty, and for being mean and erratic. He persuaded the comfortable, middle-class Andrew Sullivan's of the world to portray his behavior as evidence of independence and integrity.
5. Then he licked the butt of a lying, pro-torture president, won over Bush's base, and now leads in the polls.
You need to be thoroughly deluded about John McCain's record to feel let down. The sad and hilarious thing is that Sullivan feels he can't predict whether McCain continue to disappoint. Take a real good guess.