Whore Hero

If John McCain does happen to win this election, you almost have to feel sorry for him. The man who takes the Oath of Office in January of 2009 has to be numb at this point from the bending-over he’s done in his quest for power. He’s traded in everything that passed for a principle in his damaged heart, he’s backtracked on the positions that defined him, and he’s thrown in his lot with the same vile goons who cast aspersion on his own child in the 2000 campaign.

It’s a particularly gruesome irony, and I don’t relish pointing it out, but the Vietnam war hero had to destroy his campaign in order to save it.

He talks up his “maverick” past, forgetting that a year or two ago, most of the fawning faces looking up at him from the RNC floor wanted him to totter off into the sunset. They like the idea of him as a maverick… they just weren’t a big fan of him while he was, you know, being one.

Only when he started kowtowing to the most snuffling, knuckle-dragging elements of “the base” did he get some traction. Only by retreating from his own stances on everything from tax cuts to immigration could he curry enough favor to get the establishment slowly, resentfully behind him. Only by pimping out his POW story – one he claimed not to like to dwell on – could he hoist enough American flags to mobilize that great clump of evangelical dickheads who’ve throttled the Republican party for decades.

You know – the ones he deliberately provoked less than a decade ago? Those guys.

He gave lip service to a high-road campaign, before pulling shit like the ad claiming Obama wants sex-ed for kindergartners. It’s a program to help kids stay out of the clutches of pedophiles. It takes an especially viscous kind of slime, like Lee-Atwater-back-from-the-dead slime, to use a program designed to keep kids safe from molestation and tar your opponent with it.

And then… the final blow, the last capitulation. He wanted someone he could work with as his veep. He wanted a colleague, a trusted ally, someone with whom he could conceivably get some shit done. The Bible-thumpers let him know that the decision wasn’t really his to make after all, and The Maverick reined in his testicles and picked Palin out of thin air. Met her once. Never vetted. Impulsive decision, and one that almost seemed to smack of a “fuck you then, you don’t like Ridge? You don’t like Lieberman? Choke on this, assholes” move.

And now, after months of grim fighting and desultory support from his own party, everyone’s fired up! Everyone’s gung ho! Everyone’s fighting all the way and taking the hill!

But they’re doing it for Sarah Palin. They’re not doing it for John McCain.

A 72-year-old white man with bona fide warrior credentials, and he couldn’t rally a pack of conservatives to fight the good fight until he got stuck with Peggy fucking Hill.

So yes, there’s a chance John McCain will reach his goal, and become the next President of the United States. He’ll have left every principle along the road to glory, and he’ll be second fiddle at his own inauguration, assuming Sarah has learned to say anything besides “I SOLD THE JET ON EBAY!” by then and one of her kids hasn’t flat-out started abusing meth or fellating moose in public.

How broken will he feel, standing there in the January cold, looking down the gaping maw of his last mission, thinking of all the time he’s spent on his knees, all the positions shifted, all the principles jettisoned? How much like failure can success taste? How painful will it be to have let himself down again – to have been broken on the wheel, not of a VC interrogator, but of his own ambition? And then to have the moment of glory stolen out from under him by a carping tundra yahoo?

Let’s get one thing out in the open, since no one will say it. Not every single person who comes home from a war is a war hero. A hero makes his or her presence known by heroic actions, or at least a dignified demeanor – not by signing off on blatant lies in attack ads, not by rattling off their hero's credentials to everyone in the room repeatedly, and certainly not because Rudy “The Biggest Scumbag on the Planet” Giuliani finds it politically expedient to call you one. Being captured by the enemy does not qualify you to run a country. Being a part of the losing team in a disastrous war does not qualify you to run a country. Personal hardship and physical pain do not qualify you to run a country.

The United States does not owe the Presidency to John McCain.

You wanna support a vet? Hire the homeless guy down the street to mow your lawn.

John McCain is a shameful man, and that shame will be his to own whether he wins or loses this contest. The only question, then, is if we’re prepared to shoulder our own share of that shame ourselves by playing along.