Read the whole thing.But none of the alternatives look any better. Mitt Romney is the most freakishly transparent liar I've ever witnessed. His party is desperately reliant on playing the Christian card on election day, but most traditionalist Christians deny that his religion counts as Christianity. He can't decide which state he's from, invested major resources in barely winning a Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll last weekend, and, for his trouble, managed to snag the endorsement of Ann Coulter at the same time she was calling John Edwards a "faggot."
Then there's McCain. To the kind of liberal who spent 2002 fantasizing about McCain beating Bush in '04 on the Democratic ticket, his pathetic decline is probably a sad story. To me, it's more like a funny one -- like when that guy slipped and fell down a flight of stairs and it all looked very painful but he was a huge jerk anyway. McCain is old. And sick. And obviously so. He has the misfortune of being both the most conservative candidate in the race and the one most hated by conservatives. His website makes it look like he's campaigning for F�hrer. Worst of all, George W. Bush's Iraq policy is so crazy that it's managed to ruin McCain's devilishly clever positioning on Iraq.
What clever positioning am I talking about? A little while back, McCain faced an apparent problem -- his demented, run-amok militarism clashes with the national mood at a moment when Iraq is becoming a horrible millstone around Republican necks. McCain, however, had a way around this -- simply advocate the one policy so crazy nobody would ever possibly do it, namely throwing more troops into the war. That way, things would continue to go downhill, congressional Democrats would surely force some kind of de-escalation, and McCain could campaign not on an unpopular pledge to actually send more troops, but simply on an in-retrospect observation that more troops should have been sent. But then -- because sometimes the strangest things happen -- Bush decided that he agreed with McCain and was going to implement a "surge." And with that, the once promising Cult of John McCain began to fall apart.
--The Editors
