John McCain sure has trouble driving his "Straight Talk Express" (STE)in a straight line. STE wound its circuitous path to truthiness today. And it ended up at VMI. Here's the full text. And here's the gist of McCain's VMI remarks courtesy of MSNBC:
Republican presidential contender John McCain on Wednesday called the four-year Iraq conflict "necessary and just" and accused anti-war Democrats, including their leading White House candidates, of recklessness.
McCain also accused Democrats of "celebrating" defeat and of "small politics."
McCain hopes to establish himself as the heir to Bush and the harbinger of "truthiness" instead of truth. Here's an indicator of his revisionism:
Calling the war "necessary and just," McCain said those like him who support Bush's troop increase chose the "hard road" but "right road."
Trotting out his best, hot-button appeasement language, McCain claimed, "In Iraq, only our enemies were cheering" over Democrats attempts to curtail the length of time troops fight in Iraq.
McCain not only doesn't get it, but also, like Bush, he has lost touch with reality. And he's shown that to sustain right-wing power, he will do or say anything. When things don't go his way, he attacks the usually McCain adoring press: "I risked nothing more threatening than a hostile press corps," he said.
On one thing he was right, however:
We need to pay careful attention to America's image and moral credibility.But John McCain has no idea how right he is on that one.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Yeah, I know it's just curmudgeon-speak, but I see a lot of truth in it. The longer people stay in politics, the more they seem to fit Mencken's description. (One reason I liked Webb so much -- he was not a professional pol.)