The Kristol Prefigure

Bill Kristol is an insufferable fool and wrong about everything, but over and over in this campaign he has flown trial balloons in this column that have inevitably been picked up by John McCain. So if you want to see what's going to happen at the final debate on Wednesday, consider his column today a blueprint.

Of course, the idea that McCain can junk everything with three weeks to go and start over, while people are voting early, and expect the electorate to react favorably, is... well, it's a Bill Kristol idea, so I don't have to tell you how stupid it is. But as much as anything, it's an honor restoration strategy, not really a strategy for winning. They actually started this over the weekend, when Rick Davis responded to John Lewis' comparison between McCain rallies and the ugly race-baiting of George Wallace by saying, oh yeah, well John McCain was a POW. Which suggests a return to the wounded warrior status, the "how dare they attack me" backlash strategy.

Not that McCain isn't OK with a little comparison of Obama to a terrorist. I mean, he's only human.

...And sure enough, here comes the McCain reboot. Bill Kristol is a genius! In the same way that the guy holding the puppet strings knows exactly where the marionette is going to go!

So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time...

Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are two more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain's growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday's Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.

In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would "rely heavily on" for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.

Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.

I think I need to start keeping a list.

...I suppose I could add the fact that he rejected calls for Pervez Musharraf's resignation in December 2007, while welcoming it today, but that's not an exaggeration or a lie. That's just piss-poor judgment, based on the biased notion that only a strongman can keep the brown people together. It's truly a colonial mindset for foreign policy where you install the dictator to keep the masses relatively stable. It's dumb thinking, and dangerous besides.