The Mac

I keep reading that John McCain has made some kind of comeback, the premise being that the failure of his opponents to insinuate the union of McCain and a Vietcong lady assassin improbably produced a Hottentot terrorist lovechild somehow represents a personal victory for Mac. Then again, I just heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio the other night, and he told me: Friends, this McCain went over to the other side in that cell in Vietnam. Something to that effect. Which is only to note, impolitic though it maybe, that John McCain is a former POW who, if you actually pay attention to him while he is and does, appears to be just as crazy as any other POW-MIA trucker-cap-clad alcoholic at your local Moose lodge. He has this line in his stump speech where he tells you: Friends, I will pursue Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, if I have to, to bring him to justice. This is perhaps the most geographically, cosmologically, astrologically, theologically, mythologically, eschatologically confused metaphor that I've ever heard, although as pure, dog-whistle rhetoric it probably beats Hope and Change. What is it that the press likes so much about this guy? He's an old coot with a bad voice and a headful of reactionary half-notions. The reason he is on one hand able to act as the most "conservative" of senators while on the other hand hooking himself to a constitutionally dubious, entirely ineffectual, unconsidered project of "campaign finance reform" is this precisely--that he's an old coot with a headful of reactionary half-notions. Then again, he's sure to carry on the Reagan legacy, much in debate of late: Hey, Where's the rest of me?