There’s an idea for an anti-McCain button that’s been floating around in my head for a few weeks now. See, John McCain would be in one of those striped nightshirts and a sleeping cap with a little tassle on it. He’d have his head on a pillow and look all sleepy and dreamy. And then there’d be the text around it saying, “John McCain? Good night and good luck.” I think there’s a certain cleverness to it in the way that it brings in a bit of Edward R. Murrow, classifies John McCain as sleepy McOldguy and suggests that the presidency is too much for him to handle.
I’m pretty sure it would be a good seller. But I haven’t been able to get myself to go ahead and make that button. The truth is, when I get down it, I just don’t want to make it. I think it would be wrong to make it. There are a number of reasons why John McCain would make a rotten president. He’s sided again and again with corporations against individual rights and interests. He’s sided again and again with those who have laid siege to our constitution. He helped lead the charge (that too many others followed) into an unnecessary and brutal war that has done little to nothing to aid American interests and done much hurt to the world. I could go on with a long list of wrong-headed policies that define the John McCain agenda. But see, then there’s the fact that he’s relatively old. It’s just a fact about him. I could try to take that fact and use it against him, making some argument that because he is old, he is unfit to be president. But I don’t actually believe it. I’d be making shit up. Now, if he had some early form of Alzheimer’s or something, that would be different. Ronald Reagan did, and it made him unfit to be president while he was still president. But John McCain doesn’t have any symptoms of Alzheimer’s or any other dementia sometimes but not always associated with age. Just because John McCain is old doesn’t make him unfit to be president. I can think of a good handful of elderly people who I think would do a great job in the presidency. John McCain’s age is not the reason I oppose his candidacy, and so I shouldn’t pretend that it is.
If I did make that button, I’d be participating in a little campaign game that lately has been turning my stomach sour. I used to like to listen to the Stephanie Miller Show on AM 1580 here in Columbus, but lately I can only take a few minutes at a time. They’ve got this schtick they’re pushing lately in which they play audio clips of Grandpa Simpson (from The Simpsons) prattling on and losing track of what he was saying and mumbling and groaning and then telling the kids to get off his lawn. And then they say, “Grandpa McCain!” And then their voice impersonator, Jim Ward, says a few lines in the voice of John McCain about how he wants those pesky kids to get off his lawn. And then everybody on the air giggles theatrically. And then they ring a bell. The Stephanie Miller Show does this every day. Every single day. I’m sure it has the desired effect. I’m sure it gets a lot of people to assume that McCain is a senile coot through the effect of sheer repetition. But it’s still bullshit. First the Stephanie Miller Show decided to be against John McCain for other reasons, be they market demographics or idealism about policy. Then they noticed John McCain was old, and so they decided old was mockable and pursued that angle. If the Democratic Party runs an old person for president in 2012, the Stephanie Miller Show will talk about the value of the Elder Statesman (or woman) and make fun of the Republican candidate for being foolishly, goofily young. That’s bullshit.
It was bullshit when the Republicans went after John Kerry in 2004 for windsurfing. If he’d been the Republican candidate, they would have called him a “sportsman” for it and said he was vigorous. The Stephanie Miller Show caught on that George W. Bush rides a bicycle, and so once a week they toss in twenty seconds or so of Jim Ward the voice impersonator snickering like a six-year-old and chiming a bicycle bell over and over again while he says something inane using George W. Bush’s fake Texas drawl. That’s bullshit too.
It’s bullshit when people like Loren Davis and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and others try to cobble together conspiracy theories that use genealogies and political events occurring when Barack Obama was five or seven years old to assert without any factual basis that Barack Obama is a member of a secret Muslim Islamofascist conspiracy to blah blahdee blah blah blah. I mean, why should I even fill in the blanks? It’s bullshit!
It’s bullshit when people talk about the foibles of Bill Clinton as a justification for not voting for Hillary Clinton, as if it is legitimate to judge the merits of every woman by the merits of her husband. It isn’t. It’s bullshit. It’s bullshit when people write that they’ve “never known a woman who could be trusted to spend someone else’s money,” or when they show up at Hillary Clinton rallies with signs that read “Iron My Shirt!” It’s bullshit.
It was bullshit when people said in 2000 that by gum, they’d vote for George W. Bush because he was the kind of guy they’d like to have a beer with. Come on, fess up: have you EVER had a beer with George W. Bush? You never will. He isn’t that guy, and to pretend otherwise is bullshit. It’s bullshit now for New York Times columnist David Brooks to write:
The fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values…. when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now.
Yes, a New York Times columnist is seriously suggesting that Barack Obama has to bone up on his bowling game if he wants to be a good president. Bullshit! And, by the way, Barack Obama only bowled seven frames. It’s still a bad score. But who cares? Any way you parse it, it’s bullshit!
I don’t care if Hillary Clinton is “shrill.” I don’t care if she’s “abrasive.” I don’t care if she has an annoying laugh. When the Stephanie Miller Show (yes, them again) broadcasts Hillary Clinton cackling as if that was an actual argument against her, it’s bullshit!
Every time I get exposed to this bullshit, I get a little bit more corroded on the inside. I get a little bit more bitter. I get a little bit more angry. I’m tired of being poisoned by it. I don’t want to listen to it any more. I don’t want to read it any more. And you know what? I don’t need to read it or listen to it any more. As a citizen, I’ve already voted in the primaries. My role in that decisionmaking is done. I don’t get to vote again. As a writer, let me be blunt: what new and actually relevant piece of information am I going to impart to you about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before it is decided which one of them is going to be the Democratic Party nominee? If you’ve been paying attention to Clinton’s and Obama’s policy statements, you should already know what the two of them have stood for in the past and what the two of them stand for now. And if you’re the sort of person who loves to wallow in bullshit claims about who is supposed to iron whose shirt and who is a member of a secret Islamofascist cabal funded by the Illuminati, then I’m never going to reach you anyway.
So I declare for myself a one-month sabbatical from writing about campaign politics. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed that the frequency of my posts on the subject has declined; now I’m just making it official. Why expose myself to the poison when at this point in the campaign there’s no good to be had from it? Why expose you to it? I’m just not going to do it. After a month passes, I’m sure there will be new things to say, not least because I’m pretty sure the nomination will be wrapped up or on the way to wrapped up within the month. Until then, I’ll have nothing to say about campaign politics. Sure, if someone gets shot or something I may call a break. But nobody’s going to get shot, I hope. So until then, I’ll write about substantive policy matters, and social movement activism outside electoral campaigns, and the interplay between religion and politics, and some other things that have nothing to do with politics. I hope the poison leaches out by then.
What about congressional campaign politics? Do you think that informing people about the people who are running for the House and Senate is poison?
Why not just write about campaign politics in a non-poisonous manner?
Do you think that my writing about Loren Davis and his outrageous attacks against Barack Obama is poisonous? Would it be better for me not to write the exposure of what Loren Davis regards as a credible idea? Would it be better just to let the attacks from Celeste and Loren Davis lie unaddressed – as the national news media has – as they are spread around elsewhere on the web?
No, not at all. You’re reporting on the existence of the poison and resisting it, and I admire that.
I’m just saying that I’ve had enough of the bullcrap — like Loren Davis’ bullcrap — and I need a break from it.