Republican Party Top Dogs Keep Distancing Themselves From McCain

Yesterday the McCain campaign suggested that they had Barack Obama right where they want him. It reminded me of the old Monty Python “Holy Grail” movie’s Black Knight, who, after King Arthur challenges him to fight, continues to keep trying to defend his little bridge after Arthur has lopped off his limbs one by one until he is a torso on the ground.

“It’s only a flesh wound,” said the invincible knight, looking a lot less invincible, and well, a bit like John McCain with two-plus weeks left to go in the campaign.

While McCain’s staff loses ground in traditional as well as battle ground states, he has spent weeks trying to turn one state red: Denial. Rather than focus on the economy, where they have nothing, and they are tied to the 7 trillion ton weight that is the Bush Administration, they have tried to rabble rouse and get the Republican base scared and angry.

They’ve been campaigning in Denial with very little to show for it, other than fanning the fires of hatred that have produced home-grown racism in places like Missouri:

Palin is attacking her own audiences when they can’t hear her with anti-patriot slams. The economy (stupid) which was supposed to be McCain’s subject to address yesterday was instead substituted with yet another incendiary motivating speech to get the partisans out there angry and painting anti-Obama signs and using Curious George as a racist prop.

Florida governor Charlie Crist went to Disneyworld rather than do a McCain event. Bill Kristol, hawkish mouthpiece of the near-facist right, trashed McCain’s campaign yesterday. Christopher Hitchens trashed Palin, and McCain for extensive bad judgment. Had old Bill Buckley been here, he would probably have joined the chorus.

McCain apparently is developing the stink of political rotting fish to most of the partisans in the upper echelons of the party, even if he is still getting his share of boos and jeers from the largely white, frightened “patriots” on the road in his stump speeches.

His greatest failing will have been that he needed the boos and jeers more than he felt compelled to stand up for what he spent decades running on.

John McCain is getting to the point where no one can take him seriously, at least any thinking person, right or left, who sees what a farce McCain-Palin has become.

A quote from King Arthur dismissing the helpless torso that he had beaten aptly sums up the lunacy that has been John McCain in the last thirty days:

“Silly person.”

About Brian Ross

Brian Ross is a writer, screenwriter, political satirist, documentarian, filmmaker and chef. Ad hoc, ad loc, quid pro quo... so little time. So much to know!

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