This Josh Trevino post is all over. Plus Tommy’s spelunking of the Freepi below, plus Jonah Goldberg was on my TV briefly before I turned to Ron Popeil commercials, and he (Jonah) seems to be furrier than usual, so it looks like he’s gearing up for a long hibernation, and it seems like everybody’s just about ready to throw McCain from the FAIL train they all boarded with Bush and intend to ride straight into the gorge ahead.
I’m actually kind of surprised. The GOP is a party known for its loyalty; if we run a dude for president and he loses, we pretend he doesn’t exist, trash him on the pages of our “moderate” magazines, talk shit about his campaign, and compare him unfavorably to war criminals. If they run a dude for president and he doesn’t even make it through the primaries, they just wait four years, hook him up with a governor from Alaska and try the whole thing again. We’re keeping Michael Dukakis in an undisclosed location and every time Kerry opens his mouth I hear somebody yelling about “where was this guy four years ago?” and he was right there:
And yeah, yeah, whatever, Obama’s a better writer and a better speaker, but I was in the blog threads at the time of this Kerry speech and I remember how people reacted, and it was a Jonas Brothers concert up to and through “where the FUCK are the balloons!?!”, so do not come to me now and pretend you didn’t love it.
But you know, at least we waited until AFTER the election to do the thing where we ate our own. I’ve said my share of angry things to Obama this past year, about what I wanted him to do, and I’ve said my share and yours too of angry things to Biden, particularly about his utter WHIFFING of that question about marriage equality in the VP debate. But it’s a whole other thing to say “we disagree in this,” than it is to fling somebody over the side before the voting even takes place. That’s just rude.
In that way, I almost feel sorry for McCain, the angry old creep. He did a job for them, exactly the way they told him to do it, and because they were wrong about everything, because they’ve failed so spectacularly in every possible way, he can’t get it done, not the way he wanted to, not the way they wanted him to, and instead of saying thanks for fighting the fight we’re too cowardly to fight ourselves, they’re flinging him out of the side door and hoping nobody notices he was there. I’ve watched that happen to enough Democrats, good guys, to know how much it sucks.
What’s more, I refuse to believe it’s about some principled “he’s not really a conservative” stand. If McCain was ahead by 20 points in the polls, you think the Freepi would be gnawing each other’s legs off and Trevino would be whining? You really think so? Then I have a bridge in Alaska that maybe you’d like to buy. Modern conservatives don’t want to win the argument over issues. Shit, they don’t even want to HAVE the argument. They just want to wave their big foam GOP finger in somebody’s face and chant “booyah!” and do that stupid moonwalk thing wide receivers do whenever they make a mediocre catch these days.
They want to gloat. You don’t need to be upstanding and sober and principled to give your people a reason to gloat. You just need to win, and that’s why people are pissed off at McCain. He’s not winning.
A.