The final nail in the coffin of the maverick

Of course the fact that John McCain has now decided to be a George W. Bush clone on economic policy as well as on Iraq policy won't make one bit of difference to Chris Matthews, who will continue to refer to McCain as a maverick. After all, true love of the kind Tweety has for John McCain is always delusional.

But if you had any doubts that McCain's campaign slogan should be "If you enjoyed the Bush years, you'll LOVE a McCain administration", his economic policy speech yesterday erased them:

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, spoke at length about those economic hardships and suggested he might well break with the economic policies of President Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. “It will not be enough to simply dust off the economic policies of four, eight or 28 years ago,” he said in the speech, at Carnegie Mellon University. “We have our own work to do.”

But a major component of his economic plan — like those of Presidents Bush and Reagan — centered on tax cuts. Besides making the Bush income tax cuts permanent and reducing corporate taxes to 25 percent from 35 percent, Mr. McCain called for eliminating the alternative minimum tax and doubling the value of exemptions for dependents to $7,000 from $3,500, among other recommendations. He also proposed giving taxpayers the option of filing a simpler, shorter tax form each year than is available now.

Mr. McCain even called for cutting one tax before the Republican National Convention, let alone the election: he urged Congress to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from this Memorial Day until Labor Day. He said doing so would provide “an immediate economic stimulus,” but such plans have gained little traction recently in Congress, and some environmentalists fear such a cut would encourage more people to use their cars at a time when Mr. McCain has made combating global warming a central theme of his campaign.

The McCain campaign put the cost of his tax cuts at roughly $200 billion a year, but its estimate did not include the cost of making the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would more than double that figure.

The campaign said it would offset the lost $200 billion by eliminating from the federal budget earmarked pork-barrel projects; putting a one-year freeze on discretionary spending in most federal agencies, later eliminating wasteful programs; broadening the tax base by eliminating loopholes; and spurring economic growth. But its estimate of how much could be saved with such measures was far higher than those of some other independent budget analysts.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because it's the cornerstone of the very Bush policies that have driven us into debt so huge that it's just about beyond our ability to ever pay it back and has driven us into recession. And this is also the president who has promised us that "there will be more wars" and an indefinite stay in Iraq until some undefined notion of "victory" is reached.

So....where you gonna get the money, John? Or are you just going to write more hot checks until your one or two terms are done, at which point your time here in this level of reality will be just about done and it'll be someone else's problem?

Today Maureen Dowd insists on flogging the "Barack Obama is an elitist" meme even though most actual voters don't seem to care (perhaps because they know they've been shafted by politicians and Washington pundits like Dowd). Would that she and the other multimillionaires of the Washington Press corps would stop fanning themselves long enough to point out that whatever George W. Bush hasn't done to wreck everything, the guy who has gained the label of "maverick" because at one time he worked with Russ Feingold to enact the very campaign finance legislation he now feels doesn't apply to him, cements his status as selfish, "I got mine and fuck you" empire-building neocon.

And when the whole house of cards comes down on his watch, not even Tweety's love for John McCain will save us.