John McCain exposes the ugly, foul, pus-filled heart of Republicanism

I suppose that it was inevitable that when the Straight Talk Express went off a cliff, it would be John McCain himself who would torch it and push it off. This man's entire adult life has been about his quest for the presidency he believes is due him because he was a prisoner of war -- as if six hundred other guys just like him, only they may not have had fathers who were military hotshots, didn't have the exact same experience.

Anyone who seeks the presidency has a lot more than a spoonful of ruthless ambition. You don't run for president if you don't. But one has the sense that if Barack Obama doesn't win, he'll go back to the Senate and he'll be just fine. But if John McCain doesn't win this last battle, he'll regard himself as a failure and just wither away, a more broken man than he was after five years in a prison camp.

And that's why his campaign has grown so increasingly desperate and so unprecedentedly ugly. I don't believe in a place in the sky where you go when you die, but if there is one, I have to wonder which Lee Atwater is looking down at this smoldering wreck of a candidate -- the one who made Willie Horton the running mate of Michael Dukakis, or the swollen, tragic figure who realized when it was too late that he had some pretty ugly sins for which he had to atone before he could meet his maker.

John McCain is desperate. Everything in his life since returning from Vietnam has been about getting this brass ring. Dumping his wife for an heiress who could bankroll him. Sucking up to a man who smeared his family. Everything has led up to this moment. And now his moment, his DUE, may be taken from him by a BLACK MAN???? It's the worst wingnut nightmare, it's Jesse Helms' "white hands" ad in his campaign against Harvey Gantt come to horrific life. And to make matters worse, it's the very sucking up to the man who smeared his family that put him in this mess.

Desperate men do desperate things, and John McCain, as Glenn Greenwald notes, has no further use for the Straight Talk Express that he now feels betrayed him:

...John McCain -- speaking in New Mexico -- delivered one of the ugliest, nastiest, most invective-filled personality attacks a major candidate has ever delivered, blatantly designed to stoke raw racial resentments and depict Obama as a Manchurian candidate funded by secret Arab Terrorist sources -- a truly unstable and hate-mongering rant filled with lines like these, delivered with an angry scowl to screaming, howling, booing throngs, while Cindy McCain stood behind him shaking her head in disgust at each fact she heard about the Black Terrorist daring to challenge her husband:

I don't need any lessons in being honest with the American people, and if I did, I wouldn't seek it from a Chicago politician. . . . There's much we don't know about Senator Obama. For a guy who has authored two memoirs, he's not exactly an open book. Who is the real Barack Obama?

It's as if somehow the usual rules don't apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that . . . His campaign had to return $33,000 in illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors, and this weekend, we found out about another $28,000 in illegal donations. Why has Senator Obama refused to disclose the people who are funding his campaign? Again, the American people deserve answers.

I wonder what it is about Obama that allows "the usual rules not to apply" to him? McCain also repeatedly claimed that the fault of the financial crisis lies with Democrats who (despite controlling no branches of Government) forced banks to give mortgages to poor people who couldn't afford them (which, as we've seen, means minorities) and that Obama "aided and abetted" these practices. What are typically Rovian attack themes disseminated underneath the surface are being unleashed in their naked, unhidden form. As Marc Ambinder just put it with real understatement: "Sen. Barack Obama is, Sen. McCain said in New Mexico just now, a mystery, a liar, complicit in the economic crisis and an unaccomplished naïf, at all the same time."

There are 30 days to go before this election is over. What we're seeing explode in front of us are both the devastating fruits of eight years of unchallenged right-wing rule under the Bush/Cheney administration and the tactics of a desperate, dying, rotted movement descending further and further into the sewer in order to cling to power. The more they unmask themselves this way, the more smashing will be their defeat, the longer their banishment will be.

I'm not as optimistic as Glenn is. Americans have very short memories, Obama if he should win is going to inherit one hell of a mess, and there's nothing uglier than Americans when they're angry and fearful that their way of life is at all at risk and may not continue as it's been.