John McCain's Road to Perdition

It was almost shocking. Not quite the real thing, because we're largely desensitized to the unremitting pageantry of Republican racketeering, a bit like professional electricians who've been zapped so many times they scarcely even notice the sting of live voltage.

But it was, let's just say, an eye-opener:

There, Friday morning, appeared John McCain on "The View," confessing to attempted political blackmail as a defense against the charges of slander, libel, swindling, fraud, misrepresentation, mythomania, confidence gaming and character defamation.

Now keep in mind, attempted blackmail was his defense. Said McCain: "If we had done what I asked Sen. Obama to do" -- that is, hold joint, town-hall appearances -- "I don't think you’d see the tenor of this campaign" as the criminal tenor that it's become.

(Sorry, but I had to complete that thought for the good senator, whose personal ghost of forsaken honor was vengefully strangling his syntax.)

Well gee, Barack, McCain was saying, it's a damn and miserable shame that things worked out this way. But they did only because you didn't do what I "asked," and hey, I warned you that I'd carry out Jesse Jackson's castration dream if you didn't.

Blackmail pure and simple -- and that was the positive spin.

But as the Politico notes at some length, McCain's confession to attempted extortion -- which one "former adviser suggested that McCain may have convinced himself to believe is true" -- to justify other and even more felonious behavior doesn’t quite get to the honest meat of the matter.

Since what his staff is confessing to, as the Politico put it, is this: "We don’t care what you think."

That, in a nutshell, is how "Team McCain" is now responding to journalists who ask about the former's "dishonorable, disingenuous" campaign behavior and its "contrast to McCain’s image as a kind of anti-politician who plays fair [and] disdains politics as usual."

Said, for instance, Brian Rogers, a proud McCain propagandist: "We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it. We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain."

Which, in Rogers' subterranean and self-forgiving world, not to mention McCain's, therefore gave them the perfect right to bellow and bray like the lying asses they've become. And there you have it -- their pre-confession of how they'd govern as well: If the truth doesn't work, we can always resort to mendacity.

Damn, I know I've heard that somewhere before, and not that long ago, either.

But, at any rate, what the malignant Mister Rogers -- don't you love it?; a modern-day, Orwellian fablist for weak-minded adults -- neglected to note as the reason that "nobody cared about us" before they started lying was, quite simply, that they had nothing to offer.

And that had nothing to do with Obama's rejection of joint, town-hall appearances (which I do think was a mistake -- McCain would have been up to, what, Gaffe #138 by now?), or the woe-were-we, the-media-love-only-a-circus excuse now peddled by the McCain campaign.

No, the only reason they received little to nothing in the way of coverage before was that they possessed nothing to cover: no new ideas, no new vision, no new nothing. Theirs was the most agreeably status-quo campaign since Calvin Coolidge, and about as exciting.

And they still have nothing, other than that whole-cloth skirt that McCain is hiding and trembling behind. But that will soon wear thin. Then, as McCain's former campaign manager, Terry Nelson, told the Politico, "the focus will go back to McCain and Obama" and presto: "the biggest burden for the McCain campaign [still] will be to convey a compelling, positive vision for the country’s future."

And that, as I'm sure Obama already knows, is part of the threefold message he needs to pound from now through Election Day: Here's my "change"; with McCain there's no there, there; and yet the once-honorable gentleman from Arizona is trying to dishonorably get there through slander, libel, swindling, fraud, misrepresentation, mythomania, confidence gaming and character defamation.

If that truth doesn't work? Oh well. Just buy bonds -- war bonds.