John McCain: both Faust and Frankenstein

Some folks remember Joe McCarthy as a dedicated, methodical anticommunist who almost singlehandedly shook the American public out of its postwar complacency and accommodationist stupor. Was he rough? -- perhaps too rough at times? Sure he was. But devotion to his noble cause transcended perforce the boundaries of customary gentility.

Humbug.

McCarthy merely lashed himself to a preexisting movement of bipartisan hysteria. His headline-bursting national debut -- his 1950, commie-identifying Wheeling, West Virginia speech -- caught no one by surprise more than McCarthy himself. It was mostly just an imported, cut-and-paste rhetorical performance that he thought would amuse some nice old ladies on Lincoln Day.

Prior to that, McCarthy's principal interest lay only in getting his besotted, tail-gunning butt reelected to the U.S. Senate. He didn't much care how, or on what issue. An acquaintance suggested the hobbyhorse of anticommunism -- that might be just the ticket, just what he was looking for, something to score some local press and cushion his reelection odds.

So McCarthy learned his lines and played his role, although there was precious little ideological dedication behind it, which is something most folks didn't know then and still don't. To him, his part was just one added scene of a national drama that nevertheless required all his theatrical and improvisational skills. But at its root, the play -- the game, really -- was just politics.

Everyone -- well, everyone, that is, who was intelligently schooled in the art of demagoguery -- would understand. They wouldn't take it so seriously. They would forgive him his unbridled enthusiasm because unbridled enthusiasm, after all, is what polished demagoguery is all about.

Hence McCarthy was genuinely perplexed when some of his pals in the 1950s media began shying away from him and expressing rather unsubtle indications of disgust.

Hey, he would tell them, it's just politics, guys. You know that. You know I'm not a bad guy. You know I don't really mean a lot of what I say. I'm just playing a necessary part here.

Why, he would wonder aloud, is everybody getting so mad at me?

He was that out of it.

And that is surely the longest introductory point to the main point I've ever written.

John McCain has created a monster from his gullible, clueless, overemotional base. He and his write-on-me-what-you-will running mate pumped them full of demagogically outrageous extremes, just for the desperate politics of it. He needed something, anything, to save his political butt, and portraying Barack Obama as some sort of sleeper-cell terrorist seemed like a good idea.

The hysteria was preexistent, and he soon discovered the few trial balloons floated to test the issue on which the hysteria was based would indeed amuse the media and capture its wholehearted interest. And they would understand -- it's just politics. All McCain had to do was unleash his uncreative tactics team to cut and paste from campaigns past, then memorize some lines and stoke the fire.

Nothing could have been easier, except it worked way too well.

McCain, I imagine, never dreamed that so many people could possibly be so stupid. How, I can further imagine McCain asking himself, could these rather garden-variety nincompoops actually, genuinely, authentically ingest the idiotic notion that the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States is a goddamn unAmerican, antiAmerican terrorist sympathizer?

How goddamn nuts can you people get? This was just politics. I -- McCain, that is -- thought you'd understand.

And what the hell's with the media? They were playing right along, acting their customary role of sophisticated, above-it-all observers, and suddenly the ratings-grabbing ingrates turn on me in disgust and take me to task for being too rough.

All of which shot my negatives right through the Capitol dome. And now I find myself having to dial it all back, assuring the assembled cretins that my opponent is in fact "a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues," and that there's no reason to be "scared" of the presidential nominee from the oldest political party in the world.

Jesus Christ! you absolute morons. Wasn't selling my soul to the seductive gods of demagoguery enough? Couldn't you see I was just playing a game from a prescripted position? That this was only the stuff of politics -- that I was no more dedicated to reversing your invented complacency than Joe McCarthy was hot on the heels of actual communists?

Tail-gunner Joe died a broken, alcoholic wreck of a man less than three years after he was officially marooned from the national stage. But I won't wish that on you, John. I'll be more humane, and merely wish you a nice, long, happy retirement in one of your dozen swanky homes -- even though, just like Joe, you went way too far.