The McCain Mutiny

Senator McQueeg tries to keep all hands on deck.

by David Faris

Republican voters delivered a strong rebuke to their party's conservative base by vaulting John McCain past the animated and disingenuous corpse of Mitt Romney on Super Tuesday. The trouble with this decision is that the so-called "maverick" McCain has staked his candidacy on President Bush's Iraq War and the chimerical success of the Surge. And it will be his undoing.

Baghdad's recent horrific market bombings underscored the continuing lack of basic security in Iraq, and in January, U.S. troop deaths crept up once again. Contrary to the popular notion of decadent liberals celebrating each dead American soldier with a pomegranate martini and some casual sex, no one is happy about this ongoing tragedy. But that doesn't mean we can't hold people accountable.

John McCain is as responsible as anyone for our multitrillion-dollar experience in Southwest Asian adventure tourism. His vote for the war enabled the man who slimed him in the 2000 South Carolina primary to launch a preventive war, without pretext or justification. And he has done absolutely nothing since Mission Accomplished to get us out of Iraq before the dawn of the next millennium, or to expose the crony capitalism that has turned our 51st state into a dysfunctional wasteland.

While McCain is polling well now against both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he has the advantage of a fawning media that hasn't realized the Surge has only succeeded in renting Iraq for several more bloody years. And the financial scandals emerging from the country's "reconstruction" are just starting to creep out and may make the Saddam-era oil-for-food corruption seem like a soccer mom fiddling with PTA walking-around money.

One of the big questions about McCain is whether he can keep the conservative deckhands on board the HMS Straight Talk. Will they string up Sen. McQueeg by either staying home on Election Day or voting for James Dobson? Most people in the snake-handling, tent-revival crowd will almost certainly get on board with McCain, after he is repackaged as some sort of a God-fearing evangelical. I personally can't wait to hear about his personal relationship with Jesus.

But the real John McCain is an ideological chameleon whose long stint in a Vietnamese prison imbued him with a lasting creepiness. You think values voters were repulsed by Bill Clinton? In McCain we're talking about a guy who came home from his captivity and proceeded to run around on and eventually dump his crippled wife, who had waited for him the whole time. These are the kinds of things you don't hear from the media — which spent eight years digging up every trivial detail and outrageous accusation about Bill Clinton's sexcapades.

And aside from his few departures from Heritage Foundation cult ideology, his policies mostly consist of outmoded, supply-side claptrap that he should be embarrassed peddling after the two-recession economic record of the Bush administration. His campaign literature refers to Roe v. Wade as "a flawed decision that must be overturned." And his health-care plan consists of a bewildering array of changes that, as some intern scribbled on his Web site, would end up "

Don't let anyone tell you McCain is some kind of post-partisan savior. He's just as bad any wild-eyed 700 Club true believer, and he's even worse on Iraq, where a President McCain would keep us for generations.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.