Looking At John McCain Looking At Us

John McCain has a totally bizarre way of delivering a line. This time it’s something about how we dare not let them [the Democrats, Obama/Clinton, ruin our way of life, surrender, etc.], and for some reason he repeats it twice, “dare not let them,” with a little smile and coquetteish tilt of his head.

He’s really missing the cadences of the speech, one of his many assured victory ones. He’s pompous and painfully parroting, yet strangely off on the speech’s rhythms. He’s probably unsure which state it is he’s won. CNN keeps doing this insane blurry flash-forward graphic on him, cutting to another part and point in the speech, cutting short his senile crazy old man ramblings. It’s really not fair for them to do that — give the audience the CliffsNotes John McCain, truncating his awful incomprehensible speech after the fact.

Since it’s so clear that McCain is the frontrunner, you’d think they’d have brought in someone to teach him elocution by now, or at least more than I learned in my ninth-grade speech class.

McCain’s dead-eyed stare is starting to frighten me more than Romney’s ever did. He was once an animated man, John McCain. They called him maverick. But now, like another famous man to wear that moniker, John McCain has totally lost his grip on reality, and we can see it in his wary prehensile grin. Like Tom Cruise, he’s losing his shit for us all to watch and re-watch forever on YouTube.

It’s so evident, watching him talk, watching him move, that he sold his soul for this. It’s hard, sometimes, to even look at him, as he seems to struggle to get out these words that aren’t his; this hard, hard party line. He doesn’t seem to have prepared much, or thought much about his words or the speech. Doesn’t matter, does it? Got the nomination locked up, out of right field, for his soul, because he was the only one whose name could have been held up versus Obama’s without being laughed at.

McCain turned on the creepy campaigning Republican grin when they came to fish him from the gutter, and then he tuned out. He’s a talking point full of the best pollsters and speechwriters and snakeoil salesmen leaping off the Bushwagon and onto McCain’s (admittedly, broad) shoulders full of their messages of fear and their terrifying war.

That John McCain doesn’t seem to care much himself about what he’s droning is almost more scary than really believing the rhetoric: shows how deeply, how fully, how utterly this man thinks he deserves to be President, and how he no longer cares how he gets there.

I miss the time when you could think of John McCain with a latent fondness, respect him for being a tough old coot, though I do not think that he necessarily fought in a good fight when he fought. You and I wanted to go on thinking about John McCain like the cranky-but-respectable-so-watch-your-manners-mister uncle who shouts too much at Thanksgiving and makes you help clean the guns twice, but now he’s trying to become much more than that.

Of course, we wouldn’t be having to have this conversation about McCain at all, if Bush/Cheney had come toppling down when it should have, a hundred different times over. If we were lining up now to pin liberation flowers on the noses of the officials responsible for Iraq and Katrina and Guantanamo and two stolen elections through their prison-cell bars, none of us would ever have had to think about John McCain very much at all.