During my short visit to Japan in the past few weeks, I felt a lingering feeling -- a constant pang of distant awareness, too vague to grasp -- as though something vitally important (or vitally apocalyptic) was missing from my life. As the days passed and I was entrenched in the vastly peaceful feeling of disconnection, I realized what it was that I had abandoned back home: The fluidly constant stream of bullshit, lies and treachery that is American politics.
Luckily, the moment I arrived back in the glorious republic to end all republics, I was bombarded by the Great American Cynicism, and I can happily say I am once again swimming in the discontent that accompanies any exposure to this wasteland of political circus clowns. And as I drove down the interstate from the airport -- grateful to be behind the wheel instead of screaming in terror as my dad navigated Asian roads -- a curious thing happened. I felt great. I felt at home. I fucking love this country!
No, not the wave-the-flag-and-masturbate-to-your-Hummer kind of love for this country. It's more the I'm-watching-a-trainwreck-and-can't-look-away kind of fascination. For some reason, I feel much more accomplished writing about the crushing depression of American politics while I'm actually in the nation in question -- not thousands of miles away, where I'm virtually immune to the fallout of fascist Republican religious fanatics preaching "small government" glory while systematically working to rape Americans of our rights to watch what we want, marry who we want and say what we want. The fight for preserving the classic American rights to freedom is just not as fulfilling on foreign soil.
That being said, I'm happy to report that, while once reluctantly acknowledging that John McCain could possibly be the closest thing to principled that any Republican has ever achieved, I've finally realized that he is just another opportunistic vulture in an endless sky of spineless, two-faced political scavengers. How do I know this? Well, in order to win his unlikely victory to our nation's highest office, he's attempting to be more Republican: That is to say, he's rejecting all his purported "moderate" beliefs about freedom and decency in favor of a discriminatory police state that is more aligned with the GOP.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that Bush has basically pissed on the Constitution by seizing people from foreign nations and throwing them in U.S. military prisons with no access to the fundamental rights granted to U.S. citizens, McCain boldly told the nation: "I think it's one of the worst decisions in history. It opens up a whole new...interpretation of our Constitution."
Interesting. Sounds like a normal response from a man who has recently discovered his undying love for the Bush administration, despite the fact that Karl Rove torpedoed McCain's primary campaign in 2000 by circulating a rumor in South Carolina that the senator had fathered an illegitimate black child (but I digress). Of course, McCain's tone on Guantanamo detainees is a bit different from his rhetoric back in 2007, when he was still a long-shot candidate and didn't have to worry about rallying his base around a guy who was basically a Democrat. Here's what he told Fox News Sunday on April 2, 2007, when asked "how (he would) fight the War on Terror differently than it's being fought now":
McCain: I would probably announce the closing of Guantanamo Bay. I would move those detainees to Fort Leavenworth. I would announce we will not torture anyone. I would announce that climate change is a big issue, because we've got some image problems in the world. Clearly, in the area of "propaganda," in the area of the war of ideas, we are not winning--well, in some ways we are behind. Al-Jazeera and others maybe, in my view--may sometimes do a better job than we are. At the end of the day, it's how people make up their minds as to whether they want to embrace our values, our standards, our ideals, or whether they want to go the path of radical Islamic extremism, which is an affront to everything we stand for and believe in.
Right. So, in 2007 McCain bitches that the treatment of Guantanamo detainees is an affront to American values, and we should just close the goddamn place, and we shouldn't torture, and oh yeah we should probably do something about the world thinking we're a bunch of brutish totalitarian hypocrites because we don't afford "enemy combatants" any legal rights. Now, just a year later and facing heavy criticism about his waning conservative credentials, McCain says granting basic rights to the prisoners -- including such outlandish ideas as hearing the charges against them or facing their accusers -- is "one of the worst decisions in history."
That's a pretty bold statement, considering the Supreme Court has put out more than its share of disastrous and misguided decisions. To name a few:
* Dred Scott v Sandford: U.S. Supreme Court rules that African Americans shipped to the United States for the purposes of slavery could never become U.S. citizens and were the rightful property of slave owners.
* Plessy v. Ferguson: U.S. Supreme Court upholds racial segregation as constitutional.
Anyway, you get the picture. McCain may have been a legitimate moderate -- and, quite possibly, very genuine in his beliefs -- at one point. But that day has long passed, replaced now by the ambitions of a career politician who believes he can ride his Vietnam torture record straight to the Oval Office. He's Bush Light, and if he wins, he'll either continue down the path of insane neo-conservatism, or he'll revert back to his moderate ways and expose himself to be the shameless con man many believe him to be. Either way, we all lose. Big time.
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