The Bush-McCain Double Whammy; Or, In Search of a Pulse

The gang that simply cannot shoot straight may have only doubled in size, but its doubling has created something of an exponential growth in imbecilic effect.

Now, whenever George Bush isn't saying something monstrously stupid, we can always count on John McCain to fill in the gap, plus some. A whole lot of some. And when we've been especially good boys and girls, we get treated to both on the same day. Yesterday was bonus day.

First there was Bush's delightfully grotesque speech to the Knesset. I say delightful, because nothing could have pleased the Obama campaign more. It was like manna from the political heavens -- there, on foreign soil, stood an American president unsurpassed in global debauchery, lecturing and even hypocritically scolding his likely successor on the intelligent design of foreign policy. Could it get any better than this? Could it? Huh?

Well, it did, and in spades, courtesy the rootin-tootin senator from Arizona.

I heard one journalist -- and only one -- imply that Bush's speech was probably not coordinated with the McCain campaign, since the senator was (reportedly) heard grumbling about the president having rudely overshadowed his own showcase of an oratorical outline of paradise abroad (oh, and at home, too). If true -- which any healthy suspicion throws into question -- then it was indeed a case of uncoordinated assistance, and not interference, from the White House, since Bush's imbecility was the only thing to detract from McCain's.

You've already heard, countless times, the president's core attack on Obama -- all that gibberish about "Some seem[ing] to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals" and how this, the "false comfort of appeasement," is a "foolish delusion." By now you've also heard, countless times, about the rather odd contradiction in Bush's words, given his own negotiations with terrorists and radicals like North Koreans and Libyans. So I won't rehash that, except to renote that McCain was in profound agreement with our splendidly non-negotiating negotiator.

What seemed even odder to me, however, was the little-noted disparity between Bush's projected timing of global paradise and McCain's. Bush, in Israel, envisioned that 60 years from now "Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, where today’s oppression is a distant memory." Not only that, by then, at long last, al Qaeda "will be defeated." That's what he said.

This was of course welcome news, but the even better news was that Bush was 55 years off-schedule. Because while the president was walking the long road, McCain, in Ohio, was soundly whipping our foes everywhere. And in only five years.

By the end of his "first" term (right, let us not ponder the implications of that wording), said McCain yesterday, "the Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced." 

Presto. How? Well, some may say, Ah, there's the rub. But who are we to question Iraqis' inevitable bowing to an Authentic American Hero. In some sort of Capt. Picardian fashion he'll say, "Make it so," and they will make it so. Done deal. That's what he said.

But McCain also added that by then -- by only 2013 -- al Qaeda will be defeated as well. Now you may object that McCain was talking only about al Qaeda in Iraq, and not the mother ship, but if the Bush administration from shore to shore can conflate the two for years on end, then by God so can I, in one measly column.

Besides, in this instance -- yesterday's instance -- it was all incomparably fantastical nonsense anyway.

Whether suggesting 60 years or five, or defeating one al Qaeda or the other, both men were merely plucking whimsical abstractions out of absolute thin air. Neither's prognostication had even the least familiarity with reality. One took the longer view, simply because his most intense interest now is in peddling a historical vindication to come only after we're all long since dead and therefore can't confirm it; the other took the short, because only the next five months weigh on his mind.

Whatever works, whatever sounds good, whatever the natives might buy. That's the GOP motto, which is now its only official policy, as well.

For when it comes to actual ideas -- you know, actually helpful ones -- the GOP is as bankrupt as a political party can get. Its international cowboying and domestic supply-siding ideology is dead, dead, deader than Jacob Marley. But it's all it has. Since Bush's precipitous slide into the netherworld of darkest negatives, the GOP has been spinning the top of its beanie for something fresh, and it has come up stale. There is nothing new under the GOP's sun except tax cuts today, tax cuts tomorrow, tax cuts forever, accompanied by lethal doses of costly imperial militarism.

It's not just that George W. Bush is historical toast, or that John McCain will be November's entree. It's their entire ideological corpse of a party. It has nothing to offer but tomorrow's fantasies, because its past reality has been so bloody awful.