John McCain's The Straitjacket Express

What a week -- the mother of all bad weeks (so far) -- for John McCain. 

It was as though all his ill-fated stars of undisciplined messaging, political insensitivity, the actual truth of safety-net Republicanism and, to be diagnostically frank, a touch of pixilated senility conspired in alignment against him.

The McCain camp's omissions and misfires over, say, Viagra and the Pittsburgh Steelers were bad enough, and in an otherwise normal week of gaffe competition would have earned his campaign the bronze, maybe even the silver. But John and advisers were intent on entertaining us with far more than that, bless their little gilded-gaffe hearts.

For example there was, of course, the lugubrious Phil Gramm, drawling on and on like an antebellum plantation owner in thorough disgust over the great and shiftlessly unwashed, who just don't appreciate how good they've got it.

In his figurative white suit and rocking chair, with mint julep in hand, the former senator from Texas informed the press, on the behalf of Admiral McCain, that what we've got here is merely a failure to communicate.

Those people out there -- well, you know how they are -- are just a bunch of "whiners," said Col. Gramm. In fact, the whole damn nation is just a bunch of whiners, with all their problems residing firmly but only in their head.

The admiral instantly clarified that the colonel doesn't speak for him, forgetting momentarily that he hired the colonel to do just that. At any rate, Lost-Causer Gramm wasn't about to back down. "I’m not going to retract any of it. Every word I said was true," drooled Gramm.

We believe you, Phil -- not what you said, but that you believe what you said. No further clarification is necessary. Nevertheless, thanks for sticking to your muskets.

Those were the words and that was the personage that dominated media coverage this week, but in my opinion McCain himself -- since these following words came directly out of his mouth -- outdistanced Gramm in public stupidity by at least a parsec.

Starting his week of demise in Denver, McCain said at a forum that "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed."

With that, McCain had gone where no pol should ever go. It's just not wisely done, politically speaking, any more than a losing candidate would publicly insist on staying in a race because there's always the (un)happy prospect of the opposition's assassination. There are some things a pol just doesn't say or do, outside Zimbabwe. And tampering with Social Security is one of them, as George W. Bush demonstrated with (we thought) convincing finality.

McCain's keepers scurried to clear things up: The "disgrace" -- the "absolute disgrace" at that -- they said, isn't the social program itself; it's, uh, something else, one of those classic distinctions without any difference.

His staff then committed the colossal error of unleashing McCain to clarify things on his own, which he promptly sorta did/didn't the following day on CNN. "They pay their taxes, and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That’s why it’s broken; that’s why we can fix it," said McCain in a stupendous display of non sequitur.

The "fix," as McCain's Web site says with even less lucidity, for our system of social security that depends on current taxes is the redirection of taxes into purely personal accounts -- "but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept." 

I defy anyone to cogently decipher that utterly incoherent dependent clause which supposedly addresses a Social Security "fix." But some loose analysis with the aid of  political tarot cards implies just one thing: privatization. And yes, that should do it. That would really shore things up, especially on our carefree, happy-go-lucky, ever-ascending Wall Street of today.

Why Barack Obama is slinking from town-hall forum stages co-populated by a befuddled, politically suicidal mind like that is beyond me. Right, I understand, just let McCain keep digging. But a little one-on-one time might speed the process.