John McCain's Panic Attack

I didn’t see it – I do, after all, have some standards – but the Washington Post reports in so many words this morning that the fighting John McCain appeared on Fox News yesterday in an apocalyptic fever and, no doubt, with an extreme case of under-the-table tumescence.

"We've seen this movie before in Prague and Budapest," intoned the senator about the Russian-Georgian conflict. "And I'm not saying we are reigniting the Cold War, but, this is an act of aggression in which we didn't think we'd see in the 21st century."

Yes, John, we have seen this movie before, but in Peoria, Portland and Pensacola. It was a 1950s horror flick starring the likes of every jingoistic Joe McCarthy whose only political lifeline was the promotion of paranoia and fear of domestic reason.

Oh, and a level of hypernationalistic hypocrisy that would knock even a McCarthyite’s socks off.

You really didn’t think we’d see an act of aggression like this in the 21st century, John? You, a U.S. senator who helped inaugurate this century with the champagne launching of America’s single most aggressive, unprovoked act of international roguery in its history?

When I read the formidably hyperbolic senator’s comments as bellowed on Fox News for the benefit of all the little Fox Newsies, my first thought was, There … there’s a fresh talking point of attack for the Obama campaign nicely packaged with a bow on it and everything: Senator McCain not only overreacts, he not only lacks a proportional sense of recent history, but let’s face it – he panics.

He’s not really panicking, of course. No, he’s just pandering, playing to the lowest emotions of the lowest-information voters who are barely aware or even unaware that the Soviet Menace imploded nearly one score ago. And if you think that’s a cynical exaggeration, just recall that Mr. McCain himself can’t seem to remember that Czechoslovakia no longer exists.

So he’s not panicking, he’s pandering. But what's wrong with a little creative reframing amidst the opportunistic exigencies of a political campaign? After all, throughout the summer McCain has been engaged in the abundantly distorted framing of Barack Obama, and few in the media have seemed to mind.

As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported this week, "More than anything, Mr. McCain has used this [summer] to seek a thematic spine of the campaign he intends to run against Mr. Obama" – a quintessentially Republican campaign, that is, packed full of immature inanities about Obama as the "frothy celebrity," Obama as "different," Obama as "alien," Obama as the "elitist," Obama as "effete," even (my favorite) Obama as "fussy."

And my favorite comeback? It was from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who said of McCain’s thematic riff on his employer’s elitism: "Obviously, his strategists met on the portico of the McCain estate in Sedona — or maybe in one of his six other houses — and decided what line of attack they were going to use."

What Nagourney did not report, however – and I understand, he really likes having a job – is that McCain’s developing attacks are wholly vacant of plain, simple honor, the one theme which McCain, with Annapolis-cadet solemnity, had earlier pledged above all.

So, it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, so be it. This is America, and this is American politics, and in it there is absolutely nothing so conceivably low or dishonorable or detached from reality that can’t be successfully hustled. I mean, Jesus, look who just went to the Olympics representing our peculiar brand of psychotic democracy.

Which corrals my attention back to the matter of Mr. McCain’s rather severe case of unsteady nerves. The poor man, one international dust-up – a mere dust-up, for sure, compared to what we’ve been doing around the globe – and he panics. He melts into paranoid, apocalyptic visions of Cold War scale, while frantically misperceiving a long-standing border conflict as another Czechoslovakian 1968 or Hungarian 1956.

It’s sad, but clearly his nerves are shot and his perspective is gone. What we’re witnessing in Mr. McCain isn’t determined strength, but septuagenarian panic. Or so the Obama campaign could calmly and coded-ly say, should it ever reciprocally decide to grow a "thematic spine" of its own.