John McCain: From Pilot to Pol to Pig

I'm afraid (delighted, actually) that I have very little to add in the way of comment about that gravest controversy of our time: porcine cosmetics.

After all, what could possibly be left to say in the media's wake of untrammeled, full-blown scandal mode? Indeed, as yesterday progressed (devolved, actually), even the cable networks of stultifying overkill were publicly brooding about their conspiratorial role in the "controversy."

Yes, not only were the media slowly, gradually, eventually embarrassed to the point of on-air self-examination -- Well, gosh, Chet, have we made complete fools of ourselves today?; Well, gosh, David, would a professional have to friggin ask? -- near the end of the day it seemed that even some of the GOP gunslingers were having their associational doubts.

I got the feeling that as the day went on (down, into the unrecoverable abyss, actually) they were getting the feeling that the mother of all political boomerangs was nearing the apogee of its arc and was close to whirling right back on them, with decapitation in mind.

In fact, I'd be willing to wager that the recent McCain-Palin bounce will be the shortest lived of all postconvention bounces, a flatlining thud coming soon at their own hands, their own design, their own egregious overreach.

We'll see, but it may well be that even the entertainment-hungry American electorate has its limits -- and that it just discovered one boundary of propriety. I retain, anyway, some slim hope of that. Say it's so, Joe. Please, say it's so.

But if nothing else, we at least discovered that Barack Obama has his limits.

Yesterday morning, in a visible but contained simmer, he finally deployed the dread L-word -- "Enough," he said of the GOP's "lies" and "phony outrage." The lipstick brouhaha is too silly even for this silliest of silly seasons, even for the clownish Republicans, said the senator in so many other words, and that's saying a lot.

I hadn't heard a presidential candidate use that word since Bob Dole, bless his dark little heart, but when Sen. Dole used it (against -- who else? -- a fellow Republican), the complaint itself had a touch of the phony outrage.

Not, however, in Obama's case. He seemed genuinely miffed, although that emotion was admixed with an equal serving of befuddled, and perhaps rehearsed, amusement. The much-ridiculed vocation of community organizing was probably starting to look pretty good to him about then; at least he'd be dealing with real adults and real problems.

One of which, of course, is the economy, if we're still using that polite word in reference to what in reality is merely an unsystematic welter of unhinged, deregulated monstrosities. Ah yes, our "economy" -- one enunciates it with a sob, a sobbing perhaps audibly similar to the Politburo's, circa 1990.

At any rate, as I was listening yesterday morning to Sen. Obama summarize the sad and sorry state of GOP politics, I was also reading the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson, who was making the widely stated case that seems as profoundly self-evident as any case can be:

"If Obama and his strategists can't reclaim the economic issue after eight years of Republicans presiding over the first recorded recovery in American history that failed to boost family incomes, and now over a slowdown that has its roots in the GOP's mania for deregulation, they ought to find another line of work. They need to ask John McCain at every turn: What Bush economic policies do you repudiate? Where have you broken with Bush on the economy?"

Yet events literally of the day, precipitated by that lipstuck non-event of the preceding day, made me in turn rethink the self-evident nature of that case.

To "ask" John McCain anything at what appears to be this, his dishonorable low point of no return, would further appear to be a complete waste of Obama's time. For clearly he is not dealing with adults; he is, rather, merely suffering the characteristically manufactured stunts and tantrums of incorrigible GOP infants.

Hence why bother asking what policies McCain repudiates or where he might have broken with Bush? Why ask him anything? Ask, Mr. Obama, and you'll only get the same infantile responses: from grossly despicable ads about your eagerness to teach sex to kindergartners to his running mate's lying about that boondoggle of a bridge -- a classic "example of a candidate staying on message even when that message has been publicly discredited," noted the Post yesterday.

Or something about lipstick.

No, McCain is proving to be a swine, all right, and you know what they say about wrestling that species.

So don't bother asking him anything, Sen. Obama. Just dismiss him as the frivolous porker of a fraud he's become and get on with your own direct message.