Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet
It's all about more war for Dr. Strangelove.
Charles Krauthammer's pissed today (this being a day with the letter "Y" in it).
Surrounding him are all these wishy-washy "conservatives" abandoning the sinking McCain ship. But the Hammer's having none of it …
Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.
See, it's not because the GOP could run a lump of human excrement and Krauthammer would vote for it -- it's because he's a contrarian, and that means that he's not going to be swayed by the wisdom of the crowd. And, principled conservative that he is, he just doesn't give a damn if that stance means he never gets invited to another rubber-chicken dinner anywhere within the Beltway.
Here he expands on this contrarian streak of his …
He continues ...
I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
That, my friends, is why Krauthammer gets the big bucks. Seriously -- a beautiful single-sentence paragraph. He stands athwart those losers, damnit!
And, apparently, he has no truck …
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
He sure talks pretty, but does any of that make sense?
Sharing the WaPo's real estate today is former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson blabbering about how the "surge" in Iraq, which most Washington Post columnists insist worked, was McCain's undoing, and Kathleen Parker of the National Review writing about how it was the selection of Sarah Palin that's causing her to (possibly) bolt from the fold. Chris Hitchens didn't say anything about McCain being "erratic" -- he wrote that McCain is "someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical" and that Palin is "a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience." And Buckley, while mentioning that McCain had become "irascible and snarly," focused his criticism on matters of substance: "his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?" he wrote.
But Krauthammer's having none of it -- he knows what's really important ...
McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.
Kind of sad to see the venerable Hammer reach for such a lame talking-point. Ayers, of course, has for decades been a tweedy education professor who served as an aide to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and won the city's "Citizen of the Year" award in 1997 for his advocacy for schools. Krauthammer knows all that, but election season brings out the stupid in people, and here he doesn't bother "standing athwart" the worst nonsense of the Rush Limbaugh crowd.
Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was.
Yes, because we never heard a word from any of McCain's surrogates about …
Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.
Never heard of him.
Towards the end, as he often does, Chuck let's you know what the real deal is …
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism.
That's it. McCain won the Krauthammer vote when he sang Bomb, Bomb Iran, and nothing -- not his senior moments, his cluelessness on economic matters, his choice of running mate -- can shake the bloodlust from Chuck's loins. For you and I -- and most of America -- election 08 may be about the financial crisis, health care, energy and America's relationship to the rest of the world, but for Krauthammer it's always been all about killing brown people. Politics in general boils down to that -- even Chris Hitchens isn't that devoted.
Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Wow. Those nutty Islamofascists and Putin rearing his ugly head over Alaska apparently don't offer enough threat-sex for the Hammer -- he's actually invoking those terrible days of the Falkland Islands conflict.
Vote McCain, or Grenada may well slip into the hands of those dirty damn Cubans.
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