McCain: Who ARE You?

Frank Rich in his Sunday op-ed in the New York Times, "The Candidate We Still Don't Know," takes a sober look at the myth.... GOP candidate John McCain.

The fairy tale.... once upon a time McCain "strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president's response to Katrina; he fought the 'agents of intolerance' of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom Delay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers."

Not!

As Rich points out, thanks to "both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press," most Americans don't know McCain, they just hear Karl Rove's resuscitated "hackneyed script" casting McCain as a maverick and renegade, raising McCain Lazarus-like from the campaign death-throes of association with the wreckage.... of country and party.... wrought by The Decider.

So, U.S. voters don't know that on the campaign trail McCain is frequently confused about policy, countries and forgets things he said only hours or days before. McCain's Straight Talk Express has detoured into the "no access" lane as the press is no longer allowed unfettered access to the increasingly muddled candidate.

It's time to separate the candidate from the myth, and discover the true McCain before we find ourselves being governed by Puff the Magic Dragon.