Matt Taibbi: McCain Doesn't Have a Prayer

[babylonsister]

McCain Doesn't Have a Prayer

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted July 28, 2008.

John McCain can't stand sucking up to the Christian right. Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance?


Phoenix, July 13th, Sunday morning. Thank God John McCain has declared that he wants to wallpaper the continent with new nuke plants, because now the chances are better that this wretched slab of hot, birdshit-covered asphalt they call a state will be blown to hell in an accident someday. I hate this place. Once the sun comes up on an Arizona weekend, nothing moves except the occasional elderly-piloted Buick floating boatlike in the direction of some hideous megachurch.

This morning I've come to one of those monstrosities, North Phoenix Baptist Church, to witness John McCain's halfhearted offensive in his battle to win over the Christian right. On the stump, McCain talks about God less than any Republican politician in recent memory -- certainly less than any Republican I've ever seen. The guy pitches a tent visible from a mile off whenever anyone so much as mentions the military; you can almost hear the dopamine surging into his bloodstream every time someone stands up in a town hall and begins a question by saying, "Hello, Senator, my husband was a Navy pilot. . . ." And he seems positively tumescent when talking about such horrors as Al Qaeda or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But his basic stump speech doesn't contain a single line about God or religion. McCain is probably the first Republican in modern history to talk more about "green technology" than about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

While Barack Obama gives regular addresses at churches, where he comes off very like a preacher (right down to his natty blue suits and his lilting oratory), McCain's chosen stump locations are invariably VFW halls or factory sites -- where he tries to win over working-class crowds by telling them that their jobs aren't coming back. As the nominee of a party that has swept two straight elections by hawking cheap pieties and ramming one preposterous lie after another down the public's throat, McCain's agnostically bummerific public-speaking strategy is a curiosity, to say the least.

Here's the thing about John McCain, and it's never easy to tell whether this is a good quality or a bad one. He's a shitty liar. He may be willing to change his position on anything from immigration to torture to campaign finance at the drop of a hat to win votes, and he may have no problem aiming below the belt -- below the knees even -- to impugn an opponent's patriotism. But this is not a guy who can get up in front of a churchgoing crowd in Asscrack, Arkansas, and start weeping to Jesus. In fact, he appears to deeply resent the implication that he needs to genuflect to the baby savior at all. As in, "Hell, I already lived through five years of torture! You want me to do more?"

more...

http://www.alternet.org/election08/92934/mccain_doesn%27t_have_a_prayer/?page=entire

[PDittie]

1. I think my car broke down once in

Asscrack, Arkansas. Or maybe it was Asscrack, Oklahoma.

[Hestia]

7. Well that's just rude - we have no towns in Ark by that name. Contrary

to popular opinion Ark is not a Repug state, just the Yankee's who moved
into Wal-Mart country are. The rest of live in the real world.

[madaboutharry]

2. This is the best article I have read in ages.

Every word was perfect. I encourage you all to click on the link and read the entire article.

[wellst0nev0ter]

3. That's Why Taibbi Is The Only Dead-Tree Political Commentator I Read This Silly Season

Another gem

[Raster]

15. Taibbi is a genuine GEM! His electoral investigation work in Rolling Stone has been FIRST RATE!

Whenever I think investigative reporting is dead, I look to Matt. He ROCKS!

[Stevepol]

4. The only alliance that has ever mattered for Repubs is that with Diebold et al.

"John McCain can't stand sucking up to the Christian right. Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance?"

This is one of the favorite myths of the MSM: that the reason Bush "won" in 04 was the Christian right. But the numbers weren't there in 04. The only way they could have given Bush the kind of numbers he supposedly got was if, exactly 18 years before the election, they had been breeding like rabbits on viagra so that the numbers would have swollen to fit the voting machine data at just the precise moment of the 04 election. Afterwards of course the rabbits got off viagra and lost a little of their propensity for proliferation so they could get back to the business of picketing abortion clinics and writing LTTE about how the Christians in the country are "victims" of press bias and liberal schemes to disenfranchise them with hordes of illegal aliens voting.

The Christian right won't help McCain any more than it helped Bush. Diebold et al. will without question manipulate the election. If the election is enough of a landslide, it might not be enough. But the election will definitely be manipulated.

Bush actually lost in 04 by about 3% I think, if the exit polls are to be believed, and I've never seen any convincing reason they should not be believed. Certainly they're far more trustworthy than a vote count that takes place on completely insecure and easily manipulated machines where the manipulation can be carried out at leisure by insiders or in ten seconds by hackers or others in completely undetectable ways and where the result either can't be verified or for all practical purposes is never verified through audits of actual paper ballots.

[janethussein]

5. OUTSTANDING !

It's about time a journalist wrote this truth about McCain. I have been saying these very things to my Repuke "friends for McCain." I see no signs of "Christianity" anywhere inside or outside of McCain.

Looking forward to that Religion Forum with Rick Warren where McCain and Obama will be speaking. I fully expect McCain to have to bow out for "scheduling problems."

[Mopar151]

6. Kudos to Matt Tabbi

This guy can say more in a sentence than most can in a page. A worthy successor to Hunter Thompson as our National Lancer of Boils on the Ass of Democracy.

[nancyr]

8. Priceless!!!

[tomreedtoon]

9. Follow the link, read the whole thing. Then think...

One of the big problems of progressives like Taibbi is their ingrained racism and hatred of rural people. In the complete piece he calls the people in red states every variety of hick there is, implying that they would gather around any burning cross or gun store for worship.

Okay, progressives. How do you treat these people? Like ignorant peasants that have to be shut up and suppressed by force, since they are clearly not as smart, stylish and good as we are? Or do you show them some compassion, try to understand their problems, and lead them into the light? The second solution has not been tried by anybody, since most progressives wouldn't dirty their hands.

[treestar]

10. Progressives try, they really do

Far RWers are so stubborn. They have to be right. So you can't lead them into the light that easily.

[tomreedtoon]

14. We need someone to lead the way.

And while Obama may begin that process, he can't lead that battle. Once he establishes that being progressive is not traitorous, progressives will feel empowered to go out and face the betrayed and deluded. But of course, it's not going to happen until Obama's elected...and that may be a harder road than anyone here likes to believe.

[Doctor_J]

11. The GOP is stumped - they're running an mean, amoral adulterer

against an actual "walk the walk" Christian, and the actual good people among fundies are catching on to their duplicity.

[underpants]

12. I was just going to post this

While Barack Obama gives regular addresses at churches, where he comes off very like a preacher (right down to his natty blue suits and his lilting oratory), McCain's chosen stump locations are invariably VFW halls or factory sites -- where he tries to win over working-class crowds by telling them that their jobs aren't coming back. As the nominee of a party that has swept two straight elections by hawking cheap pieties and ramming one preposterous lie after another down the public's throat, McCain's agnostically bummerific public-speaking strategy is a curiosity, to say the least.

The Republican party returned to power at the beginning of this decade thanks to a brilliantly innovative political hybrid represented in its most advanced form by the Bush-Cheney ticket -- a high-tech engine of ruthless neocon capitalism wedded to a half-literate aristocrat dunce hiding his alcoholism in born-again Christian platitudes. Add corporate money to fundamentalist-Christian demographics in a country as dumb and superstitious as America, and you can vaporize a century's worth of Al Gores and John Kerrys.

The marriage of fundamentalist Christianity and the conservative movement has been a powerful force in world affairs. It has been the best smoke screen the archpriests of supply-side economics could possibly have had, giving Wall Street a populist in with the very people victimized the most by their union-busting, deregulatory policies. It turned out, for decades, that Bible-thumping Americans didn't mind having their jobs shipped to China, so long as someone was worrying about the air supply to Terri Schiavo's brain lump. As political cons go, this was the ultimate gift that kept on giving.

It all had to end sometime, though, and that sometime might be now. Nervous, white, sexually inhibited Protestants with fourth-grade educations are becoming a smaller and smaller share of the country's population, and the Christian right is increasingly frustrated with the Republican Party's failure to transform America into a fundamentalist caliphate.

[knitter4democracy]

13. Of course he's upset--he's in Phoenix.

I couldn't stand that city when I was there in college. We spent most of the term on the Rez in Chinle, and that I loved. He needs to get off the beaten path and re-center himself around the sage brushes and rocks. :)

I'm still consistently surprised that Christians think McCain is one of them and Obama isn't. It's so freakin' obvious.