Oh Johnny, We Never Knew Ye

Let’s put it to rest once and for all—John McCain is not a nice guy.

None of the multiple-personality John McCains are company you’d want to keep. He’s a malevolent senator who was a duplicitous presidential candidate who was a self-promoted maverick who, aided and abetted by his self-promoting, syntax-fracturing running mate, made maverick a dirty word. When I think they might have added their four years of loutish stupidity to George Bush’s eight years of homogenized stupidity, I break into cold sweats.

Where were the legs on which you ran, McCain, hurroo,
When you stood for being your own man, hurroo, hurroo,
With your drums and guns and wagging thumbs,
Your gnashing teeth and your flashing of gums,
And the Palin-drone “maverick” slickly becomes
Oh Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

Let’s skip to the beginning: young John McCain was a son of privilege who was the black sheep of a family with a distinguished military legacy who distinguished himself by finishing fifth from the bottom of his 899-member Naval Academy class and crashing three U.S. military planes—before getting shot down in a fourth, which led to his capture and torture by the North Vietnamese. By all accounts he was stoic and heroic, and I have no doubt he deserved the awards and decorations and hero status he received for the physical abuse he bravely endured from his captors. But I can see how he could get under their skin. He gets under mine.

John McCain is toxic. (In school, he was known as "McNasty.") He may, by any definition, be a hero, but he serves John McCain. And it serves him now to rail and posture about the few issues he can sound knowledgeable about—earmarks and wasteful spending.

Wasteful spending is the President of the United States spending and wasting good time reaching across the aisle for a man who is a toxic waste.