America breathes a sigh of relief. In far off Pakistan US forces have finally caught up with the world’s most wanted man, Ossama bin Laden. It is a benchmark in the McCain Presidency that even many supporters now believe is half over.

Spontaneous celebrations in Times Square and elsewhere were a shot in the arm for the Administration that has seemed unable to put a foot right lately. Mired as the nation is in a new war in Libya and a lesser action in Syria dubbed a “forceful resoration of order” by some anonymous and perhaps now unemployed McCain flack, the response was heartfelt. In front of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, John Sidney McCain took the photograph that will certainly define his career if not his lifetime, mingling with boisterous crowds at midnight, casually dressed, and draped in flags by the crowds to the consternation of the Secret Service.

But if there is to be a persistent political benefit from bin Laden’s new residency status, it had best materialize quickly. The initial reports of Osama’s death were followed by details that were sometimes contradictory. At first it was reported that bin Laden’s body was quickly disposed of at sea after identification. Angry denunciations of a pointless provocation at home and a desecration abroad preceded a correction, that Ossama was “buried at sea in accordance with islamic tradition”, a custom difficult to corroborate. While the nation cheers, jokes and gloats many prominent voices raise objections. Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan rule the airwaves. Moore denounces the act as illegal. Sheehan denounces it as fictional. Each view is equally enraging to the pacifist throngs that have followed McC constantly since his election. Those with their paychecks bound up with their electability applaud McCain loudly but are silent on the complaints. Representatvie Frank declines to endorse “conspiracy theorists” but supports their  right to be heard and taken seriously. The apparent McCain arch-rival, Senator Obama STILL stinging from his and Hillary’s controversial loss in ’08 enthusiastically backs the assault on bin Laden’s compound but wonders if the fugitive was really given an opportunity to surrender as has been reported and wants to see any video evidence. He speculates that a firmer hand with Pakistan, as he had always favored, would have precipitated a simple extradition of bin Laden, who was obviously enjoying official hospitality for years.

Early polling is not encouraging. The “bump” that pros would ordinarily expect has been of a no-wake level. Non-trivial pluralities on Left and Right declare a stubborn resistance to the official line, some claiming that bin Laden is not dead, some that he has been dead and in a Pentagon freezer for years. Also popular is the notion that OBL is a fictional construct all together or a professional spy, attached to the ISI, CIA, Mossad or perhaps the Russians. In any event there are burgeoning cracks in the public view of the narrative that render it less than up to the mighty task of reversing McCain’s slide.

The year has not been kind to McCain. A spate of flooding, tornadoes and other vicious weather occuring in a slow grind across diverse parts of the nation have produced resentments, deprivations, mass evacuations and economic disruption known by the simple shorthand of McCain’s Katrina. Most damagingly, the wan recovery from the Great Recession remains a recovery only in the most technical statistical terms. Growth exists but is miniscule. Unemployment is at double digits. Inflation rages while the very definition of inflation is debated, unpersuasively, by McCain supporters professional and amateur. McCain remains in Iraq and Afghanistan as always pledged and these projects meet less than disaster, but other foreign policy decisions have been crushing failures. The closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and the transfer of those detainees to a prairie prison in Thomson, Illinois has done nothing to mollify the anti-warriors. This is just a near-arctic Gitmo, they intone. Even as McCain redefined the prisoners’ status to allow ordinary rules of criminality to obtain in their cases, it is denounced as too little and far too late. Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s ACLU attorneys are able to get a habeas corpus petition to release him. The uproar gives McCain no choice but to re-redefine the prisoners back to their former condition. Necessary but illegal and clumsy, are the most positive reviews of that debacle.

Even those disposed to back a strong military action are little moved in electoral terms by McCain’s triumph. McCaincare, the failed auto-industry bailouts, the fraud ridden bank bailouts, stimuli of various description and astronomical deficits near one trillion dollars produced the TEA Party phenomenon that is audibly gnawing away at the timbers of the Republican Party. Last November’s narrow takeover of the House by Republicans was no great news for McCain, the principle target of TEA approved ire. Aligned with a few deficit hawk Democrats the anti-spending coalition rules over the House and pokes its head into the Senate. McCain declares that we need a hike to the debt ceiling. It seems unlikely that he will get it. The TEA rowdies want to starve the beast McCain believes he has saddled. McCaincare is a dead letter, as much under assault in the Legislature as in the courts and in the streets. The costs of the wars mount while the goals seem evermore remote. Ron and Rand Paul tagteam McCain to furious ovations. Come home, America, is their classic and simple call.

The taking of Ossama’s scalp would seem especially beneficial in the area of military affairs, McCain’s wheel house, but the situation there is so bad that even the elixir of bin Laden blood is weak medicine. While McCain prosecutes the war in Afghanistan and continues enforcing order in Iraq he is subject to snipers of his own. Most famously Obama from the Senate and Hillary Clinton from her post at the UN both maul McCain at every opportunity with whatever implement. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, McCain is a mad warmonger, ideologically wedded to an empire of Big Oil. On Mondays and Wednesdays, he is a weak-minded vacilator, letting the Pakis, the REAL villains, double-talk and run him over. Weekends he is a dreamy idealist getting his just wages with the bloody exposure of his aid to Iranian rebels, his widening war in Libya that STILL has not collared or killed Khadaffi and the new project in Syria that threatens to make the botched American intervention that left a wounded and sulking Mubarak in power in Egypt look like a good result.

During all this McCain continues the cynical and counter-productive enterprise conceived as a campaign strategem that he has pushed to this day. That is the forceful assertion of a bright line distinction between himself and George W Bush. McCain’s admission of Bush’s rectitude in matters of security was demonstrated by his continuing of those policies while he resisted ever speaking the name. It has availed him little. On the streets of our cities and universities Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin are effigized and immolated indifferently. Indeed it would be a poor showing at a peace rally if all four were not embroiled. Still, whether from raw political tactics or the genuine disfavor McCain has held W in for a decade, the POW President made a hobbyhorse of ending “torture”, closing Guantanamo and, until stopped by a Democratic House, holding civil trials for Gitmo inmates. Each has exploded in his face and now his trophy of Osama’s head (recreated, of course) threatens to do the same as the news comes out that the waterboard induced testimony produced in the American Gulag is what made the bin Laden raid possible. Gleeful media types slap McCain’s gunslingers upside and downside. From the Right they declare that Bush is vindicated. From the Left, that McCain is indicted. Either way, it is McCain who shows the bruise.

No one ever said the Presidency was a slough job. Perhaps John Sidney McCain will prove to be up to it yet. Perhaps he has a trick or two up his sleeves. Then again, perhaps this was it. This is the most galling of all the putrid speculations thrown up by the splash of that white-wrapped bundle into the sea: the seditious notion that it has all been a stunt. A Wag The Dog for our day. Currently only the fringiest of the fringe has broached this though even some big players like Howard Dean and Obama have cautiously questioned the timing of the whole mess. Whatever can be done to squelch this idea from percolating, however discretely, up until the next election, it must be done now. If McCain is dead in the water then so too is McCainism. Cap and trade, immigration reform, the McCain military missions, the new campaign spending laws, ending the Bush tax cuts, McCaincare, Social Security reform…. all these projects have come to a squealing and inglorious halt. If the nation cannot survive without them we are in dreadfully perilous shape. If the nation cannot survive with them, our prospects are good.

Mr. McCain’s, not so much.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: politics & government, terror & war // 1 Comment »