House of Eratosthenes

I’m not sure whether to be encouraged by this or not. I think not. Prepping for this post, I was doing a Google search for a link I could use to properly credit Dennis Prager’s unofficial motto, long one of my favorites, “I prefer clarity over agreement.” In the first page of hits I found some flotsam and jetsam that related to my point only weakly, and then a good strong correlation in a Right Wing News article done up by some guy…who is me. It’s over three years old, flush with the disappointment of President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain. I point to another article that’s bringing back a 404 error now, although Miss Attila’s referring work is still up and well worth reading. It has to do with the need for unity within the conservative movement.

To which I say,

…the Devil’s in the details…Once you’ve made agreement more important than clarity, it’s a treacherously short road to that tragic state of affairs in which the substance of what you have to sell, is nothing but a distant memory, and all you’re left holding is a package and a label.

It becomes relevant today because blogger friend Rick notices the problems involved in what has lately been said by the recent loser of that election from three years ago. McCain, to his credit, can be counted on to do his darnedest to score some wins for conservatives when & where he can — right up until the conservatives start to define what makes them better than the opposition. And then he’ll turn around and lay down some friendly fire. He’s very reliable about this, and the civility leash upon which he has the conservative movement staked to the ground, seems to myself and others to be impractically short.

The problem is exactly the way I defined it three years ago: “All you’re left holding is a package and a label.” The real tragedy is that McCain was standing for something in 2008, but too many people didn’t understand what it was, and I don’t think McCain understood what it was. It made good sense to choose Sarah Palin as the running mate, and it made almost as good sense to bring Joe The Plumber into the campaign. The message, which McCain utterly failed to crystallize, and needs no special effort for crystallization now, is: We cannot afford to live, long term, in an America in which non-producers tell producers how to produce. Palin did not bring mobility to this message by being the Governor of Alaska. She brought it by means of her experiences, including breaking her hand hauling fish aboard a boat for her husband’s business. If America needs anything right now, it needs people in these beltway offices whose hands once smelled of fish guts. That, by itself, most assuredly will not fix the problems. But it would be a start. It would address what is the original sprouting seed of those problems.

Because — and this is well worth pointing out — when we put people in charge who’ve never actually created anything, we start valuing hard work less and less, and then we value character and integrity less and less, and then we end up under the leadership of scumbags. Character and integrity, remember those, the driving reasons behind choosing John McCain to carry the conservative banner? And yet John McCain won’t let anyone in the conservative movement call anyone else a scumbag. Even when it’s important.

John McCain slammed Newt Gingrich Thursday for calling Mitt Romney “a liar,” accusing him of crossing the line of “something that we don’t do in politics.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to call your opponent a liar. That’s just something we don’t do in politics unless you certainly have some overwhelming proof,” said McCain on CBS’s “The Early Show.” The Arizona senator endorsed Romney on Wednesday in New Hampshire.

Within all the transcripts I’ve read of this interview, not once has McCain bothered himself with the details of what Gingrich said, or where Gingrich found fault with the verity of what Romney said. I cannot speculate from that, that McCain neglected it entirely; maybe he did, and the quotes generated by that just weren’t sexy enough to be picked up & reported anywhere.

But I will say, Newt’s comments do seem to deserve more respect than to be dismissed as “something we don’t do in politics.”

O’DONNELL: “You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this Super PAC that has funded that, and you said of Mitt Romney, ‘Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president.’ I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

GINGRICH: “Yes.”

O’DONNELL: “You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

GINGRICH: “Well, you seem shocked by it! Yes. I mean, why – “

O’DONNELL: “Why are you saying he is a liar?”

GINGRICH: “Because this is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.”

My gripe here — the foundation for my point, which is, again, that John McCain is a negative stencil-template defining exactly what kind of candidate the Republicans should try not to nominate this time — is this: John McCain has just manufactured a conflict. It is a conflict of the sort I was defining three years ago, the Dennis Prager conflict between clarity and agreement.

Republicans did what he said; they nominated him. And this next point deserves some special emphasis: John McCain’s way of doing things, is not conducive toward clarity or agreement. It is a double-loser. The conflict did not exist before McCain spoke up. So his remarks undermine the value of both truth and unity.

He does this repeatedly. And he does it with ignorance. Rick provides a link to a report of an earlier incident that took place during the 2008 campaign:

Bill Cunningham, who hosts “The Big Show” with Bill Cunningham, a local program here that is also syndicated nationally, was part of a line of people lauding Mr. McCain and revving up the crowd before his appearance here before several hundred people at a theater here.

He lambasted the national media, drawing cheers from the audience, for being soft in their coverage of Mr. Obama compared to the Republican candidates, declaring they should “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.”

He went on to rail, “at one point, the media will quit taking sides in this thing and start covering Barack Hussein Obama.”
:
Afterward, however, Mr. McCain held a scheduled news conference and immediately addressed the comments, evidently informed by his aides about what had happened.

“It’s my understanding that before I came in here a person who was on the program before I spoke made some disparaging remarks about my two colleagues in the Senate, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton,” he said. “I have repeatedly stated my respect for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, that I will treat them with respect. I will call them ‘Senator.’ We will have a respectful debate, as I have said on hundreds of occasions. I regret any comments that may have been made about these two individuals who are honorable Americans.”

Responding to questions from reporters, Mr. McCain said he did not hear what Mr. Cunningham said, saying that when he arrived, Mr. Portman was on stage.

So McCain, you see, didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. I’m not using that as an expression. I’m saying it as a statement of fact.

Is anyone besides me catching the irony here? McCain, and politicians like him, are trying to sell a certain aspect of appeal: Gentlemanly behavior, with self-policing in force. Someone associated with McCain’s campaign says something uncivil, the top dog will deliver a dressing-down. Yes, people do want this. Count me among the people who would like to see this. But you see, McCain is probably not the candidate who provides this because, appearances being any indication, he just doesn’t even get it.

See, the self-policing gentlemanly candidate who works this way, would wait until he got all the facts. McCain gave the game away when he pounced like a jaguar in waiting the first time there was the slightest hint that such an event might have taken place. This proves he had a narrative in his head and wanted to fulfill his role in it. His reasons were pragmatic and not altruistic. In February of 2008, he was not the nominee yet, but he was a wounded veteran and a POW and respected by friends & foes alike as a good, decent man of principle.

Knowing what we know now, we have to question all of it. Which is a great tragedy. But it’s unavoidable: John McCain is so eager to fulfill these narratives and broadcast these messages about his positive personal attributes, that he will block any messages being sent or received about anything else, including why exactly we would suffer under an Obama presidency or why Republicans make better leaders and support better policies than democrats. He won’t allow the message to get across. Not because communicating the message would flunk his litmus test for civility. But because communicating the message initiates another iteration of the narrative, and McCain will fulfill the rest of the narrative by laying the smack down even when he doesn’t have the facts about what took place, just to demonstrate his gentlemanly, self-policing behavior.

Well, when you have to prove the same thing about yourself over and over again, the likelihood that it actually applies, logically diminishes.

That all is a mouthful. There may be ways to outline the point in fewer paragraphs, but as our other blogger friend in New Mexico is fond of pointing out, we here at The Blog That Nobody Reads don’t have an editor on our payroll and sometimes it shows. It’s not a simple point. But this is: If someone’s calling someone a liar, and you’re saying that’s something that just isn’t done in politics, without taking the time to find out why it was said, then this is a confession that telling the truth is “something that just isn’t done in politics.” It’s just like Rick was saying. And this leads to another irony: John McCain is supposed to be a man of character. But what is that, exactly, if it doesn’t have something to do with standing up for truth? Here’s McCain, from all I’m gathering, standing up for lying without being called out on it. He was chosen to be the nominee for the Republican party because he has morals, standards, respect. This is no small thing; it is written in history, so he will be the 2008 Republican nominee forever. He’s still serving as a Senator with the letter “R” after his name, so he still represents the Republican party. How good do the Republicans look, with their standard-bearer for personal integrity making the case for lying “in politics,” and not being called out on it?

Not being a vet, I cannot sink to the level of questioning McCain’s moral code; I still have to respect him as someone who has made sacrifices I have not made.

But it is fair game, I think, for me to criticize him for thoughtlessness. And he’s shown it. Many times. Exactly this way. Sadly, it has become, even though he might protest against this I think, his most reliable trait. He stands for a moral code that isn’t moral, and doesn’t help us as a country. Republicans cannot, to coin a phrase, “speak truth to power.” Conservatives cannot speak it to RINOs or semi-conservatives or phony-conservatives. From all I’ve observed about McCain’s behavior, since I’ve been able to see it, if the speak-truth-to-power thing runs in the opposite direction, he’s completely cool with it and doesn’t have a single problem with it.

So the irony is this: You can’t demonstrate that one thing is better than another thing, without appreciating differences in things. It is, by its very nature, an exercise in disunity. McCain opposes this only selectively. He has much to say about it when conservatives show their way is the better way; he blows the whistle on this. But he blows said whistle to show he’s ready and willing to blow said whistle, to show us something about himself, thereby engaging in exactly the same behavior he is declaring to be unfit and incompatible with that strong, principled personal character he has. He’s calling out a contrast in order to make himself look good compared to other Republicans. Hey, it worked, why not keep doing it? But he won’t let his party do exactly that same thing to show why it is better than the other party.

So the problem with John McCain is that he wants to show people he has strong personal character, without allowing it to amount to anything.

When are people going to wake up and realize that McCain himself made McCain irrelevant?
- james | 01/07/2012 @ 12:03

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Devil’s in the DetailsFriday, January 6th, 2012

Devil’s in the Details
Friday, January 6th, 2012