The Blindness Of David Brooks

He's sticking by the McCain he says he knows. He wants to separate the despicable lies and insane ploys that this man has been throwing into the mix in this election season as some kind of aberration. Please. He knows what he is doing: lying and lying and offering the most reckless, cynical gambits I can ever remember in a political campaign. His contempt for his oppponent is as obvious as it is unmerited.

Brooks: "He was an unfailingly candid man." So why the stream of bald-faced lies now? To give one simple example, he said on live television that Sarah Palin never received federal handouts for Alaska as governor. He lied. He has not apologized or retracted that lie.

Brooks: McCain is "a humble man".  Is Brooks really saying that a humble man would come back from Vietnam and among his first actions write a massive piece about his heroism in US News and then "write" five memoirs detailing his own heroism?  Does a humble man bring up the Hanoi Hilton even when discussing his own many houses today? Real heroes never talk about their war records. McCain has milked and milked and milked his shamelessly for political advantage from the minute he got home. Men of the Greatest Generation wouldn't dream of this disgusting exploitation.

Brooks cites his legislative achevements but omits the fact that this torture victim was critical in putting into American law the first legalization of torture of prisoners by the American government in 2006, a betrayal of ancient principles so deep only a man without any integrity at all could have agreed to it. Someone somewhere is being tortured right now because John McCain made it happen. Standing over the shoulder of the torturer is the presence of McCain, as the pain and terror of the torture victim is milked for false confessions, then used for political purposes. That is integrity?

And Brooks, of course, omits Palin: the worst act of political judgment in my lifetime. She is indefensible. By any standards and by any reasonable person. No candidate with an ounce of concern for his own country would have selected her with such insouciance, cynicism and incompetence.