Image is everything

In the wonderful film The Princess Bride, the Vizzini character, masterfully acted by Wallace Shawn, repeatedly, inappropriately, and hilariously uses the word “inconceivable”. After several malapropisms, Inigo Montoya, played by the brilliant Mandy Patinkin, finally states “You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means”. It is a classic line, delivered with a look that said (in the less eloquent parlance of this here website), “you don’t have any idea what the fuck you are talking about, do you? We just watched that dude scale a cliff free-hand and the only you seem to be saying is that it was impossible for him to do so”. Sadly, such is the case with the media, John McCain, and his bullshit “independent” label that seems to follow him regardless of how he votes, what he says, or any other relevant yardstick of the guy’s politics.

Make no mistake, McCain is a hardcore rightwing conservative, straight up, no chaser. The dearly departed and much missed Molly Ivins once said of McCain that he is “so conservative it makes your teeth hurt”. And yet, this misperception of independence persists. The media seems to think that a fellow who is pro-business, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and a war hawk to boot can somehow be absolved of those positions because he occasionally bucks his party. That view is weird, obnoxious, and by my reckoning, applicable only to McCain; perhaps, however, that worm may be turning.

The AP, in a piece from the Better Late Than Never file, attempts to set McCain’s conservative record straight.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The independent label sticks to John McCain because he antagonizes fellow Republicans and likes to work with Democrats.

But a different label applies to his actual record: conservative.

The likely Republican presidential nominee is much more conservative than voters appear to realize. McCain leans to the right on issue after issue, not just on the Iraq war but also on abortion, gay rights, gun control and other issues that matter to his party's social conservatives.

Bravo to the AP for actually, you know, reporting. Would it were so prevalent elsewhere in the press, we might actually know something of Saint John aside from this manufactured persona of tough guy, no-nonsense truth teller. Seriously, is it too much to ask that McOldGuy* face the same scrutiny as Obama’s preacher? What, a boy can dream can’t he?

(*credit to the brilliant and gorgeous Lo for McOldGuy moniker - I am not that good)