re:McCain

I have to hand it to him, John McCain is a likeable guy. I don't agree with him on every issue -- far from it -- but I've always liked him. He's like that really old, bumbling uncle who gives you butterscotch candies and tells you the same corny joke he's told you since you were five.

While he lacks the rhetorical vigor and flare of Barack Obama, he's very good at appealing to pathos, to the audience's emotions. McCain knows how to work the empathy angle, to make you believe he honestly cares about the "real" people he mentions in his speeches. Obama's better at appealing to logos, and it's when McCain tries to move into these appeals to logic that he loses me in contradictions and hypocrisy.

Now let's hop aboard the Double Talk Express.

First of all, did a candidate who has stated a goal to overturn Roe v. Wade just say he wants to appoint Supreme Court justices who will not "legislate from the bench"? How, exactly, do you plan to overturn a Supreme Court ruling without nominating justices who will do just that? Perhaps they're wrong, by Merriam-Webster defines legislate as "to make or enact laws." Appointing justices who will make and enact laws overturning laws you don't personally like sure seems like appointing ones who will legislate from the bench to me.

Second of all, he keeps trying to portray himself as the candidate who will free us from "paying $700 billion a year to countries who don't like us." Before T. Boone Pickens, a prominent oil man, came out and made this argument, you'd never find John "The Maverick" McCain making the same argument. But now that Americans are demanding it, McCain has jumped on the Big Green Bandwagon, ignoring his voting record and all those bills he voted against, most notably one titled, in a very straight-forward manner, "Reduction in Dependence in Foreign Oil". Hmmm. You want to reduce our dependence in foreign oil, yet you voted three years ago against a bill whose stated purpose was "To improve the energy security of the United States and reduce dependence on foreign oil imports by 40 percent by 2025"? Anyone got a pair of flip-flops I can smack together?

I also love how McCain and Palin and all those delegates with their "Drill Now" paraphanelia cling to this idea that increasing off-shore drilling will in any way lower gas prices now. Especially when one of McCain's senior advisors, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, admits offshore drilling will have “no immediate effect on supplies or prices” of gasoline in America. But it sure makes for a catchy bumper sticker.

And that's what we want, isn't it? Who cares if what he's telling you is right as long as it makes for a good sound bite.