Patton Oswalt:
"...McCain, someday, is going to make a great novel. He doesn't want to be a part of it, but it'll be one of the most readable things to come out of this dark spiral we've been going through for eight years...
...I voted for McCain in the 2000 primaries. I really, truly liked him. Liked him as a person, a candidate, and would have loved him as a president. He and Russ Feingold proposed one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation and managed to get enough people from both sides of the aisle to back it. That's leadership. McCain was tainted by his associations with the Keating 5, but it seemed as if he glimpsed a real darkness there, and was atoning for it. That's wisdom. I'm all for redemption, especially from people who have been to the brink...
He refused to exploit his time in the Hanoi Hilton. It seemed like an event in his life that profoundly changed him and, like a true warrior, he wasn't about to burden others with it. Wow.
And he told the religious right to go fuck themselves. Yes.
So I'm fascinated at the McCain I'm seeing now. Can't get enough of him.
...John McCain has to work every day with the people that ruined him. When he ran against Bush in 2000, a firm hired by Karl Rove did evil, racist robo-calls in the southern states. They told lies about his adopted daughter. They slandered his wife.
John McCain is working with those same people now. He has to wake up in the morning, have coffee and donuts with them, map out new strategies of hatred against his opponent. They're making new robo-calls against the black guy he's running against. The calls are just as false and racist as the ones which shredded his White House hopes in 2000. The calls in 2000 helped a drafter dodger defeat him. The robo-calls in 2008 aren't going to help him win against the black guy.
But they are winning him supporters he doesn't want.
...McCain knows the answers to the Ayers question, and the Rezko question, and the Reverend Wright question. But he knows there are people out there - the "under-informed voter" in the words of a McCain campaign advisor - who don't. And these people couldn't understand the complexities of the answers if those answers were laid out before them in block letters.
...So McCain - who knows better, and who is actually better traveled and wiser and more connected intellectually than anyone else running for president - has to go out and act just as righteously angry and mystified as people who send their ignorance up on a flare every time they speak. Proudly, defiantly, smugly ignorant of the world.
How amazing a novel would that make? John McCain, or someone like him, who finds himself in an endless, shrieking gallery of howling stupidity. And the stupidity is sentient, passionate, and looks to him for love and approval..."
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