Rolling Stone Magazine's Expose of John McCain

As a group of us gathered around the hotel lobby television to watch the spectacle of Saturday Night Live's parody of the vice presidential debates, we realized that a McCain-Palin win would definitely give America better comedic theater, but aside from that, an Obama defeat would be a disaster for the nation and the planet.

Now Rolling Stone magazine has posted on its website a story, Make Believe Maverick, dated October 16, 2008, by Tom Dickinson, profiling a John McCain who is not fit for the presidency.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

This is must reading, along with its posting of Matt Taibbi's October 2, 2008 piece Mad-Dog Palin.

American electoral politics has never been polite or constrained. This election season is reaching new lows, however. I'm not sure how to combat the latest lies being spread by the McCain-Palin campaign, but after seeing the damage done by the Swift Boat ads to John Kerry, Obama has to fight back. According to one source, nearly all of McCain's national ads are now negative.

Obama wants to raise the level of discourse. Obama's newest ad is a preemptive strike.

All of this negativity is, of course, a distraction from the real issues: the economy and how it has punched the breath out of most of us; our stature among the community of nations; and whether as a country we will help solve the problems facing this troubled and crowded planet or whether we are the trouble itself.