Through The Looking Glass Darkly.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

If Senator John McCain were the DEMOCRATIC nominee for President, the Republican Party, in the guise of Rush and Sean and Anne and Michelle, would destroy him as follows:

They’d talk about the Keating Five scandal in the context of Mr. McCain’s having a seemingly ceaseless addiction to lobbyists and they’d bring up his Dr. Jekyll then Mr. Hyde then Dr. Jeckyll then Mr. Hyde positions on everything from the war to taxes to the religious right to campaign finance reform and they’d hammer him on his inability to support or even understand the Martin Luther King Holiday and they’d eviscerate him on the circumstances of his first divorce and  a thousand other things.

Then they’d innocently ask:

How does a man with so few accomplishments and so much personal and political baggage become the nominee of the Democratic Party?

And they’d pause… waiting… like a coiled adder under a pile of dry leaves.

Next they’d casually wonder, rhetorically speaking of course, if John McCain would be the nominee for the Democratic Party… if he’d even qualify as a United States Senator…

if he’d not spent significant time as a prisoner of war.

And then one of them… I suspect it would be Malkin… would say:

“Isn’t John McCain LUCKY he was captured and tortured in Vietnam?”

Now the adder strikes and… suddenly… there’s blood all over the ground.

“Has he USED his experience at the Hanoi Hilton for political gain?”

“Given his stance on torture, could it be that he has OVERSTATED how bad it was?”

“His frequent skin cancer… the condition with his arms… ARE THOSE REAL or is it possible that he knows… without them… he couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”

“What kind of soulless, conscienceless individual could MANIPULATE his good fortune at getting to coming home when so many were left behind?”

By the time the Republicans were done with Senator John McCain there would be privileged, old, white women talking of their “captivity diets”  as they showed off designer, period-era, prisoner garb to the national press on their convention floor.

I write the above, NOT BECAUSE I BELIEVE A SINGLE DISINGENUOUS WORD (as THEY would not believe a single disingenuous word), but as fair warning.

When the Republicans try and turn Senator Obama’s personal history against him… when they attempt to make his childhood poverty and his heritage and his skin color and his struggles as a community organizer… into a suggestion of liberal guilt or of preferential treatment or, most likely, of a signal that he is a Manchurian Candidate programmed to destroy America from within… we the people will engage and retaliate with furor and speed and, if necessary, with the kind of revisionist character-assassination that has been the only thing the Grand Old Party has succeeded at in the last twenty years.

Just so we’re clear.