Memory hole

Get John McCain off of a simple formulaic message, and he often stumbles. Does this mean he's suffering from dementia? I don't know, but he didn't always do this. A Bill Clinton style policy wonk he never was, but he must have made sense on the 2000 straight talk express, when he wasn't getting so much careful political management. Else what did they talk about? Sex, drugs, and Abba?

What I really have trouble understanding is how McCNN can point to Ronald Reagan's famed age quip in 1984 without acknowledging the ample evidence that Reagan was already suffering from cognitive decline at the time, and of course, it's public record that he did turn out to have Alzheimer's. But here's the sum total of all Reagan references:

Or McCain might take a page from Ronald Reagan, who was 73 when he ran for re-election in 1984. During a televised debate against Walter Mondale, then 56, Reagan famously began by saying, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I will not hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him." The audience laughed. Reagan went on to win the election.

Did the reporter think that wasn't relevant? Or did he just not want Tucker Bounds or Nicolle Wallace yelling at him and his editor?

Analyze this

McCain mouthpiece and long-time Duhbya aide Nicolle (sic) Wallace says "Barack Obama falsely accuses John McCain of running for George Bush's third term," and wants the media to do something about it. Yeah, blood 'n' guts McCain is such a maverick that he's larding his team with more and more Bushist political operatives. We all know how urgently they want radical change.

What does Nicolle come up with to differentiate her new product from her old product? Packaging!

While she emphasized that both are "hardworking men," she also added that "they are totally different people." One such difference is McCain's insistence on being in the middle of the media scrum, a setting that Bush did not often enter.

It's good to know that their personalities and taste in conversation set them apart. After all, Duhbya does have a shitty personality, and that's the only reason he ran the country into the crapper.

For all this bullshit, McCNN breathlessly provides a conduit for nothing but McCain campaign spin, and they have the gall to label it "analysis". It's progress of a sort, I guess, that the media are labelling their abject transcriptions as analysis to distinguish them from actual news, but a more honest label would be "press release".

(For some reason, I hope the Mark Preston who wrote this is not the kid I knew from Kenesaw Dr. forty years ago, but I've always been willing to bust the chops of my friends, anyway.)