World's Worst Hatchet Job

So, it started. As you would expect, like some 4 year Kubuki dance, all the appropriate journalists who write for the appropriate publications are making the appropriate noises about and against whoever is the Republican candidate is.

Nicholas D. Kristof's work on Africa is great - he should stick to that. This pathetic hit piece on Sen. McCain (R-AZ) is just, well, pathetic.

Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions, there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering.

...Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

I disagree with Mr. McCain on Iraq, taxes, abortion and almost every other major issue. He has a nasty temper, which isn’t ideal for the hand holding a nuclear trigger. For a man running partly on biography, he treated his first wife, Carol, poorly. And one of the meanest put-downs in modern political history was a savage joke that Mr. McCain publicly related about Chelsea Clinton when she was 18 years old; it was inexcusable.

Yet Mr. McCain himself would probably acknowledge every one of these flaws, and he is a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it. It is refreshing to see that courage rewarded by voters.

It is almost as if Kristof felt guilty that he had to smear mud on McCain - like he was forced to.
Nicholas D. Kristof's work on Africa is great - he should stick to that. This pathetic hit piece on Sen. McCain (R-AZ) is just, well, pathetic.

I think he will lay off McCain for awhile - McCain brings out his worst writing. However, it does help us know where Kristof's biases are. Let's see,

Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions, there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering.

...Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

I disagree with Mr. McCain on Iraq, taxes, abortion and almost every other major issue.

Ok. Kristof is therefore;
- Pro-abortion.
- Pro more taxation.
- Anti-victory.

....and from McCain's website we can take the 180-out and further determine that Kristof is;
- Pro- un-Constitutional Judicial activism.
- Anti-lobbying reform.
- Against border security.
- Loves the present immigration system (sic).
- Anti-environment.
- Anti-gun.
- Anti-NASA.

Thanks Mr. Kristof; we now know how to read your non-African stuff....

Now, who does get McCain? Christopher Buckley, for one.

And yet the sum of Mr. McCain seems (to me, anyway) far greater than the parts. How many elections offer such an inspired biography as his? And who among “us” — with the exception of Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who issued a statement saying that the thought of Mr. McCain in the Oval Office sent “chills up my spine” — would not sleep soundly knowing that the war hero was on the job calculating how to dispatch more Islamic fanatics to their rendezvous with 72 virgins, without an interlude of waterboarding, while in his spare time vetoing Senator Cochran’s latest earmark.

Mr. McCain’s speech at that big-O Overwrought conservative conference was a model of — I’m glancing at my New Yorker cartoon — mollification.

I’d love to have been inside his brain — or to have had a mind-reading crawl run across the bottom of the TV screen — as he was offering his emollient words. I’m guessing it was something along the lines of, “All right, you blinking, high-maintenance idjits, if this is what it takes, I’m willing to do it, but honestly I’d rather be doing vodka shots with Hillary Clinton.” But then defiance — defiance of the gleeful kind — is a quality I’ve always associated with conservatism.

Read it all.