Billmon: The Great White Hope. First piece I've seen since my favorite blogger shut up his Whiskey Bar. Good summary of McCain's every-shifting political positions. Starts off like this:

The media's moment of disillusionment with John McCain appears to be at hand. Even Joe Klein has finally noticed that McCain's profile is beginning to resemble the endomorphic shadow of his backstage advisor, Karl Rove, not one of the faces on Mt. Rushmore.

It's all very predictable -- about as predictable as the media's abrupt discovery in the summer of 2005, as New Orleans sank beneath the waves, that the president of the United States was, gasp!, an incompetent boob.

But anyone who's studied McCain's career with any intellectual detachment at all (as opposed to the hagiographic tendencies of his media cheerleading claque) could have told you: The truth about John McCain is that he'll do just about anything and say just about anything to win. He always has. He's just been more clever (and cynical) than most in how he goes about it.

And concludes:

Now, finally, all that hard work and twisting and turning have paid off, and McCain IS the GOP establishment candidate. In April, as Clinton and Obama were tearing into each other (or rather, as she was tearing into him) the McCain campaign clearly saw an advantage in positioning their guy above the fray, as the "kinder, gentler" candidate -- the better to pick off supporters of the loser in the Democratic primary race. Thus McCain's promise to run a "respectful campaign." (He didn't explain that what he meant was respect for HIM.)

But McCain and his new team of Rovian handlers now realize they won't have a prayer in November unless they can motivate the conservative base and (to use Lee Atwater's charming phrase) "strip the bark" off Obama. And they have to do it NOW, so McCain can pivot back to a softer, more upbeat message in September.

So that's exactly what McCain is doing -- instantly, unapologetically, without shame or embarrassment. His enormous cynicism about the political process and his contempt for the voters -- not to mention his vast sense of self-entitlement -- have led McCain to take exactly the same low road as the Bush family and its various henchmen (Atwater, Rove): Whatever works; whatever it takes.

And so it's finally dawning, even on some members of his media "base" (ever the hapless clowns in our political theater of the absurd) that McCain isn't quite the straight-talking, straight-shooting military man of honor they thought he was. The White Knight has morphed into the Great White Hope -- the GOP machine's last, desperate chance to avoid the mortal humiliation of being defeated not just by a Democrat, not just by a liberal, but by a liberal Democratic black man.

Some of the suckers are even starting to suspect McCain's been lying about them, too. Despite the cozy chats on the Straight Talk Express, the Arizona barbeque weekends, the cheerfully misogynist jokes and the teary-eyed moments when John tells one of his patented POW stories -- despite, even, the donuts with sprinkles -- he isn't actually their friend at all. In fact it's pretty obvious he despises them almost as much as he despises a system that forces him to pander both to them and to the voters.

This is followed by hundreds of comments, more about Billmon than about McCain, but here's an exception:

Cheney, like Kissinger before him, is at least goal-driven. He has a (skewed, twisted, and sociopathic) vision of how he thinks the world should be.

Bush and McCain, on the other hand, are ego-less creatures of privilege, narcissistic personality disorders. Lacking an ego (in the Freudian sense), they accumulate power solely to maintain their deeply-held illusions of self-image.

They do manifest somewhat differently. Bush has never, ever, EVER admitted he was wrong about ANYTHING. McCain, on the other hand, apologizes every time he gets caught -- but the apology is utterly insincere. It's not even halfhearted . . . it's an insult, and the fact that others believe it only reinforces his faith in his own natural superiority.

Worse, a narcissistic personality can be quite charismatic, their great confidence in themselves rubbing off on those around them. But when you see through them, it's all over. That's what happened to Bush (now the most unpopular president in history), and that's what will continue to happen to McCain. He's lost virtually all of the self-styled "independents" attracted to the "maverick" projection, and he cannot win them back.

And because McCain can no longer hide from the world's increasing disdain for him, he's going to become more and more bitter and violently angry -- anger with himself mirrored back to anger with the world. Which will make things worse and worse. Bush managed to avoid this just by becoming withdrawn rather than angry, but McCain is wired differently.

This is a little excessive, but not far off. McCain's eagerness to admit his limits and mistakes gives him a lot more room to maneuver than Bush, although Bush has hardly been as steadfast as he'd like you to think.

DrSteveB: McCain -- War Hero or Just Incompetent Pilot? This is a little excessive, too, but when so much is made of McCain's military record, this gives you some pause. Graduated 5th from the bottom of his class? As I recall, that suits him better than Ulysses S. Grant (not to mention George A. Custer), but still. News to me is that he crashed three airplanes in non-combat situations even before he got to Vietnam and got shot down. Also goes into his POW record, which has been scrubbed down to pristine myth -- nowhere have I seen him admit the obvious fact that the Vietnamese saved his life.

It seems pretty clear that McCain got his military career the same way Bush got into Yale: family pull. Like Bush, he was basically a fuck up -- young, clever, cynical. Wasn't as lucky, stuck all that time in Hanoi, but it gave him the sort of conversion experience that Bush faked with Billy Graham, and that was widely seen as making up for his wayward beginnings. The comparisons continue in how badly the media fell for both -- especially their charming informality, hinting at the rogueishness they've salvaged from theid discredited past lives. The main difference seems to be that McCain has to work harder to come out on top: he's remarkably good at flattering the press, where gets away with being aloof and arrogant. For a long time, anyhow: both men are fundamentally frauds, and once you see that, it's hard to see them as anything else ever again.

Paul Krugman: Can This Planet Be Saved? Noticed this a few moments after posting above, and it's directly relevant: it's about McCain's flip-flop on offshore drilling, which he's recently made a focal piece of his campaign. (This seems to be a standard GOP-approved theme; here in Wichita Rep. Todd Tiahrt has made offshore drilling his first big campaign issue.)

A McCain campaign ad says that gas prices are high right now because "some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America." [ . . . ] Back when he was cultivating a maverick image, Mr. McCain portrayed himself as more environmentally aware than the rest of his party. He even co-sponsored a bill calling for a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions (although his remarks on several recent occasions suggest that he doesn't understand his own proposal). But the lure of a bit of political gain, it turns out, was all it took to transform him back into a standard drill-and-burn Republican.