Anger Management
Hitchens at Slate is dismissive of the campaign thread focusing on McCain’s rage issues, though that necktie-yanking thing is a little weird and sounds like it would get old real quick. Good thing senators don’t carry canes anymore.
It’d be a horserace to see whether McCain in a rage starts caning someone, or if someone else, tired of having his tie yanked, canes McCain. I’d advocate holding one’s tongue within cane-length of Murtha and Webb, too, and I’ll bet Hillary could lay out an opponent with one blow once she calculates her advantage and picks her moment. Obama, having only recently stuck a toe in the cauldron of national politics in the highly controlled environment of a presidential campaign, is despite recent aggravations really untested on this score … though if his spiritual counselor’s ire is any guide, he might yet find it within his soul to render the daylights unto Caesar. Aren’t commentators always bemoaning the current state of our political discourse and harkening back to some earlier golden age of American politics? I sure we can all think of one pol or another who could use a good caning.
Sounds like fun, but even if we sometimes seem to be almost as bitterly factionalized today, it’s a different time, and we now prefer to use our words. Still, I’ll take an PTSD presidency – a candidate who held up under years of enemy torture and went on to win respect on both sides of the aisle in his decades as a United States senator – any day over wide-eyed fumbling self-interested naivete or lizardly self-interested cynicism, neither of which has been tested by much more than temptation and the personal failings of the people around them. Especially in time of war, faced with very real enemies, if our choice ultimately comes down to aggression or acquiescence.
The unfortunate part of all this rage speculation is, you know that when John McCain finally draws a line on Iran, the loyal opposition will never let it be because the mullahs have been murdering American soldiers for 25 years, meddling murderously in the affairs of other countries, seeking to dominate the world’s most vital resources, and are now seeking to do that with nuclear weapons. As it was with the murderous, WMD-seeking megalomaniacal dictator Saddam Hussein, removed because George Bush is chimpy and Dick Cheney is evil, with Iran it will be because McCain had rage issues.
A key part of that thread of course is the claim that bloodthirsty, unhinged McCain wants war, war war … 100 years of war! It’s a great line we’ll never hear the end of, but it is being officially marginalized. Talking Points Memo bemoans the AP’s effort to address a matter of partisanship with some measure of balance. Re TPM’s dismissal of strategic comparisons to Germany, Korea and Japan, and the desire of those nations to dwell under a U.S. umbrella, someone needs to tell TPM about Iran, and the fact that the Iran-friendly Shiite Iraqi government and other Iraqi factions are becoming concerned about it, and are quite interested in an ongoing military relationship with the United States.
Apropos of all of which, Gateway bears news of moonbat letters of condolence and esteemed academic delegatioons seeking to assuage the injured Ahmadinejad’s feelings post-Columbia.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:13 am on Tuesday, April 29, 2008
2 Responses to “Anger Management”
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April 29th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I’ve said before that I want a president who can get angry about the right things. Bill Clinton may have his “towering blue rages”, but they never seem to involve anything like, for instance, the bombing of US embassies or Navy ships. I can’t see John McCain ever shrugging off something like that. I can’t see Barack Obama ever getting angry about it. And Hillary Clinton would only get angry if there were some political advantage in it.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I have a colorful ancestor who was an ambassador, and crucially, an abolitionist in Kentucky, known as much for his mastery of the bowie knife as he was his fiery oratory. When he was 83, he married a local 15 year-old girl, and the sheriff and his deputies went out to the house to see if they could talk him into annulling the marriage. He chased them off his property with a shotgun.