McCain’s Spinning Smokescreen

I know I am being used. John McCain is on a bender, having abandoned Straight Talk for some other kind of talk that is often hard to understand. It has been three weeks running, and he just can’t stop. But this is all by design. He is getting me to write this, because if he behaves wildly enough we have to keep writing the What Has Happened to McCain? pieces instead of writing about the Initiation of Sarah. (Most of you are too young to catch that 1978 movie reference.)

Yesterday’s failure of McCain’s leadership — the bailout package belongs to him if he in fact worked so hard on it after suspending his campaign — sent him spinning around so fast it is hard to know what he said or what it meant. He started by declaring it was no time for blame, then pivoted to this: “Sen. Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into this process.”

But after all, earlier that same day McCain had blamed Obama for NOT taking enough of a role. “I went to Washington last week to make sure that the taxpayers of Ohio and this great country were not left footing the bill for mistakes made on Wall Street and evil and greed in Washington,” McCain told a crowd in Ohio before the bill went down. “As a matter of record, Sen. Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn’t want to get involved. Then he was ‘monitoring the situation.’ That’s not leadership — that’s watching from the sidelines.”

Oh, well.

The truth is McCain attended the White House meeting last week but was silent when asked for his opinions on an alternative plan the Republicans were pushing. After that debate, he almost couldn’t attend due to his pressing bailout-leadership responsibilities, he returned to Washington and literally “phoned it in” from his condo in Crystal City, Va., exactly as he pledged not to.

Those phone calls to negotiators either were fruitless or perhaps the lawmakers were too busy to call him back — John left for dinner at a restaurant downtown with Cindy and the Liebermans while everyone else toiled at the Capitol. In the days that followed, no one has been able to find a Republican in Congress to vouch for McCain’s role in any of this.

No matter. Any minute now the subject will get changed again when McCain suddenly remembers a fictional landing during sniper fire on a tarmac in Tuzla. And we will all talk about it endlessly.

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