Sunday, January 27, 2008

Re: "Dishonest"   [Mark Steyn]

Rich, the other day I found myself thinking of that line of Bush's from the 2000 campaign, where he said of McCain something like you can't claim the high horse and then take the low road. And everyone mocked Bush for mangling his metaphors or misquoting "Loch Lomond" or whatever. But with hindsight it seems to get to the essence of the McCain style.

Personally I find the idea of running explicitly as a "man of honor" rather unseemly, and more than a little reminiscent of Emerson's line that "the louder he proclaimed his honor, the faster we counted the spoons" - the spoons in this case being campaign finance, illegal immigration, global warming, Big Pharma demonization, etc.

But, that aside, there's something extraordinarily petty about the High Horseman's jibes at both Romney and Rummy. Rumsfeld's tenure at Defense is for the historians now, but I know this: he was an unusually far-sighted thinker for a Cabinet official, and his instant strategic clarity by lunchtime of September 11th was critical to this nation's response. The reductive notion peddled by the Senator - that everything that's gone wrong in Iraq is Rumsfeld's fault and everything that's gone right is McCain's - is not only false but weirdly obsessive. 

01/27 11:25 AMShare