Hello Republican Nomination, Goodby Honor and Dignity?

John McCain lacks honor. I know, I know, this is nothing new and I do not write to provide some thrilling revelation or some clever new argument or equally clever new twist on an old argument. I am writing to express sorrow and stupidity.

Sorrow because it makes me sad (and, yes, angry too) to see what a man will do to obtain power. When I was young, around seventeen years old, I was convinced I would one day be president. Part of it was naïveté but the larger part of it was that I honestly thought that I might one day be able to do some good, As it turns out, a sometimes disturbingly weak work ethic conspired against me and I have made peace with my life as a decent lawyer and loving husband and father. There are much worse things than I can be and while I still believe I am destined to do something great, every day I become more and more convinced that the great thing I am to do is raise my daughter so that she can one day achieve true greatness. I was wrong about my prediction for the presidency but not as wrong as it would appear; I will never be President, but my daughter will one day be viewed as one of t he greatest leaders this country has ever had. And I am fine with it.

Anyway, I digress. But I have been thinking a LOT about the fact that I used to assume that I was destined to be President. I have been thinking that because I naively assumed that the President of the United States was selected because of his ideas and because of his high-minded attitude about ideas and about how America’s place in the world was to sere as a beacon to other countries. I know, very naïve. The thing is, I think it used to be true. I am 42 years old, so I am not some old guy screaming at kids to get off my lawn, but I grew up in the age of Reagan and Jimmy Carter was the first President under whom I had some speck of an idea about the world around us. There can be little doubt that Jimmy Carter was a good man who might have even been a good president if he hadn’t inherited the legacy of Watergate and the newly-found cynicism that Nixon wrought. Carter restored my belief that good people should be President and that America stood for “good” whatever that means.

Reagan, well, Reagan was a disaster. My first Presidential election I voted for Mondale and I pretty much detested everything Reagan stood for. Still do and I think Reagan is the illegitimate father of the crises we now face. He was, despite his popularity, an absolutely atrocious President who oversaw an immensely corrupt administration. Still, Reagan was a man of ideas. Ideas that strike me as evil and corrupt but ideas nonetheless. Reagan was a champion of small government (except when he was bailing out Chrysler and doing untold scores of other government expansions). Reagan wanted people off welfare and he wanted abortion illegalized. Pretty much everything Reagan wanted I despised and still do. But he had principals. Loathsome ones to be sure, but Reagan believed what he believed, even if it was in his doddering, bobble-headed fashion. And Reagan was able to make people believe in America and he did it during a time when that was not any easy thing to do.

The thing that makes me sad about the current presidential campaign is that, while I never liked John McCain, I was always pretty certain that McCain would let us know where we stood. I didn’t agree with his policies and his vision of government, but unlike the Chuklehead –in-Chief of the last eight years, at least McCain was an honorable man who had served more or less honorably. He worked, as he loves to point out, with guys like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold to make America a better place even as we disagreed on a definition of the word “better.”

What a difference a few years makes. I have learned in the last several months, that John McCain places nothing ahead of his own lust for power. The honor and integrity that John McCain once displayed is now gone as his aides have convinced him that the only way he can win is to lie and make scurrilous attacks on his rival for the office. McCain has done nothing to change the tone in Washington. I don’t know how many times McCain referred to “reaching across the aisle” in the most recent debate, but the fact is that McCain is doing everything he can to make that aisle ever wider. McCain has practically incited riots and he allows his followers to call Obama ugly names and to make a fetish of the ugly tactics McCain used to decry and by which McCain was victimized himself by the previously-referenced Chucklehead-in-Chief.

So, why am I sad? Because McCain has reminded me that I used to believe in our government generally and him specifically. McCain has made me remember that there was a time I could believe that I felt that I could work with people who saw things differently than I saw them. Now I see a bunch of angry, snarling madding supporters of McCain who will try to give McCain what he wants even at the expense of what McCain used to hold dear. It is now obvious that McCain sold his soul for the Presidency and if he doesn’t win the Presidency, it’s not as if he will have his soul returned to him. I hope it was worth is, Senator. I hope that becoming that which you professed to despise in exchange for the presidency has been worth it. Assuming that you win the election and assuming that aliens don’t decide to farm your body again and that you live another four years, I wonder if it will have been worth it. If your election comes to pass, I hope to meet you one day and ask how you profited by gaining the world yet losing your soul.

I know there are a lot of you out there who will say “well, DUH! Of course he sold out.” I know, I know. And it’s not as if this is a recent development. Still, it saddens me greatly to see a man I might once have considered to be motivated by good now motivated solely by a lust for power. This isn’t new and it’s hardly the first time, but to see a man take his own honor and wipe his ass with it is something we should collectively mourn. When John McCain is on his deathbed he may well be remembered as a president, but I wonder if he will also regret anything he has done. I wonder if he will realize that, while everyone makes compromises, not everyone makes deals and the deal he made is bitter and foul.

To you, the reader, I apologize. I know how maudlin this entry is and I regret that. I also apologize for appearing to be so slow that I am only now realizing that McCain is irredeemably dishonest and dishonorable. It’s just that McCain has made me remember the boy I used to be and I find myself comparing who I was with who I am and, for the most part I like what I see. I just pity John McCain because, unless he was entirely self-delusional back in t he day, his earlier self would not recognize his current iteration and would be disgusted by the man he has become.

I promise that next post I will get back to the snark and won’t be so overwrought about something so obvious. I just can’t help it. I always feel badly for senior citizens who have had their dignity stripped away. Normally it involves old people forced to live in warehouses for the elderly, but right now John McCain has every bit as much dignity as the 72 year-old man who suffers from dementia and is strapped to his bed in only his underwear. The fact that McCain chose this path only makes me felt slightly less queasy.