White Hair And War Wounds

by digby

Margaret Carlson tells us all what Real Americans want. Of course, the Real Americans Carlson speaks for are the political media:

As he’d done so many times before, McCain said we can win if we just pull up our socks and banish our defeatism. “We can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success,” he said, ensuring “that the terrible price we have paid in the war, a price that has made all of us sick at heart, has not been paid in vain.”

Don’t I wish? Don’t we all? I don’t buy his take on the war but, like half of America, I want to. Deep down, we can’t accept limitations on our good intentions. We hate to hear that a military surge didn’t produce a political surge that created a Jeffersonian democracy or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Another six months you say? OK. I’ll buy the prospect that the next six months will be THE six months that makes all the months before worth it.

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Compare this with the downer Democrats whining that we’ve blown it, that it all might be in vain; indeed, we’re worse off than before we lost more than 4,000 lives, spent trillions of dollars, and left 35,000 soldiers maimed and brain-damaged for life. Just suck it up.

Listen to Senator Hillary Clinton’s statement that it is “irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again, at such tremendous cost to our national security.”

Senator Barack Obama is almost as dour, concluding that we may have to settle for “a messy, sloppy status quo.”

McCain’s optimism is seductive no matter the facts because Americans aren’t good losers. It’s not that we’re sore losers. We’re just not losers generally and have no practice at it.

The reigning national philosophy is we can do anything if we just stick with it. Anyone who can shield us from the reality of losing is tapping into an abiding need that exists in poker, illness and war: As long as you don’t fold your cards, turn off the respirator, withdraw your troops, you’re still in the game. You haven’t lost.

[…]

Forget that the sending of more U.S. troops to Iraq hasn’t accomplished its goal of creating a functioning government and an independent army. McCain has bragging rights to having said the surge would work and has statistics to show it has. That buys him time for the other stuff.

McCain is winning the propaganda battle over the war. When a generic Republican is put up against Clinton or Obama, the generic Republican loses. When the Republican is McCain, many polls show that he’s winning.

That McCain’s approach isn’t hurting him was clear at the much-anticipated hearings. Obama and Clinton were still in favor of withdrawing troops, but not nearly so outspoken as they’d been earlier.

Real Americans are winners, not losers like those boring old Democrats. The fact that it’s the Republicans, most especially head cheerleader McCain who have “lost” their lovely little war seems to be irrelevant. In this game, you blame the referees for failing to allow the game to go on forever.

This is because “deep down we don’t want to accept limitations on our good intentions.” The war in Iraq may have been an illegal invasion of a foreign country that didn’t pose an imminent threat and which was sold to the people based on the thinnest of evidence and propaganda, but heaven forbid anyone would seek to limit such good intentions. And anyway, the good news for all of us is that he gets “bragging rights” for extending the killing giving him time to do “other stuff.” (!)

It helps that McCain has separated himself from President George W. Bush’s war and hasn’t been caught in any recent photos being hugged by him. McCain claims ownership of a new, improved war. He’s long been a critic of Bush’s management of the military, called early for Donald Rumsfeld’s head, and was an early adherent of putting an expert on insurgency like Petraeus in charge.

He’s done more than just about anyone to convince Americans that they’re fighting a war against al-Qaeda, conflating our real enemy — al-Qaeda — with “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a terrorist group that didn’t exist until we invaded. It’s been repeated so often that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the two groups are the same.

…It’s McCain’s war now, and he’s not afraid to own it.

And we love him all the more for it, the optimistic old rascal!

He may be as delusional as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but with his military bearing, his seriousness, his white hair, his war wounds, his straight talk, he doesn’t seem so.

Just as independents and Democrats project onto McCain a liberalism that isn’t there, they may believe he will be like Richard Nixon going to China — the hawk who can safely bring the troops home without having to say we’re sorry we ever went there.

It’s possible that Carlson actually has some insight into the way Real Americans view John McCain and the war in Iraq, although unlikely. I simply can’t believe that John McCain is seen as some kind of happy warrior and that the country has even the slightest notion of what “winning” in Iraq means other than that we are no longer bankrupting the country to keeps troops over there for no good reason. (What would VI Day look like?) People get that this is not a war which will have a glorious surrender date, and they know that this notion of

Margaret Carlson does, however, have insight into the way the kewl kidz view John McCain. Even though he might be just like Bush he just doesn’t seem like it. He’s got white hair and war wounds and he doesn’t act like a five year old (a trait which Margaret and her cohorts previously loved.) And, of course, there’s the straight talk. When he isn’t delusional, that is.

And by the way, liberals and independents wouldn’t impute to McCain a liberalness that isn’t there is the press stopped partying with the man long enough to report on him honestly. It’s not the people’s fault that they have the wrong impression of the man, it’s the fault of Margaret Carlson and columns like this. She takes the most shallow conventional wisdom (we like winners!) and writes another chapter in the myth of St John McCain the heroic, straight talking optimist who will lead us to victory and bring American back its national pride.

I’ve seen that movie and it sucked. McCain can’t count on “Iraq Syndrome” and economic malaise to get him out of this. Unlike the halcyon days of St Ronnie, this time they can’t get away with blaming the dirty hippies for all the country’s problems — after the last 14 years of “branding” of their identity all over everything they touched, there’s no escaping the fact that he’s a Republican. And people are very, very, very disappointed with their product.

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