McCain's Brain

I'm really getting the sense that John McCain (a man I respected and actually voted for in the 2000 election) is losing his facilities and trying not to let anyone notice it.

There have been so many little slip-ups. He was publicly corrected by Joe Lieberman for saying that Iran was training al-Qaida when the former is predominantly Shiite and the terrorist groups is primarily Sunni, a pairing that hate each other at least as much as they hate us. Lieberman whispered in his ear and he corrected his statement... and then went on to assert the link again in other interviews, one as early as 12 hours later.

This week he asserted that we had drawn our forces down to "pre-surge levels" (we have not, we have over 20,000 more troops in Iraq than before the surge, and even after the draw downs complete in July or August we're projected to have over 10,000 more people there than we had in January 2007 (when the surge was announced). When called on it he behaved as though it was ridiculous that anyone would assert he had said such a thing... but it's on video.

There are others. Watching him speak, I get the clear sense of my grandfather in his later years, still trying to be the vibrant, confident man he was in his 60s but just not quite pulling it off.

I hate to bring this up, because the McCain campaign and the media have portrayed ageism in this campaign as akin to sexism and racism, but the thing is, there's a difference. Gender and race have little to do with a person's abilities. A black man or a woman of either race has just as much chance of being a great leader as a white man (and a much higher chance than the current white man in the job).

Whereas we all know that our faculties diminish with age. Anyone in their 40s or over who suddenly finds themselves reaching for the reading glasses in order to enjoy some light fiction, or who spends an entire day walking gingerly after a moderate game of tennis knows that our bodies stop providing us with the same level of service they once did.

Those like me who find increasingly that finding the word we want is difficult (and let me tell you how much fun that is, while writing a blog entry, knowing there's a word or phrase that conveys exactly what I'm thinking and being unable to conjure it up) know that our minds are just as disloyal as our bodies.

John McCain seems to be in pretty good shape for a man his age... but the combination of having lost a step or two mentally combined with his reported stubborn streak (apparently not being terribly willing to listen to opposing viewpoints, and where have we seen THAT behavior recently?) make for a bad combination in a President.

Anyway, I'm going to finish this with a video from YouTube. I'm still not sure posting this is a good idea, because we've all seen many examples of these sorts of videos cobbled together from a lifetime of public speaking in order to make a perfectly competent politician look silly.

Still, though, this one has several examples in it that I've seen in context, and they're just as bad.

Take it with as many grains of salt as you need. (These are two parts of essentially the same video, or at least two different videos by the same production company, "Brave New Films").





Liam.