Christina’s Common Sense

For all his years in politics, John McCain seems not to understand that his business is the game of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. In fact, he frequently gets it backwards.

Today, McCain has issued a decree to pull an anti-Obama ad in North Carolina featuring Rev. Wright. McCain claimed it to be dishonorable and says he wants to run an honorable campaign. Apparently, that means not calling out the fact that your opponent has listened—or not listened, depending on who you believe—to his preacher calling for God to damn America.

An “honorable campaign” does not mean letting your opponent walk all over you. That is not honor, it’s suicide. Having served a couple of decades in the Navy, McCain should know a thing or two about honor. There is nothing dishonorable about calling out your opponent’s mistakes. That is politics. If McCain can’t deal with that, he should go find another job.

Linda Daves, chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, has said that she will run the ad anyway because it’s her job to point out the weaknesses of the Democrat party. When Norah O’Donnell accused her of playing the race card, Daves replied that it has nothing to do with race and that as chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, it’s her duty to do what’s best for the party.

John McCain should drop to his knees and thank God that his opponents are so maladroit. Otherwise, strategies like this would ensure his defeat in November.

Think back to middle school history. Remember the Donner Party? The people who set out for the West, got stranded in California, and found themselves in such dire straits they had to eat each other?

Well, this election year, the Democrats are doing the same thing (metaphorically, of course). Their party is so bankrupt, their ideology so vacuous, and their candidates so utterly laughable that they’re out of resources. All they can do is consume each other.

John McCain may be the luckiest politician ever to live. His own party hates him and many of them will sooner stay home than vote for him. Not only that, but the Republicans should lose big this year. We’ve got an unpopular war, an economy in a minor recession, and the Republicans basically flushed their twelve years in power to the point that they were ousted in the midterm elections. They haven’t done themselves proud since. By all political analysis, the Republicans should fall on their faces this year.

But they may not. Hillary and Barack are so busy tearing into each other that they don’t have the resources to tear into McCain. The Democrats could easily make hay on pointing out McCain’s traitorous actions against his own party. But they can’t! They’re too busy shredding each other.

John McCain and the Republicans have no business winning a consolation prize, never mind an election, this year. But their opposition is so bad that they just might anyway. If the Republicans win a darn thing in November, they will truly have been blessed by their enemies.

Last week Bill Cunningham, a talk show personality, referred to Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” several times as he emceed a John McCain rally. Not only did this get Democrats in an uproar, but it also got McCain in an uproar. Read the story and view the video here.

I want to know why it’s such a mortal sin in this election to call attention the fact that Barack Obama shares a name with a third-world despot responsible for the deaths of countless people and was an enemy of America to boot. It’s not a deal-breaker—in my book at least, Obama’s got several deal-breakers that come before his middle name. But shouldn’t it make us think? Is it not relevant that we’re fighting radical Islam and the man who may be Commander-in-Chief of the armed services that fight this war may have ties to that religion?

I think it is. If we could make a big deal over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, we can make a big deal over Obama’s Islamic ties. After all, Mormons haven’t made a habit of blowing up symbols of American freedom. My party’s nominee doesn’t recognize this. He needs to. If he can’t, then he’s not fit to be dog catcher. Never mind President of the United States.