Sticking The Taxpayers For His Fluffing

by Steve Soto

I wrote yesterday that McCain’s overseas travels are primarily intended to generate an inevitability narrative with supporting pictures that portray him as Bush’s likely successor to voters here at home. You’ll note that McCain insists that these trips to fluff his image as a president-in-waiting are supposedly fact finding ventures related to his role in the Senate, which is a load of crap. McCain is in little need of "fact-finding", as he has been in the Senate and acted like an expert on the Middle East for years, yet he is still enfeebled as evidenced by his recent “senior moments” on Iran, Al Qaeda, and Shia-Sunni sectarianism.

But McCain has to insist that these trips are official fact-finding, because in truth as long as McCain can have his bipartisan road buddies Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman along as willing enablers of a falsehood, his campaign and the RNC can stick the taxpayers with the tab for these photo ops rather than make his campaign pay for them.

Note that the Europeans are already worried about McCain, due to his straddle of Bush’s record by talking tougher than Bush on North Korea and Iran and then distancing himself from Bush on global warming and torture. Europeans are waiting to see if Americans will once again make fools of themselves this November by electing someone touting a foreign policy that has demonstrably failed while isolating this country.