You can stick a fork in John McCain, my friends. The former Navy officer fragged himself last night. Oh sure, every other GOP candidate in Manchester wanted a piece of him on immigration, but he should have seen it coming. Nine-on-one is St. Anselm’s fun.
Surely McCain knew he was going to get blistered for supporting the Kennedy-Bush amnesty bill. His unfavorability rating in Arizona is 51 percent. He took a beating on immigration at a town meeting in Gilford earlier in the day.
But McCain just can’t help himself. He just keeps stepping into it, spouting nonsense about how the illegals have a “tough path,” and how they “must come into our country legally.” He’s sounds as simple as George Bush does on the subject. No wonder Mitt Romney could afford to be so genial to him. Nobody looks good jumping ugly with Sen. Depends.
McCain is like a NASCAR race now - you just wait for the Strait Jacket Express to careen out of control and slam into the stands. But why would McCain just confirm the cynicism of maybe 90 percent of the Republican primary voters by perfectly summing up what he and his Washington cronies have excreted in SB 1348: “What we have done is what you expect us to do.”
Isn’t that the truth? Strike one.
“I’m proud of the support from the president and his brother, Jeb Bush.”
Strike two. George Bush is so far gone that when the candidates use the word “sane,” it’s considered a slam on Dubya.
But just in case there were any undecided voters left in the hall, McCain felt he had to answer the question of whether he thought English should be the official language of the United States.
He mentioned the Navajos in his home state and how much American Indians mean to him, and then added of English as the nation’s official language, “It’s not a big deal to me.”
Strike three.
But that wasn’t all. Instead of just scraping it off his shoe, he kept sniffing. What will happen, he went on to his friends, if we deny the illegals amnesty?
“There are 12 million in this country,” he stumbled, “Two million having committed serious crimes.”
And . . . McCain . . . wants . . . to . . . give . . . them . . . amnesty? The French are throwing illegal-alien criminals out of their country and McCain says we have to give them amnesty because he’s afraid they’ll torch a few cars. Amazing - if McCain had been mayor of Boston in 2004, he would have apparently ordered the BPD to surrender to the BU mobs after the American League Championship of 2004 when they tipped over a few cars in Kenmore Square.
But you have to admit that McCain is consistent. He made it very clear, my friends, that he doesn’t want a partition of Iraq . . . or of North America. It’s all just big country.
It was another disjointed debate, presumably the last one without Fred Thompson. By the next one, in a couple of months, presumably the field will be thinned. (T. Thompson, Brownback, Gilmore, Paul, Huckabee and Hunter - this means you!)
Mitt Romney gets a C+ last night, Giuliani a B+. There’s no one else, really, until Fred Thompson gets into the fight. Giuliani did great on terrorism, on health care, on Scooter Libby, and Mitt played prevent defense. He prevented his own breakout.
At 9 o’clock it was over on CNN, and everyone switched over to Fox to see the TV star whose mother-in-law is four years younger than he is. Who do you think had the bigger audience last night - Fred Thompson on Fox, or the other 10 on CNN? We’ll know this morning.