Resolved: John McCain does not have the integrity to be President

[Shayna]

Thanks to Hentor the Barbarian for calling my attention to this. . .

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Holy crap! Richard Cohen has taken a flying leap off of the Straight Talk Express:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/15/AR2008091502406.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

This is a guy who admits to having been in the tank for McCain, but now he spares no words in calling him disgraceful.

From that linked article:

@Richard Cohen

. . .Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. **He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

. . .

McCain has turned ugly.** His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains – his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all – but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story – that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. **It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that**. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir – the person in whose hands he would leave the country – **is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. **Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

. . .

**And so McCain lied about his lying **and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can – as he did in South Carolina – renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right – what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

Thank you, Mr. Cohen. People like you, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have renewed a little of my faith.