The Drudge Report has it that John McCain tried to submit a rebuttal to Barack Obama’s recent editorial, “My Plan For Iraq.” The Op-Ed Editor, David Shipley, responded:
“It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece [...] I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.“
At first, I assumed that McCain had chiseled his rebuttal into a stone tablet, or perhaps spent all night setting type in his basement printing press, or wrote it in middle English a-la Beowulf, but then I read the piece on the Drudge site. It’s terrible.
And I don’t mean terrible the way McCain’s sense of humor is terrible, like it’s full of misogynistic jokes and self-effacing Ha-Ha-I-Have-Alzheimer’s references. I mean the man can’t write.
We’ve got some gems for you after the jump.
Now, I’m sorry to subject you to such a large chunk of McCain’s writing, but you can’t get the full impact of it unless a paragraph is rendered in its heinously constructed, unsequenced and flowless whole:
Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.
There’s the utterly confusing introduction of an unnecessary and furthermore uncited quotation in sentence one, followed by the stunted and awkward sentence two. I guess sentence three is okay, but it still reads funny, and the last sentence wouldn’t fly in a fifth-grade book report, let alone the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times.
I kinda figured McCain would be smart enough to get a ghost writer. Or at least have someone edit it. He has no rhyme or reason. Oh, wait. My apologies, he’s got one rhyme: “The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.” Nice! That’s how you landed a beer baroness, eh?
And he LOVES the comma-separated clauses, to the extent that when I get to the end of a sentence I have often forgotten what happened four clauses ago. It’s the literary equivalent of having Alzheimers and hiding your own easter eggs!
During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”
Okay, nurse. I think it’s time for Johnny’s nap.
via Gothamist
Image Credit: Bold Lentil
You know, it really is like that. It’s like when I talk to people about my dad. He’s telling me about some woman who thinks he is too old and she is 53, yet he’s got other prospects. My dad is like McCain’s age. We look over the crazy shit they say, or the fact that they are a good 20 years behind the times, but see… we don’t let them drive the goddamn car anymore. See that? Now, I ask you, seriously… do you want John McCain driving the goddamn country? It was harsh of them to out right reject his manuscript, but really, he didn’t write it anyway. He didn’t, fuck it, he did not. The truth is we don’t fucking know what McCain really feels because he only claims to feel what we feel at the moment. That makes us wonder if isn’t shitting us most of the time, telling us what we want to hear, and in the end do whatever the fuck he wants anyway no matter what we think. I read some of his “jokes” and really that sort of shit would be funny if you were in the goddamn Navy and McCain was your commander, but we’re not and he isn’t. He belongs to that “greatest generation” mentality. The one where you could talk about how great it is to be a cunt hound, but still smack your kids in the mouth for saying “pregnant” in public. It’s not that we don’t love them, respect them, and find them oddly endearing, because we do… it’s that we don’t live in their world. Their world is really just a page in history now. It’s like looking at a finely restored piece of architecture. While it’s beautiful and they don’t make them like that anymore… still, it’s not what we’re doing now. It’s almost like, hey McCain, we think it’s great that you can still get it hard and cheat on your wife. We think it’s great that you don’t surrender your military bravado, even after having your ass humiliated by Wes Clark. It’s great that you like to talk about getting pussy, call your wife a cunt, and pick on Chelsea Clinton. That’s all great and we would expect nothing less from you. We’d like to buy you a six pack and watch you get drunk, re-tell stories of sexual conquest, and have you listen intently as we told you about how we got our big Navy dick from you. We’d love that. Still though, we’re not letting you drive the goddamn car anymore. Forget it dad. Our nerves can’t take it. Seriously. Though, we still love you for all your old ways and crazy things you say. We look over it with a smile when you crack some kind of joke like that in public, or fart and don’t even know it. We love that about you John, we do. You’re a real American for all of that. No shit. But you’re not driving the mother fucking car anymore O.K.?
[...] On McCain’s editorial being rejected by the NYT: “I read some of his “jokes” and really that sort of shit would be funny if you were in the goddamn Navy and McCain was your commander, but we’re not and he isn’t. He belongs to that “greatest generation” mentality. The one where you could talk about how great it is to be a cunt hound, but still smack your kids in the mouth for saying “pregnant” in public.” [...]
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