Unift to serve

In light of the pig-lipstick ad (which has now been pulled from YouTube, per CBS's request) and the education smear ad that came from the McCain campaign, there is discussion on the blogosphere that McCain is no longer morally fit to be considered for the office of president.

It's an argument I've been making for a while now. It won't be news to the readers of this blog, but McCain is not the maverick he portrays. It is now clear to me that this is not just about policy, as the Obama campaign suggests. There is an argument to made that, despite the votes in lockstep with the Bush administration, McCain has separated himself from his ideological party on key issues, ranging from the environment to corruption to wasteful spending. But for a while now, he has embraced the partisan politics that have divided this country. He frequently says he would rather lose an election than lose a war, yet he continues to run the sleazy, mind-numbing kind of campaign that, despite his stump speech claims, is only about winning elections. 

Andrew Sullivan has a great post on just how morally defunct McCain has become. I urge you to read the entire post, but here's a snippet:

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.

And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.