MumbleVille

“Exuberance” does mean “inexperience,” right? It doesn’t? Well, you could’ve fooled me…

A University of Illinois student opinion columnist writing in the school rag says of John McCain, “…I’m going to say something that, as far as I can tell, no one else has said: a McCain presidency will be conservative enough for most conservatives, and yet will please many a moderate and even a few Democrats.”

At least he didn’t say, “…a few members of the Democrat Party…”

The guy’s a sophomore (you might want to look that word up: it essentially means “wise fool”), which I reckon means he’s probably not even old enough to drink – nineteen, maybe twenty at the outside. So when George W. Bush first ran for the Presidency in 2000, he was certainly more concerned with getting a peek at the next-door neighbor’s sixteen-year-old daughter in a bikini than in who’d end up in the White House. Well, kid, here’s some news for you: the Republican Presidential candidates included such worthies as Orrin Hatch, Liddy Dole, McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Bauer; in addition to the now-President Bush. Some of those names may not be familiar to you, but most of them are politically so far to the right that they might well be coming around from the left – Hatch, Buchanan, Keyes, and Bauer, for sure. In that company, George W. Bush looked pretty damned moderate himself. One could’ve said of him – in fact, several did say of the current President – that his presidency might “…please many a moderate and even a few Democrats.”

Damn, but would the speaker have ever been wrong!

After McCain was Roved out of the race with Karl’s push-polls in South Carolina, the Republican nomination was all over but the shouting. That meant that the presumptive nominee had plenty of time to cozy up to the pack of nut-jobs running the religious right (starting at Bob Jones University, in fact), letting them know that he would be pleased to carry their standard – after the general election, when it was safe to “come out of the closet.” Like they say, you run to the right in the primaries and run to the middle in the general election – and then do what you damned well please once you’ve been elected, ‘cepting you gotta dance with the one what brung you.

And he’s been dancing with the RRs ever since, from Supreme-Court nominations to stem-cell research to “faith-based” programs to abortion. And that’s exactly what John McCain would do, too: he’d have to sell his soul to a voting bloc that’s about half of the voters needed to win. No way he could win without them!

But, of course, that’s an observation that’s based on experience: eight years of George W. Bush in the White House kowtowing to Colorado Springs – an eight years that this college sophomore probably spent mostly trying to download porn, get drunk on cherry vodka and root beer, and score with a cheerleader. Now do you know why they say experience is the best teacher?

At the very least, the writer could have taken a minute or two to learn that a “viola” is a stringed instrument…