The power of scripts: David Broder on the bold Maverick McCain

This dimwitted column from David Broder shows just how impervious to reality our Pod Pundits' favorite scripts can be: John McCain, your country is calling Washington Post 08/26/2010.

Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, is the highest high priest for the ideal of Potemkin bipartisanship. And Broder has been in love with McCain's maverick image for so long that apparently nothing can convince him that McCain isn't any kind of moderate, at least not by any meaningful definition of the word: not his hardline pro-Bush voting record, not his shameless warmongering, not his Mean Mister Mustard Presidential campaign, not his anti-immigrant demagoguery, not even McCain's own (false) insistence that he had never claimed to be a moderate.

The Dean declares of the bold Maverick McCain: "The reputation he established for independence -- for being his own man, no matter what the pressures -- has survived the vagaries of an exceptionally long career."

Because when you construct a phony script out of hot air and maintain it by wishful thinking, no vagaries of an exceptionally different reality staring you in the face is going to change that. For the Dean, McCain's the legendary Maverick. No matter what.

That's the kind of decisive analysis The Dean always brings to bear. Like in this Post column of 02/11/2010, Sarah Palin displays her pitch-perfect populism. ¡Caramba! The Dean's finely-tuned political ear knows that Sarah Palin is speaking to the soul of the Real Americans. Why, she's lots like George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton! No, it doesn't make jack for sense. But The Dean just knows about these things.

Tags: bipartisanship, david broder, mccain

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