McCain’s stunt

In the most crass, cynical and ultimately stupid political stunt I’ve seen in my lifetime, John McCain announced he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington to deal with the financial crisis. He also wants to cancel the first debate between him and Barack Obama.

I don’t know which part of this stunt is the funniest: That as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee McCain championed legislation to remove regulation on the banking and finance industries—you know, the sort of things that made this crisis possible, so now he is trying to make it sound like he can undo what he did. Or maybe it’s just the fact that he thinks the other Senators need his help to fix something he helped break.

McCain has been plummeting in the polls, being pushed down by the economic crisis he helped lay the foundation for, and by a running mate who’s plagued by continuing scandals and—let’s be honest here—a rather obvious lack of qualification for the job she’s seeking.

So it looks to me like McCain is looking for an excuse to get out of the debate with Obama. Although the topic was meant to be foreign policy, he knows that the economic crisis will come up and he’ll look bad because of it. His team has to keep Palin a mile away from the media because every time she speaks to them, she sounds like a blithering idiot.

So, faced with a crisis he helped create, that was bound to come up in the debates, and a running mate who has been found sorely lacking, McCain decides to suspend his campaign until he figures out a new tactic. I don’t know how long he’ll keep up this charade, but there’s no way that Palin will debate Joe Biden.

I’m just hoping that now Bush, Cheney, Rove and McCain aren’t plotting some way to suspend the election, too.