Creep, assassin

Just in case we needed another reminder, McCain’s appallingly tasteless joke about the Iranian people yesterday is a good sign of the debased and morally corrupt levels to which our politics in general and the Republican version of it in particular have sunk.

McCain thought it cute to respond to a news item about increased American cigarette exports to Iran as ‘a way of killing them’. This from the presidential candidate of a country that regularly accuses the Iranian state of harboring genocidal sentiments about Jews.

I wrote off this blustering heap of shit months ago after his jokey Beach Boys imitation using the words ‘Bomb Iran’. I suppose it got a real round of belly laughs from the wannabe tough-guy reporters assembled aboard his campaign ‘ship’.

We’re supposed to speak in hushed tones about McCain’s ordeal while a prisoner of the Vietnamese, but we’re never reminded that he ended up as their prisoner by flying over their country in a warplane and dropping very large bombs on it. His adolescent horseplay about the fun of causing ordnance to rip through the bodies of civilians suggests that the suffering he caused never, ever pops up on his radar. Instead, he celebrates it.

That’s probably true for Osama bin Laden too.