The great Cuban comic, Alvarez Guedes, tells a great joke where the punch line is a drunk informing the unattractive lady who has just called him a drunk, that he will be sober tomorrow, whereas her appearance will be unchanged.

See if you can see the parallels in George Will’s column:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

It’s not just George Will, this is what John Fund from the WSJ Editorial page had to say:

What is John McCain thinking? First, Mr. McCain takes a wild swing by saying as president, he would have fired Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for “betraying the public trust.” It turns out a president doesn’t have the statutory authority to do that, and Mr. Cox has been a political asset in dealing with the financial meltdown of last week. Indeed, the day after his call for Mr. Cox’s firing, Mr. McCain retreated and called him “a good man.”

Now Mr. McCain has compounded his error by floating the name of Andrew Cuomo, the pugilistic Democratic New York attorney general, as his possible nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. McCain told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that Mr. Cuomo had “respect” and “prestige,” praising his tenure as secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton administration.

I’m voting for McCain. Further, I think that Sen Obama is undeserving of the presidency, lacking in experience and patriotism. Add in his consistently radical associations, and the guy is a walking & talking Manchurian candidate. And yet, if McCain loses, no tears here.

George Will puts his finger, the middle one, on the reason why. I think a lot of his maverick positions, with the exception of immigration, are evidence of [Sally] Fieldism. The guy really just wants to be liked by the MSM elites. Why else would an intellectually honest conservative continue to advocate for campaign finance laws in the face of their consistent failure to achieve their objectives?

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

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September 23, 2008
McCain’s Queen of Hearts Intervention
By George Will

“The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said without even looking around.”

— “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

WASHINGTON — Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain’s characteristic accusation that Cox “has betrayed the public’s trust.”

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain’s fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Congressman Cox, who as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for “dynamic scoring” that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Washington Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and The New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham’s Law of political discourse, McCain’s Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a “dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions.” This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain’s campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors “massive government, billions in spending increases.”

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On “60 Minutes” Sunday evening, McCain, saying “this may sound a little unusual,” said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has “respect” and “prestige” and could “lend some bipartisanship.” Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
georgewill@washpost.com
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* SEPTEMBER 23, 2008

McCain Shorts Himself
By JOHN FUND

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What is John McCain thinking? First, Mr. McCain takes a wild swing by saying as president, he would have fired Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for “betraying the public trust.” It turns out a president doesn’t have the statutory authority to do that, and Mr. Cox has been a political asset in dealing with the financial meltdown of last week. Indeed, the day after his call for Mr. Cox’s firing, Mr. McCain retreated and called him “a good man.”
[Andrew Cuomo]

Now Mr. McCain has compounded his error by floating the name of Andrew Cuomo, the pugilistic Democratic New York attorney general, as his possible nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. McCain told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that Mr. Cuomo had “respect” and “prestige,” praising his tenure as secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton administration.

Mr. McCain must be looking at a different record than I am. Mr. Cuomo was a political grandstander at HUD, ranging far afield to file frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers. He also spent taxpayer money to hire such firms as Booz Allen Hamilton, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young to paper over snafus at his agency.

Among the problems created by Mr. Cuomo while at HUD were what the liberal Village Voice called last month “a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis.” A Voice investigation found that Mr. Cuomo “took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded ‘kickbacks’ to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.”

Most egregiously, Matthew Rees of the Weekly Standard documented how Secretary Cuomo used the power of his office to declare war against Susan Gaffney, the HUD inspector general who was investigating charges of self-dealing by Cuomo aides. The Government Accountability Office later concluded Mr. Cuomo had used underhanded tactics to pursue spurious charges of racial discrimination against Ms. Gaffney.

The GAO found that HUD’s decision to handpick two lawyers to investigate the discrimination charge, and award them contracts totaling $100,000 (the normal cost is about $3,000), represented “significant deviation” from the standard process of investigating discrimination complaints.

Ms. Gaffney, a classic whistleblower in the maverick tradition John McCain claims to embody, was an innocent victim of Mr. Cuomo’s smear machine. Mr. McCain needs to go back and look at the Cuomo record at HUD — and at the New York Attorney General’s office for that matter — before he so loosely and recklessly promotes Mr. Cuomo as someone to oversee the nation’s securities regulation.

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