Kudos to McCain!

Finally saw a glimmer of the halfway decent guy who ran for President in 2000 when he admonished a couple of supporters who voiced their ignorance and hatred of his opponent to his face at campaign rallies yesterday.

The first clip, you can see McCain’s face getting set tighter and tighter (wish I could find a pic of it online to steal, oh wait, here it is on The YouTube...) as the redneck rambles on about his ill-informed fear of bringing up his kid in a country run by Obama. Said redneck was stumbling and stammering around, dredging up every code-word and phrase he had been fed by talk radio and Fox News and trying to put them together to form one coherent thought. Uh, it was very much like watching a Sarah Palin performance, actually. At the end, McCain thanks the man and takes the mic back, but then does a little stuttering and stammering himself before saying that Barack Obama was a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

At the other rally, the crazy old coot in the photo above who insisted Obama was a Muslim had the microphone plucked away from her by McCain before being repudiated.

Fucken a! What took McCain so long? I’m trying to convince myself this return to decency wasn’t just the latest Hail Mary pass cooked up by his team of geniuses to stop his poll numbers from plunging (I’m looking at you, J-in-B!) but in the end, I don’t care. I hope if they told him tomorrow to go back to his former fear-mongering tactics, he’d have gotten enough of a rush out of doing the right thing the day before, he’d tell them to go fuck themselves.

I just went looking for links to put in here, and came across this bullet-point on cnn.com:
NEW: McCain urges his supporters to be respectful of Obama

The “New!” being in red and all, it just cracked me up.

Here’s MSNBC’s headline: McCain booed for calling Obama 'decent'

Just for laughs, let’s see how Fox spins it. I just love Fox News. They make me laugh on the outside and weep for the depths of human depravity on the inside. I usually go there for the laughs. Let’s see… Oh, again, that’s too funny. I got an error message: [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Let’s try again… Well, okay, pretty close to MSNBCs. Geez rednecks, when you lose Fox News, you’re stepping too far out of the closet. Perhaps it would be better for your candidate if you stayed home the next time he’s in town. Oh yeah, the Fox headline was:
• McCain Booed After Calling Obama 'A Decent Person'

Anyhow, even if we never see that McCain again in this campaign, and even though others will, perhaps correctly, ascribe less-than-heroic motivations to this change of face, I always feel like if I’m gonna stand up and call somebody out when I think they’re fucking up – like I have McCain – I have a responsibility to slap them on the back if I think they’ve done something good.

And whatever his motivations, those moments were good for America.