The Young Turks

As you know, on CBS Tuesday McCain done fucked up and revealed he doesn't know shit about the surge.

McCain seemed to enjoy this so much he spent the rest of the week saying nonsensical shit to anyone he could find with a microphone, which actually wasn't many people it turns out.  But no to worry, he just had to start fitting two or three mistakes into each interview to meet his quota.

At this point McCain was in serious troubled of turning into Bob Dole.  He was rapidly exposing himself as a giant fraud on his one and only issue (when asked today what his policy on gay adoption, he actually answered, 

"My position is, it's not the reason why I'm running for president of the United States.")

McCain's option were limited.  He could a) admit his mistake or b) try to find a way to explain the mistake in way that made sense to sane, informed people.  The second option looked good until someone at Camp McCain realized it was impossible.  Seemingly trapped, the McCain campaign discovered secret option c) speak in gibberish.

I'm not kidding.  Try to follow this clip and sync it up with objective reality.

The first few times I heard it, I mistook it for a lame, incomprehensible attempt to cover his ass.  It was only later I saw its genius.  It seemed to be a discussion on the surge but in reality it made no sense.  And that is why it was brilliant.

McCain's explanation was an abstract painting.  A free-form poem of Joycean impenetrability.  If he had said something that could be followed, unpacked and argued rationally, he would have simply extended the discussion, been chased another day into territory he couldn't survive in.  But this defense could only be discussed by picking at it line by line, word by word.  It was too dense and abstract to be dealt with on network TV and esoteric enough that one could see in it whatever one wanted to. 

The right wing pundit could run the clip and say, "See!  McCain was right all along!" and since you had no idea what the fuck McCain just said, maybe he had proven his point.  What are you going to do, rewind it and watch it over and over? 

If you had a Dem and a Pub both talking about it, it was easy work for any pundit, say even as one as stupid as Hannity, to at least muddy the waters enough for the low info voter (the only real undecideds) to shrug his shoulders and lose interest.  The right could turn a loss into a tie through the art of confusion.

In the end, it was a great punt.  After a terrible series of downs, the McCain campaign managed to effectively deflate the issue and stop the bleeding.  It may be the only good play they have had in a while, but nice play, Jonny Mac.