Why Not John McCain #4 - Would You Like A Flop With That Flip?

An article in today's Washington Post looks at some problems McCain has been having with defining his campaign:

...they are trying to walk this tightrope between creating distance from Bush and not angering the base," said a Michigan Republican operative who described himself as nervous about McCain's chances of victory in that swing state...Another Republican strategist, who worked for a rival GOP campaign during the primary and has ties to Bush's political team, said the McCain team has "not really figured out" how to present McCain to voters: as an experienced conservative leader or a reformer who wants change..."who John McCain is and what he stands for -- it's a little hard to connect all the dots."

It has indeed become difficult to understand what John McCain stands for:

- He fought the Bush administration on torture, and stated he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, yet he voted AGAINST banning waterboarding, and called the recent Supreme Court decision establishing limited habeas corpus rights to detainess one of the worst decisions in the America's history (yes, worse than the ones that called slaves property, or that upheld segregation).

- He spoke out for years against the reckless Bush tax cuts, but now wholeheartedly endorses them as the bedrock of his economic plan.

- He was against offshore oil drilling before he was for it.

- He now states that he would not even vote for his own immigration plan, probably because he found that it was not supported by his conservative base.

- He speaks out against lobbyists and "pork" but has turned out to have a staff full of lobbyists. Just one recent instance: McCain had a large role in killing a wasteful government deal with Boeing to develop new planes for refueling. But it has recently been revealed that McCain is also being closely advised by lobbyists for the Boeing competitor that instead received the contract.

And perhaps most importantly, Frank Rich recalls some of McCain's biggest changes in judgment about Iraq:

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

Anyhow these are just some flip-flops in what will likely be an ever expanding list. Or as this clip from MSNBC states "McCain Flip Flops on Everything":