Flip-flopping

According to John McCain’s presidential campaign (resembling in recent days an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”), Barack Obama is a flip-flopper. And they’re actually being serious about this.

Last Thursday, Obama said in response to a question at a news conference that he plans to continually refine and adjust his strategy for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, as well as any military actions that would take place as that withdrawal was occurring, based on information coming from commanders on the ground in Iraq.

When I heard this, I saw it as a nice breath of fresh air compared to statements coming from the outgoing administration. Evidently, though, to the McCain gang, that’s a flip-flop, even though Obama said nearly the exact same thing that he said Thursday in one of the debates preceding the New Hampshire primary – in January, so long ago that Dennis Kucinich was still in the debates – and he also said it in a “60 Minutes” interview in February.

And even though this all exists on tape for the world to see, John McCain’s people still expected Americans and the media to accept his warped view of reality as the correct one. And, horrifyingly enough for a fan of logic and common sense like myself, the media ran with this over the Independence Day weekend, and people actually believed it.

In the immortal words of Jacobim Mugatu, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
If anyone’s a flip-flopper, it’s John McCain. I’m thoroughly convinced that if John McCain circa 2000 met today’s John McCain, he’d challenge his sell-out future self to some sort of brutal fight to the death, like in the episode of “Star Trek” where Spock has to go through the Vulcan mating rituals.

He can’t even agree with himself from last year. In December of last year, McCain admitted that he is far from an economist, saying, “the issue of economics is something that I’ve really never understood as well as I should.” Though that’s not really something I’d ask for in a presidential candidate or, for that matter, someone who’s been serving in the U.S. Senate longer than I’ve been alive, it was good of him to admit it.

Of course, as soon as possible, he started denying that he’d ever said it. In a January debate, the late Tim Russert called him on the quote, to which he responded, “I don’t know where you got that quote from.” It took about a day for people to find the Boston Globe article in which he’d said it, after which he started spinning it harder than a Sandy Koufax curveball.

He then did the same thing July 2, when after being asked by “Good Morning America”’s Robin Roberts about the quote, he claimed to have never said it.
Evidently he thinks that just because he doesn’t understand “the Google,” we all can’t find this information, or that we won’t. Let’s not do this again. Let’s not allow John McCain to tell us what reality is, when he’s so clearly off the mark.