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Enough About McCain’s ‘Graciousness’ — It’s the Reason He Lost

John McCain wanted to be nice; Barack Obama wanted to be president.

by
Kyle-Anne Shiver

Bio

November 9, 2008 - 12:00 am

Honestly, if I should hear the word “gracious” applied to John McCain’s concession speech even one more time, I may throw the biggest hissy fit ever seen this side of the Mississippi.

In reality, however, it isn’t the concession speech that has me riled. It’s the unavoidable reality that Senator McCain attempted to be graciousness personified throughout his campaign.

Now, please, dear reader, do not misunderstand me.

There’s not a darned thing wrong with graciousness; I shoot for it all the time myself.

On the other hand, one does not need to have studied at the famed American War College to know that when a battle calls for a Patton, one does his country no favor by going as a Bradley instead.

When the object is to win, it would seem that the most salient key to victory lies in properly gauging the true character of one’s opponent. And in this regard, it seems to me that our beloved Senator McCain — outstanding war hero and statesman that he is — failed to comprehend the reality on the ground regarding Barack Obama and that army of trench fighters backing his candidacy.

Now, there is no doubt that John McCain does not make these naïve misjudgments when it comes to our enemies around the world.

McCain has said plainly on more than one occasion that when he looks into Putin’s eyes, he sees KGB. McCain knows full well that Putin, in a suit playing friendly diplomatic statesman, is a front for an old KGB power-mad goon.

McCain understands that Putin is merely going through the motions while keeping his eye firmly fixed on the old Soviet empire, patiently awaiting opportunities to rebuild it. There is no doubt that Putin still pulls the strings in Russia and is merely waiting for his imminent return to the formalities of power.

The country of Georgia proved a handy testing of American limits. Now it’s on to Poland and those missiles rushed in already to test our new knave of a president-elect.

John McCain understands the evil and the determination of our Islamo-fascist foes far, far, far, far better than Barack Obama. There is no doubt whatsoever about this.

John McCain has stated ferociously and often that when it comes to our war with Islamo-fascism, “we will never surrender. They will.” On the will and persistence which will be required to defeat these mullahs, intent on establishing their worldwide fascist caliphate, McCain obviously gets it.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, spent several years of his own childhood with a kindly Islamic stepfather, attending school as a Muslim and learning the Koran. Young Barack tells of a fondness for the melodic sound of the calls to prayer at the mosque and of going there on Fridays with his stepfather. He mastered the call himself and can still belt it out in perfect Arabic.

Barack’s own mother, a lovely anthropologist, raised to disdain Christians as weak-minded hypocrites, had no such antipathy for any other world religion. In fact, she twice married Muslim men, the first as a second wife to a man for whom Islamic polygamy was a virtue.

In adulthood, Barack Obama has made it a point to embrace the Palestinian point of view in its historic battle over the little strip of Middle Eastern land called Israel. Obama has traveled all of his adult life in these far-left intellectual circles and chose a church closely identified with the Palestinian “cause,” a supposedly Christian church where Muslims need not renounce that faith to join. Obama spent 20 years in Wright’s church, where Louis Farrakhan was a local hero and recipient of honorific awards.

John McCain, clearly, does not confuse these foreign enemies with friends.

But he did underestimate the guile of Barack Obama.

Hundreds of pundits from coast to coast are already engaged in the process of explaining what went wrong for John McCain. In fact, this process will undoubtedly continue for quite some time. Political analysts will write books on the topic from one point of view or another in the coming year. Opining upon this historic election will become a national pastime in some circles.

As for me, I won’t spend another week on this.

I’m sick to death of this campaign.

And crying over spilt milk has never succeeded in putting a single ounce of it back into the bottle.

My own opinion was formed over the past year as I looked at the man, Barack Hussein Obama, in public giving perfectly choreographed speeches with the aid of his teleprompter and professional speechwriters, while he fumbled and stumbled and misspoke and spoke inartfully every time he was without his props.

My opinion only hardened every time I heard Obama inventing relatives out of whole cloth to add flourish to his carefully constructed, oh-so-American narrative.

Lies by any other name … still lies.

My opinion was gradually set in steel as I read and studied and pored over Obama’s own books. The incongruous details of his race-obsessed memoir — the invented episodes, the composite characters, the utter lack of humility and true introspection — all bespoke a man of innate dishonesty and a lack of healthy shame. His audacious book on politics did nothing but hammer home his lack of principles and values, as he equivocated every single position, until the reader could determine absolutely nothing coherent about the writer.

Barack Obama has lived 47 years. In all that time, he has presented himself in public as a multi-dimensional symbolic figure, self-anointed as far more special than any of his actual deeds have ever — even in a single instance — validated as reality. If ever there was a more enigmatic figure in American public life, I have yet to discover him.

And so, my own final judgment of this campaign is that John McCain’s failure to assess the depth of his opponent’s desire for power — power for its own sake — was his own fatal flaw.

And the moment of truth in this campaign:

When Larry King asked John McCain less than a week before the election whether he believed Barack Obama was a socialist, McCain firmly answered, “No.”

In fact, he should have said, “Verily, I do not know what Barack Obama is and neither does anyone else, except perhaps the man himself.”

To which McCain might have added for extra flourish — and perhaps hundreds of thousands of votes for himself:

“If he walks like a socialist, and quacks like a socialist, then there is very good reason to assume that he is a socialist.”

For this, one needs no education, but he does need a grain of common sense. Pure common sense — common sense not defiled by the ongoing, ubiquitous reeducation camp we euphemistically refer to as political correctness.

John McCain, in this contest of your life, your own misplaced sense of graciousness defeated you. And I am truly saddened that we will never have the benefit of your service as our commander in chief.

That is settled; it is now history. What remains to be seen is what your own error will cost the American people, for whom you refused to be the Patton we needed.

Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent citizen journalist. She is a frequent contributor to PJ Media and American Thinker. She blogs at www.commonsenseregained.com.
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