I know; I saw it too: Grampy McMaverick tying an onion to his belt and out-Trumping Trump’s disconnected babbling. It was so bad, I almost couldn’t find it funny how often he said, “aroused”. In fact, it’s so abhorrent a thought - that a longtime US Senator has lost so many of his marbles that he can’t cobble together a single rational question with a script in front of him, yet is endowed with life-altering power - that my brain tried to reject it, and replace with a flight of fancy.
The flight went something like this: If I were, say, a longtime loyal member of my political party, having carried their swampwater for decades, having staked a career on being Mr Straight Talk, and my party had kicked me in the donalds one too many times, and I was handed a script for slapping the words “Clinton” and “Russia” together as often as possible for the folks listening at home in a lame attempt to both-sides-do-it Mister “little-p president” Trump’s blatant lawlessness and likely treason, and if I, for instance, had scores to settle with the scumfucks who invaded my party, trashed it, threw me under a bus repeatedly, and “encouraged” me at every turn to destroy my career, what I might do would look a lot like that trainwreck John McCain unintentionally engineered.
In short, I would strongly consider fucking up the talking points script so badly they couldn’t touch it with a ten-point poll, making my party look like idiots twice over, once owing to my performance, and once because they were dumb enough to trust me with the task of giving the talking heads their talking points. Especially if I knew I was on my way to ride off into the Arizona sunset.
Not that I’m saying this is what happened. No, I think Occam’s Razor has some bad news for John McCain. But it’s certainly a more palatable option than the ugly reality that yet another high-ranking US official with enormous responsibilities has lost the capability to muddle through ten minutes of scripted airtime without shitting the bed. Or that this Grandpa Simpson interlude was just a brief sideshow in the unfolding horrors so many Americans have gotten used to with soul-crushing alacrity.
I know my flight of fancy is not true. But it sounds nice. Isn’t this the post-truth era? I’m just trying to fit in, so it seems appropriate to emotionally rather than rationally suppose John McCain torpedoed his marching orders and deliberately sabotaged a ham-fisted attempt to throw yet more mud at Hillary Clinton, costing only himself and his handlers. What a straight-talkin’ maverick move that would have been.
So what if John McCain were a friggin’ genius? Yeah, I know: He isn’t. But if he were, would the result have been any different? Could he have screwed the dirtbags in his party any harder than he did? I doubt it. Sure, what we witnessed more resembled tragedy than comedy, but in these dark times, we should remember to have a little fun on occasion. And it’s fun to play, “What if?”. So I decided to embrace the ludicrous for a day, and ask myself: What if John McCain were a friggin’ genius?
Well, I imagine it would look a lot like what happened, only much, much less sad.