Posted 1:32 PM by Scoobie Davis

Is it the 2000 South Carolina Primary All Over Again for John McCain?


As I noted in the previous post, it's great to see the right eat its own. Today, there's at least a hint that the wingnutosphere might use the same tactics used by anti-McCain Republicans in the crucial South Carolina presidential primary.  If you'll remember, pro-Bush Republicans suggested that McCain's wife was a drug addict and that McCain fathered an illegitimate black daughter.  One of the tactics, straight out of Karl Rove's playbook was to try to make one of McCain's biggest strengths into a weakeness.  They did this by the whisper campaign that the time McCain spent in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp caused McCain to become mentally unhinged.  Pro-Bush people in the media further helped to spread the McCain-is-insane meme.  I noted on this blog that during the 2000 South Carolina primary, Rush Limbaugh had a Caine Mutiny parody on his radio show that had a McCain sound-alike engage in paranoid rant similar to the kind given by the Captain Queeg character.

Is the McCain-as-Queeg meme being put back into action now? I'll report and you decide: today Joseph Farah --who helped Limbaugh with his book See I Told You So--wrote this in his WorldNetDaily column:

You could say I'm prejudiced against John McCain. The idea of McCain's finger on the nuclear trigger brings shudders to my very soul. The man is emotionally and psychologically unstable, in my opinion. Imagining McCain as president brings to mind equally scary and morally repulsive figures – Hillary Clinton, Captain Queeg or Charles Logan, the fictional president in season five of "24."