RUSH: Funny story today also today in the New York Observer. (That’s the pink paper here in the city.) Headline: “John McCain and the Iraq Numbers Game.” The Drive-By Media is starting to turn on McCain now. They loved McCain when he was anti-Republican, and they thought when he was a moderate and a “straight talker,” but Richard Cohen of the Washington Post had a column yesterday essentially saying that McCain’s campaign is a tale of two cities, Baghdad and something else, because he’s all for troop increases, increasing the number of troops, and the — the drive-bys are just beside themselves that McCain is changing the guy he was during that period of time when they fell in love with him: South Carolina and the primaries, the New Hampshire primary 2000, the Straight Talk Express, and this New York Observer story is sort of a takeoff on this.
“It’s not that McCain’s call for more troops to be dispatched to Iraq is disingenuous. He is, after all, a confirmed believer in the democratizing doctrine of American neoconservatism. He’s a proponent of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein back when George W. Bush was pooh-poohing the concept of nation building. Consider the chief lesson that McCain seems to have learned from his 2000 White House bid when his maverick credentials certified him as the most popular politician in the United States but doomed him in the primary.” Now, that intrigued me. That intrigued me, so I decided to keep reading the story. The story is otherwise dull and boring, and we know everything there is to know about McCain — and here it is. “Which brings us to the present debate over Iraq, its parameters redefined by the bipartisan study group’s suggestion to,” surrender. It doesn’t say that. I put that in myself.
“For Mr. McCain, the fault lines are eerily familiar. His old allies have their fingers crossed, hoping that Bush’s obstinacy will at least wilt, but a shrill minority of voices on the right — the Rush Limbaughs and the Sean Hannitys — who led the intra-party assault on McCain in 2000 feel threatened by the Iraq [Surrender] Group and have viciously turned their guns on its members and their proposes.” Notice when any of us disagree with these people, we are called “vicious” and we “turn our guns” on them. I said it was stupid, and I called it a surrender report — and I don’t feel threatened by it at all. At any rate, “A shrill minority of voices on the right, the Rush Limbaughs…who led the intra-party assault on McCain in 2000… This time McCain is standing squarely with the Limbaugh crowd. Maybe it’s because he genuinely agrees with the Limbaugh crowd or maybe it’s just that he learned a political lesson about what happens to you when you don’t agree with the Limbaugh crowd.” (laughing)
This is the New York Observer, and this is a trend you’re going to see it more and more. The Drive-By Media is very much upset over the fact that McCain’s changing who he is and trying to become the new definition of conservatism. We’ll see how he reacts to that. Everybody loves fawning media, and you would assume he has to know that this was going to happen. Maybe not.