John McCain, in a meeting with the Des Moines Register's editorial board, narrated by Josh Marshall of TPM.
Here are some ther things I noticed besides McCain's seething manner that Josh concentrates on: the occasional creepy smile, the grim way he sticks to lies that have already been thoroughly debunked, his utter denial of what polls show about his choice of running mate (including in her own state), the way he shows no shame in labeling himself with the names he used to pretend the media made up for him; e.g., "straight talk," "putting my country first," and "my honorable service."
And of course, can't go through an interview without John McCain reminding you that he was a POW. Because he doesn't like to talk about that.
Oh, and how many tongues flicks did you catch? I caught inner ones around 1:40 and 2:50, and the full lizard at around 1:57, 2:03, and 5:25.
[Added] More Angry Johnny.
2 comments:
Yeah not a very nice person to work for, I would imagine. But I wouldn't necessarily say that being continually in a state of controlled anger is a necessarily bad characteristic for a POTUS. (emphasising the "controlled" part though...)
In this case it the anger seems to be pretty clearly directed at the media, which he views as the enemy. Specifically, they holds contrary views to his own and want to promote those views through opposition. At one point he was asked a clear (and IMHO relatively objective) question about his health care record. His response was "that's an interesting statement", when it clearly wasn't a statement at all. Again I'm sure that this siege mentality is probably symptomatic of a very long campaign, as well as being a fairly consistent conservative world view.
But the net effect of this hostility is that he clearly intimidated his interviewers. Faced with such an intransigent interviewee, the journos obviously felt that they couldn't press him further on some of his claims. "We have facts on the website" is the substance of his answer to one question, which frankly isn't good enough IMHO.
A more obvious example was his answer on the issue of Palin's experience. He basically claimed that she is popular, ergo she is experienced. The journos let this complete nonsense stand which, again, I think is a clear sign they were intimidated by him.
I agree that he intimidated the interviewers and that they should have done better follow-up.
I disagree that we want a president in a continuous state of anger, no matter how controlled. Sign me up for cool, calm, and collected every single time.
Also agree that many of his answers were bullshit. At this point, though, anyone who has been paying attention knows that. Also, 99.99% of anyone who would care about fact-checking a politician has already made up his or her mind. The win, from my perspective, was that he came across as such a grouchy old man, and I think that will help turn the low-information voters away from him.
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