McCain gets his myth-documentary before he dies

That's pretty special.  For Whom the Bell Tolls plays on HBO.  I won't be watching.

Matt Taibbi had to review it for Rolling Stone.

[O]ne of the things McCain will be most harshly judged for is his decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate in 2008. Many people (correctly) believe that moment paved the way for the rise of what David Brooks in the movie calls "a disease" of anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party.

  Matt Taibbi

If I recall correctly, he bucked that before finally giving in. But yes, he gave in. Then again, there's plenty of blame to go around for the anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party. It can be shared equally amongst anti-intellectuals and evil opportunists.

George W. Bush, the storyline goes, was the most unpopular president ever at the time, with a 25 percent approval rating. Obama, as a result, was kicking McCain's ass on the stump by pointing out that McCain said he shared a "common philosophy" with the hated Bush.

In this situation, the legend continues, McCain had to gamble: "Fight change with change," as daughter Meghan puts it in the film.

Fine, but there were other GOP women to choose from. They didn't have to go with a dingbat. Or, as Taibbi puts it...

Palin, who was a hell of a change, all right, [had] the IQ of a cheese-wheel – she made Dan Quayle sound like Spinoza. McCain's campaign was cooked from that moment, because as the months passed, he couldn't conceal his growing contempt for his own decision, leading to a fracture within the party that has persisted to this day.

[...]

But McCain deserves that millstone around his neck. No other politician – not even, really, Bush himself – was as aggressive in pushing the catastrophic Iraq invasion that ultimately cratered the modern Republican Party.

[...]

That Trump has cranked up our bombing campaigns and proved to be a total fraud on the "war is a bad deal" front is immaterial. This is an example of how the backslapping gang of Beltway all-stars who gather in this film to lament the loss of civility in politics had a lot to do with bringing about that change. They helped create that anger vote.

[...]

McCain has always seemed to hate the work part of being a senator, which requires slogging through lots of boring negotiations with self-important blowhards.

Which is the one place I give the man kudos.

His real persona in a nutshell:

McCain is a war hero who married the heiress to a beer distributorship and needed a job.

[...]

I'd have been interested in a single cut of McCain talking into the camera for two hours about how much he hated his job and how full of shit he thought everyone in Washington was, but the movie goes another way. Instead, we get a parade of wraithlike politicians from the past speaking slowly, so as not to bust their obviously recent eye jobs and neck tucks, to offer McCain mild plaudits while soft-pedaling various unrelated atrocities they personally had hands in.

[...]

McCain's tragedy as a politician is that he is forever torn between his intense desire to pander to the bomb-humping, deregulating right and the fact that he so obviously thought most Republican voters – particularly the religious ones – were dipshits.

[...]

Since he wasn't really with the party on a lot of other issues [in 2008] – he'd railed against televangelists and waffled on abortion and didn't get off on being a chainsaw-wielding, yee-hawing goon the way Bush did – this left him with nothing to run on. For days on end he seemed to campaign exclusively in half-filled VFW halls, where he would try to chew up as much time as possible glad-handing and telling jokes, so he wouldn't have to talk policy. His big theme that year was "the surge is working" and that it was better to fight the terrorists "over there" than here in America.

[...]

But rather than bravely face up to a policy error as he had on, say, the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina in 2000 or his 1983 vote against Martin Luther King day, he compounded the mistake by inviting the most vicious and virulent strain of modern conservatism onto his ticket.

This was piling one error on another, and you can draw a straight line from that second gaffe to Trump.If you want to hear Henry Kissinger croak out that he and Dick Nixon carpet-bombed Vietnamese population centers on Christmas – after years of bombing civilians in Laos and Cambodia in similar fashion, a policy of "anything that flies on anything that moves" – for the sake of peace, in order to rescue POWs like McCain, then this is the film for you.

[...]

For Whom the Bell Tolls celebrates McCain as a relic of a past when "reaching across the aisle" was still possible. The film's extraordinary lineup of gushing interviewees – Bush, Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, etc. – is an implicit endorsement of this idea.

It's a paean to the pre-Trump age when "the middle" was still sought-after political territory, and the political class to which they all belong was not yet despised enough to make someone like Donald Trump a viable spite vote. If you need 103 minutes or so of their collective denial about this, please tune in.

No, thanks.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.