Podhoretz Writes a Powerful Paragraph

March 11, 2012
The Other McCain

Actually, he writes far more than a paragraph, but he really brings home his point in this one:

Yes, if ever you wanted circumstantial evidence that the sources within the McCain campaign who spent October 2008 dumping on Palin anonymously might have included [Nicolle] Wallace and [Steve] Schmidt, you need look no further than HBO’s Game Change. The movie presents a moral case for the disreputable conduct of aides who, we can presume, fearlessly drop dirty dimes anonymously to save their own standing in the liberal culture from which they desperately wish not to be excluded.

Podhoretz makes an excellent point, and one which might have been extended to book length to address the Culture of Backstabbing that so dominates the Republican Party nowadays.

What is lacking, I would suggest, is the sort of humility that evangelical Christians have in mind when they employ the term “a servant’s heart.” Many GOP political operatives are more self-righteously judgmental than any Pharisee whom Christ ever denounced, and their only loyalty is to their own selfish ambitions. They are the type of people who are temperamentally incapable of admitting error, and therefore are always seeking scapegoats whom they can blame for their own failures.

If Wallace and Schmidt are prominent examples of this tendency, certainly it was fitting that they should have been employed by that most eminent Pharisee, Senator John Sidney McCain III.

UPDATE: I’ve noticed I’m getting a bit of Google search traffic on a post I wrote in October – thank you, HBO!