John and Pete

Pete just couldn’t tell a joke.

The old one-liner "A termite walked into a pub and asked, ‘Where’s the bar tender?’" usually elicits a chuckle and a few groans.

Pete’s version went like this, "A termite walked into a pub and asked where the bar tender was."


It still got chuckles and groans, but people were laughing at Pete, not at the joke.

At times John McCain reminds me of Pete. He just can’t tell it right. He wants the joke to be on Obama, but the joke ends up being on him. His attacks are intended to wound Obama, but they are wounding John McCain instead.

Poor John is screwing up the punch line and everybody seems to know it but him.

There’s something wrong here.

I can’t be mad at John. I wish I could. I would rather be mad at him than sad for him.

You see, I identify with John. We’re about the same age, and I resent the fact that people say he is too old. I liked the self-depreciating John McCain who was able to comfortably laugh at himself, who was quick with a quip. That phone call at three AM doesn’t scare me, John is probably up then anyway, going to the bathroom.

Once I even thought that he was a maverick, a straight talker. When he spoke up against the Bush tax cuts I thought he really cared about the middle class. When he reached across the aisle to work on campaign finance reform, I appreciated the effort, if not the result.

When did his statements start backfiring on him? It wasn’t always that way. Did something happen to cause him to speak against his beliefs.

It happened to him once before.

Maybe John thinks he is in captivity again, spreading propaganda he doesn’t really believe, doing the bidding of his captors because he thinks not doing so would be committing career suicide.

Maybe he’s not so much like Pete after all.