Friends like these.

Pretty bizarre to hear McCain complaining about the media and how they treat him. It’s kind of like grousing about your family or your best friend. For chrissake, they freaking love the guy. Why else would he be running nearly even with Obama in the polls? His campaign is amazingly flat-footed and visionless, he gets details (Czechoslovakia, for instance) wrong repeatedly, he has yet to demonstrate any awareness of our economic crisis, and he thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan. Speaking of Iraq, he has been as phenomenally wrong and boneheaded as the administration he has so frequently embraced. His pronouncements about the “success” of the “surge” reek of desperation, like an arsonist telling the judge he helped put out the fire he started after the building had already burned to the ground. The mainstream press challenges almost none of his positions, blithely passing along the campaign fiction that he is an expert on foreign and security policy. They hold him responsible for neither his words nor his work as a senator. And yet he complains – go figure.

Part of what the press is doing here reflects their usual subservience to power (something that puts them in the same boat as McCain). Those who hold economic and political sway over national affairs would prefer to see McCain elected, and so the press rides along. (If the Earth were taken over by space aliens, I’m sure the press would serve them, too.) but another component of their somewhat forgiving attitude towards McCain is a reflection of the general lack of an effective opposition party in the United States – one made up of working people and the poor, consistently representing their interests in opposition to corporate power and an expansive (and expensive) American empire. The liberal-left in this country has given ground on issue after issue, conceding where no surrender was necessary. They’ve allowed the right to canonize Ronald Reagan and, by extension, his disastrous policies. They let reactionaries re-write the history of the 1960s and 70s into something utterly unrecognizable to anyone who was alive then. Small wonder the press plays along with the G.O.P. – the Democrats do, too.

One other thing. We live in a time when military service has become such a rare and exotic experience that politicians and the press are positively in awe of it, rhetorically speaking. When I was a pre-teenager, I was surrounded by people who had either been in the armed forces or were about three inches away from being conscripted. Today, very few middle class folks could say the same thing. As that experience recedes into history, McCain’s campaign can get away with ads like the “Summer of Love” TVC that appears to portray 1967 America as a nation divided between a) hippies who chose to stay home and party, and b) patriots who chose to fight for freedom in Vietnam (!). Spoiler alert: Those freaky kids they show – the young men, anyway – were mostly all on the draft rolls and probably self-medicating as a result of the terror of that circumstance. Not only was that situation frightening and dangerous, but those who were inclined to resist had almost no support. Today it’s not hard to imagine saying no to a draft (if any such thing existed). Back then, it was pretty much unprecedented. That’s part of what made those years so gut-wrenching.