Will Calls McCain the Queen of Hearts, But Old Flipflop John is Not Playing with a Full Deck

John McCain's suspension of his campaign is just another desperate campaign tactic disguised as being done for the good of the country. But it is not "Country First," but rather "McCain First." His campaign has been sliding under the sheer weight of its own lies, and he is trying for a "time out" to slow things down so he can attempt to set the "reset button," as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow so aptly put it.

Conservative political columnist George F. Will recently hit a rare home run with his characterization of McCain as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Certainly, most of the things that he approves for his campaign ads have the truth of a fairy tale, so I agree with Will that McCain's judgment is questionable.

Will writes: "Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

Will added: "It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"

I do not think so, not when the person in question is 72 years old. And I feel Barack Obama, one of the smartest, most reliable people in government, is a quick study, and already has quite a bit of knowledge and good judgment, and the experience he does possess is quality experience.

Plus, he will surround himself with good people, not Bush-Cheney retreads and Washington lobbyists like McCain has in his campaign. And the Vice-Presidential choice shows Obama makes clearer, more conservative, (in the best sense of the word), common sense decisions than McCain. He put the whole country at risk with his choice of hockey mom-cypher Sarah Palin.

This suspending the campaign is surely a political gambit, though cloaked in McCain's best "Country First" rhetoric, and it feels like a wild improvisation, as John Dickerson of Slate wrote, with "someone in the McCain team mapped out on his chest: OK, you run to the fire hydrant, cut left, and then when he gets to the Buick, John, you heave it."

It is more of the Flip-Flop Express, the roller coaster ride of positions and ploys that campaign strategist Steve Schmidt (a Bush-Rove operative) plots for good soldier McCain. You must admit, McCain still follows orders well.

Dickinson pointed out that it's not clear what exactly McCain is going to do in Washington. He doesn't sit on any of the relevant committees and everyone is already deep in negotiations. Still, he's coming anyway. It doesn't make much logical sense. (Not much McCain does makes sense in the honorable use of the word). The only way to understand it is politically: As Dickinson states, "In a presidential campaign, the surest sign that a candidate is playing politics on an issue is when he claims not to be playing politics on an issue. The only way for McCain to convince everyone that his intentions are 100 percent pure is for him to drop out of the race completely. A campaign doesn't end—and its distracting affects don't disappear—just because one candidate says so."

In response to McCain, Obama pointed out that he had actually started the bipartisan ball rolling, reaching out to McCain privately earlier in the day to issue a joint statement. McCain then one-upped him and went public. This shows you what a man of honor McCain still is -- NOT! McCain was judged a war hero because he was shot down and spent five and a half years in prison. But so much of his life sense that time, from his failed marriage to the Keating Five to his sellout to Bush in the last eight years (just to be elected President, no matter how much of his soul he had to sell)-- so much of his life shows him to NOT be a man you can trust.

McCain was not only being transparently political in this suspension, but also reckless. Imagine what that recklessness would be like if McCain were in the Oval Office. On Wednesday Joe Biden warned that McCain is actually too risky and dangerous to be a calm, deliberative commander-in-chief. McCain's mercurial, bipolar campaign proves Biden's point.

Yet the people who will vote for McCain, the ostrich-lemming part of America, will think he is a true patriot for suspending his campaign and not wanting to debate. The ostrich-lemmings are usually one or two issue voters -- anti-women's choice or anti-gay rights (even though a gay couple getting married has no real impact on them, the propaganda makes them afraid, so they vote Republican). Or gun lovers, or anti-Mexican folks (they call it immigration, but it is usually racism), or anti-black folks (racism again, even though Obama is half-white). The Republicans win by fear, not by a real look at what is best, overall, for the country as a whole. It is so deeply sad.