Alternately a bully and a whiner, and a bald-faced liar to perhaps a greater degree than even George Bush and Dick Cheney, McCain is running a stupid and mephitic campaign that insults even Americans of average intelligence virtually every day, says Michael Tomasky.

He has pandered to the right wing to a degree that the word “shameless” can’t possibly begin to describe. He has flip-flopped repeatedly, on taxes and Roe v. Wade and many other matters. And he quite obviously changed his position on offshore drilling in order to raise pots of money from oil interests. Period.

He lies with abandon. He’s not an idiot, so he has to know very well, for example, that offshore drilling won’t affect the price of gasoline (petrol) for many years to come. Yet he repeatedly implies or says outright to audiences that if we just opened up the coasts to drilling, prices would start to come down.

Most surprisingly of all to me, he has demonstrated over and over his lack of a grasp of, and in many cases even a passing interest in, the details of policy. Here is a man who’s been a national legislator for a quarter-century. He has clearly been interested in a few things, mostly having to do with military and foreign policy, and to a certain extent energy policy. But there are dozens more realms with which responsible solons ought to have acquainted themselves over 25 years. McCain seems to have glided through the Senate without even bothering to learn very much at all about fiscal and economic policy, healthcare, social policy (which is an umbrella rubric covering a dozen different things) and a lot of other topics. His campaign, and his partisans, accuse Obama of being a lightweight. But in truth, McCain is the policy lightweight.

More on his blog here.

1. John McCain’s ‘Foreign Policy Experience’ « Back Towards The Locus

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