Two Senators, One President, One Weekend, and a Pair of Possible Futures:
One would like to think that it causes John McCain actual, physical pain to bend over and lick George Bush's anus. Not the act of giving the rim job, but the bending waist, half-bent knees, the body in general, all have to be aching from his Vietnam War torture injuries whenever McCain does one of his public asshole lappings of the President. While at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, which was surprisingly not a KKK meeting, McCain proclaimed for all to see that he loved the taste of Bush's sphincter, as he asked the gathered delegates to write-in Bush's name for a straw poll on who they wanna have fer President in 2008. It was perhaps the gayest action at a Republican event since Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn performed a duet of "Anything Goes" in drag at the 1952 Republican Convention.

In his speech at the SRLC this past Friday and in his "private" conversations with the President, John McCain sacrificed whatever phantoms of "maverick"-ness he still had surrounding him. As Paul Krugman says today, McCain is just another ultra-right-winger who happens to have done one or two things that make it seem as if he's not. He's all talk, McCain is, a chipmunk-cheeked blowhard who, like every other Republican, makes noises that he's independent and free-thinking when, in reality, like Olympia Snowe, like Arlen Specter, like Chuck Hagel, he's just in a line waiting for Karl Rove to let him into the Oval Office washroom so he can lick Bush's asshole clean. Rove calls McCain after Bush has had another bad delivery tamale lunch.

In our Fox "News"-infected world, "straight talk" means about as much as "fair and balanced" and "no-spin zone." When, as McCain did this past weekend, you can say of a man who defends policies on torture, policies that break the laws of the nation, laws you swore to uphold, "We should all just keep our personal ambitions a distant second to standing with the president ... in good times and bad. ... He's our president, and the only one that needs our support today," then you have placed all your chips on red, and you better hope that motherfucker doesn't drop on black.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, McCain's Democratic cohort on campaign finance reform, Russ Feingold, said on This Week With George Stephanopoulos's Hair that he was going to introduce a resolution for the Senate to censure the President for the NSA spying scandal. Simply stating that the President broke the law and should be held accountable for that, Feingold's quixotic action was not only immediately dismissed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a man who is so far up Bush's ass that McCain has to shove his feet aside in order to give a proper rimming, but the Republican National Committee, led, of course, by Ken "Mr. President, I'll Go Down On Your Ass Whenever You Ask" Mehlman, savagely attacked Feingold.

Spat the RNC: "Sen. Feingold's out of touch attack demonstrates, once again, that Democrats are willing to play politics with the most important issue facing the American people. Attempting to harness angry partisanship for short-term political gain does nothing to make America safer and everything to detract from President Bush's continued efforts to aggressively fight the War on Terror. Not only is Senator Feingold's approach a disservice to those who work tirelessly to protect America, it sends the wrong message to our enemies." Not to dissect such a tired argument too far, but it ain't too far a leap to think that if George W. Bush fed roofies in chocolate eggs to the children at the White House Easter egg hunt and then went crazy fucking all the children one or two at a time and Russ Feingold felt that it might be proper to censure Bush for drugging and raping children, the RNC would put out the exact same statement.

Oh, and the RNC lists all the times that Feingold voted against the Patriot Act, a record that Feingold ain't exactly runnin' from.

There you go: two visions of the President - one as the steadfast leader, fightin' against polls and partisanship to wage a good fight against those who would try to kill us; the other as a craven liar and lawbreaker who has done more harm to this nation than our enemies could have ever hoped to do. Just as we must give up the illusion of McCain as a moderate, we need to give up on the notion that there is such a thing as middle ground.