"The Mavrick"

Luckily for John McCain, he saved the POW card for the end, and it once again saved him from an otherwise dismal performance. The crowd was about as electrified as a AA battery, and I had to struggle to stay awake through a good deal of the speech. There were very few policy prescriptions in the speech itself, mostly just bumper sticker political slogans that have been regurgitated by every Republican over the past 30 years.

We believe in low taxes; spending discipline, and open markets. We believe in rewarding hard work and risk takers and letting people keep the fruits of their labor.

We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench. We believe in the values of families, neighborhoods and communities.

The speech pulled the Chris Matthews heartstrings (not very hard to do) after McCain detailed advantageous parts of his POW story, and now Chris thinks he's somehow separated himself from the President??? Huh?

There wasn't a dimes worth of difference between himself and Bush, other than he actually served in Vietnam. Good on him, but just calling yourself a "maverick" doesn't make it so. The only way McCain has distanced himself from Bush in the last 8 years is McCain-Feingold. Nothing, NOTHING, else separates himself from Dubya, except now Bush is adopting a more sensible foreign policy at the behest of Robert Gates, and McCain is still stuck on stupid.

Update:

Now MSNBC is saying that he has been "resistant" to talking about his POW story. BULLSHIT! Yes, he doesn't detail the entire thing during every speech, but he consistently uses it to get out of questions he doesn't want to answer, or to stifle the opposition.

Update II:

It appears that the protesters were Paulites, and used the floor passes of Ron Paul delegates.