Taki Magazine

This is the time of year when boats are hauled out of the water and their hulls scraped free of slime and barnacles. Then a fresh coat of paint is applied and—presto—one’s ready to start ripping up hundred dollar bills for the rest of the summer (the definition of owning a boat). The slime that builds up underneath the waterline is insidious. It can cut down a boat’s speed by quite a lot, although you’d never know it by looking at it with the naked eye, slime has the tendency to work against progress in an unobtrusive manner.

Take, for example, the McCain campaign. I recently read that neocon slime is building up on his hull, something the senator of Arizona cannot afford to let grow. Neocons are insidious, not always visible to the eye, and they like to work in the shaddows, like rats and bats. McCain says that he is aware of the concerns about neocon influence, but I am not so sure. Here are the same people
who convinced the Bush administration that invading Iraq would be a slam dunk, and are responsible for the greatest American foreign-policy disaster ever, yet the senator from Arizona—an extremely decent and brave man—tells us that he includes them in the wide variety of people he is taking advice from. This is a no-no. It would be like Patton taking advice from Goering on how to deal with divided Berlin after the fall. 

McCain should stick with Colin Powell, certainly John Lehman, definitely Richard Armitage and the like, but Robert Kagan? The Kagan brothers are to American foreign policy what the pox was to the city of London once upon a time—deadly. The kiss of death, of course, is William Kristol, along with the two bobsy twins, the Podhoretzes, and liver-lips Frum the bum. Once that slime works itself in the McCain camp, no amount of varnish and paint can get it out. Smooth sailing, John.