Hey, maybe McCain is just stupid.

John McCain has kind of a force field around him that prevents anyone from really going after his character. Because he’s a war hero, it means we can’t really tear into him on other fronts, fronts which really need torn into.

Chiefly among those is his brain. Because of the expected after-effects of being in a Vietnam POW camp for a few years, there’s this stigma that you can’t say John McCain is “crazy”, “senile”, “out of his mind”, or “not firing on all cylinders” despite that it may be a perfectly reasonable description of the situation.

A curious and surprisingly resourceful blogger was reading about McCain on Wikipedia and ran across a hell of a tidbit: In his graduating class at Annapolis, of 899 students, John McCain was fifth from the bottom. 894th. In the bottom 0.6% of his class.

Ruminate on that a moment. Think about your own graduating class for any of you college grads. Think over, honestly, how much you slacked. Think about how hard you tried to avoid doing as much work as possible. Now, did you graduate fifth from the bottom? Probably not.

Bush was a middle of the pack student, a C student. That’s where the slackers go and the semi-motivated smart guys. Bush isn’t the best and brightest, but a careful observer will note that he’s not a complete dunce for all his “aw shucks” shtick. After all, Gore’s GPA was hardly any different.

No, a smart person with a bit of a lazy streak does not end up 5th from the bottom. That’s where the complete flunkies land who can’t grasp Chapter 1 but beg the professor not to let them fail. That’s the rank of the mildly intelligent guys who simply never, ever go to class and sit down for the final not knowing what the course title is.

Which is John McCain? Depends on who you ask. He’s admitted not to be big on the economy. He’s made serious high-level misstatements such as claiming Iran was training Al Qaeda. And recently he completely whiffed on his own voting record. At the same time, he was the 110th Congress’s most absent senator.

We’re quick to call his flubbed assertions “senior moments”, but as that clever blogger said, they may not be senior moments at all. He may be that dumb.

We’re also quick to call a McCain presidency a continuation of Bush, but it might be even worse than that. He’s an amplification, arriving at the level of our caricature of Bush as the intellectually incurious buffoon stumbling his way through yet another speech he doesn’t understand.

Read the Razor, folks. Learn it, live it, apply it here.

The difficulty in prosecuting terrorists

As much as we all love taking all of our frustrations out on nearby terrorists (or at least terrorist suspects), we have to agree that there are a few little difficulties involved. Take the recent case of a few people charged with planning the 9/11 attack. When the death penalty is the highest penalty in the land, it’s tough to use when the accused really, really wants it.

“This is what I wish, to be martyred,” Pakistani captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, told the Guantanamo war crimes court.

As the judge questioned him about whether he was satisfied with the U.S. military lawyer appointed to defend him, Mohammed stood and began to sing in Arabic, cheerfully pausing to translate his own words into English.

“My shield is Allah most high,” he said, adding that his religion forbade him from accepting a lawyer from the United States and that he wanted to act as his own attorney.

Remember that scene in Fight Club where the owner of the bar comes down and starts beating the shit out of Brad Pitt, but all he does is laugh at him the whole time? That’s kinda what this is. He asks to be executed and he’s singing and dancing during the trial. Less than satisfying since the only real reason this is happening is in order to make America feel better about the fact that the actual hijackers were too selfish to let us be the ones to kill them.

You know what else sucks? When they make a valid point.

But Mohammed cast doubt on that transcript in Thursday’s hearing. “They mistranslated my words and put many words in my mouth,” he said in broken English learned as an engineering student in North Carolina.

He called the trial “an inquisition” and added, “All of this has been taken under torturing. You know that very well.”

These were the guys that the CIA admitted were waterboarded. And apparently they admitted to helping plan 9/11. These two events are completely unrelated, it’s just that the near-drowning and torturous conditions made the truth come out.

Maybe they really did what they’re accused of, but you know what? When the “confession” happens under torture and the accused is more than happy to be executed, it makes the whole thing seem like, well, a circus. Not a great illustration of American justice, a sideshow.

Obama's lapel pin?

Okay, so, there’s been all this hullabaloo over Barack Obama and the flag lapel pin he won’t wear. I’ve admired his resolve on that front, saying he won’t get caught up in jingoistic patriotism and all that. Good for him.

However, I was watching his victory speech, and… what’s this?

Is that a lapel pin?? Oh, Barack, not already…

Obama’s lapel pin?

Okay, so, there’s been all this hullabaloo over Barack Obama and the flag lapel pin he won’t wear. I’ve admired his resolve on that front, saying he won’t get caught up in jingoistic patriotism and all that. Good for him.

However, I was watching his victory speech, and… what’s this?

Is that a lapel pin?? Oh, Barack, not already…