'John McCain’s Family Just Says “No” to John McCain'

Post is here.

Just in time for McCain's solo tour of Florida without his crowd-generating human shield, Sarah Palin, the St. Petersburg Times publishes an op-ed from one of John McCain's cousins:

A part of me is made very sad to write this article. As I've said, my family has followed John's life and career with no absence of pride. If there ever were a Republican we might consider voting for, it would have been my cousin John.

But, as he continually demonstrates in this campaign, my cousin John is long gone. "Straight talk" has been replaced with "flip-flop." Saddest all, this is the same man who, when campaigning in 2000, told a crowd of supporters, "I don't think Bill Gates needs a tax cut. I think your parents do."

My parents, John, need some help after the economic destruction Bush has wrought in the last eight years, but it's clear you're not the one who'll give it to us. America's working families no longer recognize you, nor does your own.

First there was the story of Daddy's Li'l Princess, Cindy McCain, and her conveniently forgotten half-sisters, so alienated and infuriated by their sibling's sanitization of her personal history that they felt compelled to speak out. Now John McCain's own cousins call him on his blatantly hypocritical campaign tactics, publishing op-eds in large circulation daily newspapers.

And yet the McCains are fetishized by the media as "common folk," just like you and me, only with more houses with more skeleton-filled closets. [See: Keating Five, Cindy's Drug Habit, et al.]

What more do potential McCain voters need to convince them that John McCain is NOT the maverick, the D.C. outsider he loves to paint himself as? How much more proof do they require that exposes John McCain as nothing more than a quisling politician who, for example, hires the very same RNC consultant responsible for the 2000 campaign sliming of his adopted daughter? A coward who once lauded himself as a moderate, but who now caves to the Religious Right and taps Serena Joy as his running mate?

I see the cousin's point. Frankly, I wouldn't want to have to invite him to family functions, either.