Lowry excoriates McCain for his dishonesty, then praises him for his truthfulness

In his column of last Friday, Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, starts off by applauding John McCain for his luck. McCain, he says, “carries a lucky nickel. It apparently has been working its magic.” Lowry continues:

It’s hard to imagine a less likely path to the nomination. McCain’s tenacity and indelible image as a truth-telling maverick have been indispensable, but so have the other candidates and—yes—the political stars. Keep rubbing the lucky nickel, Senator.

Now, as anyone knows who has been following the conservative Web or the links I’ve been providing over the past week, the contributors at Lowry’s own magazine and many other conservative columnists have been writing detailed indictments of McCain’s stunning dishonesty. Yet Lowry says McCain has an “indelible” image as a truth-teller! How can this be? Well, Lowry’s defenders might reply, Lowry is not speaking about McCain himself, but about people’s belief about McCain; it’s their belief in his truthfulness that is indelible. But obviously the belief in McCain’s truthfulness is not indelible, if Lowry’s own colleagues, not to mention vast numbers of grass roots conservatives, are convinced that McCain is a major liar.

Furthermore, it wasn’t just other conservatives who were calling McCain deeply dishonest, it was Lowry himself. In an interview last Monday with Hugh Hewitt, which I discussed here, Lowry said:

RL: … But that’s really outrageous what McCain is doing, bringing up this ancient interview, and distorting it at the last minute so he doesn’t have to talk about the economy.

HH: Rich Lowry, your reaction to this whole scandal, attack, as well as Rudy’s and Toobin’s reactions?

RL: Well, I think they’re right. I think it’s totally dishonest, and I took away a couple of things from it. One, I think McCain just kind of feels entitled to this cheap shot, because he was genuinely up front about the surge, he was more courageous about it than pretty much any other major politician. So he just feels, though, he can deliver this low blow. And the other thing that is going on, I think, is McCain is much more comfortable attacking harshly and unfairly his enemies within the Republican Party than he is attacking Democrats. And layered on top of this is his obvious, and I think I find it very distasteful, but his obvious hatred for Mitt Romney. If you saw the clip of McCain today, chortling as he was talking about Romney’s flip-flopping, it’s this kind of insincere McCain laughter that masks his true bile that he’s directing towards Mitt Romney. So I find the whole thing, from the dishonesty to the kind of sentiment animosity it’s revealing about Mitt Romney, to be really unworthy of John McCain, and kind of a shame.

Here is Lowry talking McCain on the campaign trail talking about immigration:

RL: … I will say watching McCain on the stump, I was down there in Florida Wednesday and Thursday of last week, you know, he sounds like Lou Dobbs on immigration now, and I just think it’s so obviously insincere. Someone got up at one of his town halls, and asked him if he’d consider pardoning the border agents, those two border agents, Ramos and Campion. And he basically said yeah, I might, you know, we need more information about that, there’s an investigation ongoing. You know in his heart he thinks the guy who is asking that question is an idiot and a right-wing fanatic. That’s how he thinks of him. But he’s pretending to get himself through to this nomination. And I just don’t believe anything he’s saying on immigration, and I think one of the first priorities he would have as president of the United States would be cutting an amnesty deal with some sort of border enforcement window dressing on it, with the Democratic Congress.

Lowry made the above damning observations about McCain one day before the Florida primary. Maybe he was thinking that McCain would lose. Yet three days later, after McCain had won the Florida primary and was seen by many to be on his way to the nomination, Lowry was anointing McCain as a man with an “indelible” image of honesty.

Clearly, Lowry’s mind does not have any discernible relationship with an objective or stable truth. His mind seems to operate according a simple, highly flexible protocol: that which succeeds politically, or is perceived as succeeding, or is predicted by pollsters to succeed, is good, and must be praised. McCain is ahead for the nomination and is thought to be the inevitable winner, therefore McCain’s reputation for honesty—which Lowry had been trashing three days earlier—is “indelible.”

Further, I believe that Lowry has no consciousness of the fact that he is grossly contradicting his previous statements, because for Lowry there is no such thing as truth and falsehood. There is only winning, and the embracing of the winner.

By now even Lowry’s colleagues at NR must be quietly embarrassed by him.

National Review under his editorship should change its name to Pollster’s Review—or PR for short.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2008 09:16 PM | Send