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George Orwell, Meet John McCain – He’s Somewhere Over There in That Pile of Horse Pucky – Oh, Wait, I Mean Over There…

“They call him Flipper, Flipper, he flops faster than lightning, no one you see, changes quicker than he…”
– Paraphrased from the lyrics to the “Flipper” TV show theme.

Weren’t taxes the only issue McCain hasn’t flipped like a steelhead out of water on – I mean for a year or so anyway. Then, within a week, the old codpiece flips to “nothing’s off the table” regarding taxes and then flops back to “I won’t” raise taxes. Sweet Cheesus on a Ritz cracker, I need a neck-brace.

Hasn’t Cap’n McNasty set some kind of land-speed record for political flip-flops by now?

As George Zornick clarifies at Altercation August 1st:

This is the kind of stuff that creates head-sized holes in many walls around the country.

In February [2008], John McCain was pressed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week if he was a “‘read my lips’ candidate, no new taxes, no matter what.” McCain insisted there were no circumstances under which he would raise taxes.

Then, appearing on that show again last Sunday, Stephanopoulos asked if “payroll taxes are on the table,” McCain responded: “There is nothing that’s off the table. I have my positions, and I’ll articulate them. But nothing’s off the table.”

Now, that’s the kind of gargantuan flip-flop that would have given many journalists the vapors if John Kerry did it in 2004. …

[...]

Note that McCain flip-flop-flipped yesterday [July 30, 2008], reverting back to his no-new-taxes absolutism: “I think the worst thing that could happen to America in these very tough economic times is to raise someone’s taxes,” McCain said in response to a question. “I won’t do it.”

From a real ‘straight-talker’:

“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”
– George Orwell, “1984″ (1949).