Week of July 7, 2008

John McCain made his bus famous in 2000 during his first run for president, calling it the “Straight Talk Express.” In 2008, he’s moved up to a fancy, configured jet, painting its sides with the same slogan. The trouble is, when you examine McCain’s polices and public utterances you will find very little resembling straight talk. A substantive reading of his record leads to one clear conclusion: The John McCain of 2000 would not vote for the John McCain of 2008.

If [Rick] Perlstein's history of the 1960s and early '70s [Nixonland]in America has a throughline, it's mistrust. Parents don't trust their children. Enlisted men don't trust their officers. Blacks don't trust whites, Southerners don't trust Northerners, the Silent Majority doesn't trust the Intellectual Establishment, and -- soon enough -- nobody trusts the government.

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley. When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

Berlin, a city torn apart by war, is the perfect setting for an American president preaching peace. Ronald Reagan famously stood metres away from the Brandenburg Gate and called on the Soviet Union to tear down the Wall dividing Europe. And President Kennedy used a Cold War visit to the once and future German capital to declare: “ich bin ein Berliner!” Now Barack Obama, the presidential candidate, wants to grandstand there too.

Of all the stupid things done by the anti-war crowd, the most gratuitously moronic was allowing the sanctimonious hypocrites of the right to co-opt the nation's most basic icon, its flag. The emblem of the country's highest aspirations was mindlessly ceded to the holier-than-thou zealots who used it as a bludgeon against the less fanatical. Everyone who's voting for Obama -- and especially those who are public figures -- must immediately procure a flag pin and not be seen without it before November 5th. If you can't do it with pride, do it as an act of subversion.