Yeah, I couldn't believe that either. Since when is coming in fourth behind Sleepy Fred considered a victory? But Politico's Mike Allen on FOX seems to think so:
Tonight is a fantastic night for John McCain. … He’s one of the biggest winners of the night. He’s now in a fantastic position. Except for Barack Obama, there’s almost no one you’d rather be tonight than John McCain.
Actually, I'd rather be someone who WON my caucus and got more than 13% of a lackluster republican turnout, but that's just me.
It's obvious that FOX and the republican party don't like Huckabee. He's a reminder that the republicans made a deal with the devil when they allied with evangelicals, who are now ravaging the republican party like a born-again Frankenstein. And as a governor, Huckabee had the audacity to raise taxes and was not suitably cruel enough to the children of immigrants, though his Christian compassion has since caused him to change that position. 9iu11ani, the official FOX candidate, is dead in the water, though maybe he's anticipating an "evil bump" by repeatedly saying that he'd want a VP just like Dick Cheney. Most voters have realized Mittwit doesn't have much going on under his hairdo, and Grandpa Fred has settled in for a long winter's nap. And let's not even get into Ron Paul.
That leaves only McCain, and FOX and the traditional media are following their cues by turning his 4th place finish into some kind of heroic performance. If the repubs want to pretend that McCain is their savior, that's fine with me. I guess they're hoping that evangelicals are so stupid that they'll forget he called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance", the devastating (and effective) attacks Bush waged against him in 2000, his subsequent cozying up to the Worst President Ever, and the unconvincing pandering McCain did to try to get evangelicals back on his side. Maybe repubs will also forget how embarrassingly clueless he was when he claimed that Baghdad markets were totally safe for westerners (provided each westerner supply his own 100 soldier company, armored humvees, and attack helicopters). Or maybe how McCain was so excited to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" whose nuclear weapons program had been frozen in 2003. Or that McCain sometimes seems so old and frail that you want to get him a bib so he doesn't dribble his creamed corn.
But the biggest reason why McCain would make a fun opponent is his recent statements on Iraq, where McCain feels that Americans should be jazzed to have a troop presence in Iraq for the next 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 years. If the repubs want to make this election about pulling out of Iraq now or staying there forever, I say Bring It On.
