McCain is Dead — “And We Killed Him”

No one is willing to say it, because it is hard to believe, but the media built John McCain up starting around 1999, and now they are tearing him down.

It’s a Nietzschean twilight of the idol who was once the GOP front-runner, and you don’t have to be a nihilist — or even an atheist — to get it. The media created McCain, but they (we?) can’t remember that — or they subconsciously refuse to understand it.

If they created him, they can destroy him. It’s that simple. And right now, as they question his low poll numbers, poor fund raising, or crumbling organization, they think they are commenting on events that transpire independent of them. In reality, the events they comment on are only newsworthy because of expectations they built, and their comments lead to worse numbers, worse fund raising, and more cracks in the once-monolithic campaign organization.

To take a page from Nietzsche, then, the media need only recognize their actions for what they are and affirm them. When we allow the illusion that the media merely observes and analyzes a world (over which they claim to have no control) to proliferate, we are rendered incapable of answering simple questions about the campaign. Next time Chris Matthews squawks, “What is going on with the McCain campaign?” remember Nietzsche: if McCain is dead, we killed him.