The Camille Pagliazation of conservative journalism?

What has happened at Human Events? That worthily dull (or dully worthy) conservative magazine has an article by Dan Riehl tearing apart Sen. McCain’s self-promoting but vacuous daughter Meghan McCain in most colorful and disrespectful language. Is this another sign of the conservative movement coming alive? (Don’t let John Derbyshire know, he prefers death.)

Dirty Sexy Know-Nothing
by Dan Riehl
09/17/2010

Giving serious thought to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, is like walking face-first into the seemingly thick ick of a cobweb on a late night stroll. One knows something is there, however indefinable. You’ve encountered it, strangely. Try as you might, you can’t help but shudder and pull back, repulsed. Yet, somehow, you’re still left unsure if there was really much of anything there worth taking seriously when you’re through.

The New York Times entitled a recent article about her, Daughter of John McCain Is A Rebel. But is she that? In some ways, she seems little more than the full-throated expression of her politically and otherwise wayward and confused father, John McCain, himself.

Call her a chippie off the old block, if you will. One can easily imagine the senator just as relaxed, comfortable inside the Valley Ho, the Scottsdale hotel from which she first launched her, according to the Times, “misfired” blog, McCain Blogette. Well, if one is going to misfire, I suppose inside the Valley Ho is as good a place as any to do it.

Perhaps John McCain was being autobiographically prescient in 2003, when he quipped, if “Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people” … “Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded.”

For her significant lack of substantive accomplishment through internships, jobs and assignments handed her, Megan McCain strikes one as the living, breathing and heaving, meaty embodiment of the merging of the two—Hollywood and Washington.

Is there really anything other than the celebrity of having a famous, or perhaps infamous, father, depending upon your point of view, that Meghan McCain actually has accomplished, or has going for her?

Other than that, and her self-obsessed, grandstanding nature, and hopefully still grandstanding breasts, of course—certainly one could make a case.

Even the Times’ Liesl Schillinger seemed to be reaching for a star when he met her, writing, “I searched for a dramatic presence.” If scooching, dishing, drawing one’s legs up under oneself is dramatic, one can assume Schillinger found what he was looking for. But Ingmar Bergman, or Katharine Hepburn, Meghan McCain is most assuredly not. Even her gaudy, self-celebratory matching earrings tell us that.

Writes Schillinger, “I approached hesitantly, and then, noting two glinting “M” earrings (one “M” per lobe), shook her hand.” What, no air kisses in Arizona? Must be the dry heat.

Meghan McCain has offered up her breasts to us via Twitter. She entitled her book Dirty Sexy Politics going so far as to have some of the more titillating bits edited out. She strains to exhibit herself in every way she can, while being careful to never exhibit just that bit too much. And anything and everything she has ever written, ultimately, turns out to be mostly about her. Imagine that!

She’s a one young woman cult of celebrity with no serious following one can discern. She certainly has no discernible following within the political world, save for the media, of course.

Yes, the same media so welcoming to her father, assuming he isn’t running for President, can’t get enough of Meghan McCain and can’t tell us enough how she’s the next, newest thing. Meanwhile, multitudes of females in conservative and Republican politics, ones far more serious and beautiful, inside and out, mostly go ignored. Gee, now why is that? It shouldn’t take you more than one guess to answer that question yourself.

Eventually, it becomes somewhat sad contemplating this sort of mound of flesh, plopped out in the Arizona desert, born to wealth, a family well-placed. One gets the impression Meghan McCain has no real place in the world beyond that, except within and focused upon Meghan McCain. Yet, she hopes to “inspire,” according to the Times. Unfortunately, one is left guessing as to whom, or what, Meghan McCain truly wants to inspire, except perhaps inspiring as much attention to herself as she possible can.

She seems determined to do anything and everything just sensational enough to be noticed—yet, not quite so sensational so as to be disowned, or again rebuked, as was the case when she was dismissed from her father’s campaign in 2008.

Were she born to the real Hollywood and not some caricature of a caricature on the Potomac, by way of Arizona, I suspect we’d all be able to view her sexual prowess on YouTube by now. Well, at least we’ll always have Paris for that.

Dan Riehl works as a political consultant in Washington, DC and also maintains a popular Internet blog, www.Riehlworldview.com.

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

I thought that was a great hit piece on Ms. McCain, who in a lot of ways, reminds me of Ron Reagan Junior, someone whom the Left has tolerated and paraded out simply to demoralize the Right - rather unsuccessfully, I must add. As one of the nation’s leading liberalologists, I must take my brain, ears, and eyes where no white conservative has gone before (e.g., analyzing what passes for political discourse on urban radio), which is why I have forced myself to listen to Ms. McCain and “Young” Reagan, both of whom are players in the George W. Bush League, having been born on third base, and trying to convince themselves they hit triples to get there.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2010 10:25 AM | Send
    

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