It's The Thought That Counts

You knew this was going to happen: McCain's aging dendrites have become a campaign issue.

In addition to the Race Card, the Gender Card, the Class Card (Green or Platinum), we will henceforth be forced to deal with the Geratol Card, and McCain is already setting the standard for how to play it. If McCain attacks Obama for clinging to failed ideas, or for lacking experience, that's fair game. But Obama must now tiptoe against McCain's doddering political philosophy or risk accusations of ageism.

This is so much bullshit. The fact is that most of McCain's platform is composed of old ideas, ideas that have been particularly prone to displays of incontinence and decrepitude over the last 8 years. On every issue, from tax cuts to Iraq, McCain offers nothing new. And that's fair, because he's conservative, and conservatives aren't about new. Says so, right here on the label.

And that's what's so beautiful about the Age Card. The moment Obama points out that McCain's entire campaign rests on outmoded ideas, or that he's "out of touch" with American people, or that he apparently doesn't realize this-or-that...bam! He's an ageist. Sorry, Obama, the Arizona Senator's ideas are off-limits.

Over at Slate, Chris Beam has a passable piece on what's happening to McCain's cerebral cortex right now. As an exposition on the neurobiology of aging for the lay public, it'll do, although it set of my geek-o-meter a couple of times, and I just couldn't help flashing on the classic pre-election Doonesbury sequence from 1980, "The Mysterious World of Reagan's Brain."

And neurobiology is rather beside the point. I don't care that McCain's brain is old and worn out. It's the ideas inside his brain that are old and worn out. I don't know whether it's his ossified synapses or his ideology that keep him from thinking differently on the economy or Iraq or foreign policy. And frankly, I don't care. The result is the same.