John Rich’s Poor Logic: “Raising McCain”

Now that the Democratic National Convention is over, ending triumphantly with Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech (one of the best in recent memory), I thought I’d look ahead by focusing on a little song that you’ll probably be hearing at the Republican Convention next week (if you’ll be tuning in at all, that is).

John Rich of the country duo Big & Rich (you know, the guys who brought us that terrible “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” song and brought me the shame and embarrassment at a recent wedding of learning that my mother and aunt know the lyrics by heart) has written and recorded a song called “Raising McCain,” in support of the Republican presidential candidate of the same name.

Here it is, in all its red hot American glory:

Wow. OK, there are several ways go at this.

First of all, as a piece of music, it’s pretty basic and uninteresting, like much of popular country music today. It’s funny to think that Rich might have actually written this down on paper, possibly struggling through several drafts, with two or three dog-eared McCain biographies by his side.

And it’s pretty obvious that the “large,” cheering audience in this “concert video” consists of about 30 people, although many of these extras do exhibit the classic American value of showing lots of cleavage.

But aside from the song and video’s obvious deficiencies, distracting endowments, and over-stereotyped representations of good-ole-boy patriotism, Rich’s sloppy songwriting just reveals the lazy logic that makes anyone think that McCain is the right person for the job.

In a recent Billboard article, Rich explains:

This guy is a hero…He was physically tortured for years, and yet he gets out of bed every day and serves our country for decades.

And then moves to the illogical consequent:

The entire world is looking for a way to sucker punch us…National security is absolutely at the top of the list of issues. That’s why I think John McCain is the guy to keep us safe.

This logic is kind of like saying that because a song is played on the radio over and over again, it therefore must be a good song.

The best way to stay safe is to stay out of fights. Picking fights usually does the opposite. And perhaps a candidate who gleefully sung “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” to the tune of The Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” doesn’t quite have the judgment or temperament to handle tense situations that could mean the difference between peace or war, safety or bloodshed, in our world. This is the same guy who supported a war against a country that didn’t attack us instead of finding the guy who actually did attack us. It’s kind of like picking a fight with the guy in the corner while some other dude is looking over your shoulder, trying to figure out the best way to deliver a second punch.

So anyway, yeah, John McCain is a veteran, but it doesn’t mean he’d be a good Commander-in-chief. It’s just lazy logic, no matter how many times Republicans will try to drill it into our heads during the convention. “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” certainly got lots of radio play all over the country, and people know it well through repetition. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually a good song.

And it isn’t a good song.

At all.