"Kiss my fat ass!"
That was feisty Republican progeny Meghan McCain's short reply to rightwing radio host Laura Ingraham, who made fun of McCain's weight after McCain had the audacity to suggest that maybe Ann Coulter is a little over the top.
McCain has a more substantive response on the Daily Beast, not that an admonishment to kiss her ass wasn't sufficient, given the quality of debate established by the intensely loathsome Ingraham, who also called McCain a valley girl and asserted she hadn't earned the right to express her views.
The feud is getting a lot of attention for all the expectedly grim reasons, starting with "Catfight!" and ending at the increasingly familiar, desperate and yawn-inducing flailings of a party adrift and leaderless, keen to crown the conservative ingénue the future of their unpopular party, after a series of other coronations have failed to produce the Big Awesome: All hail Sarah Palin! No, Joe the Plumber! Wait, we meant Rush Limbaugh! Oops, make that Bobby Jindal! Hang on, let's try Meghan McCain!
And then there's the McCain legacy that prescribes extended flirtations with the media by boldly attacking fellow conservatives. Temporarily. Until such notoriety has been achieved nationally among conservatives that one's career necessitates renouncing all that critical thinking stuff.
John McCain's (resoundingly undeserved) reputation as a maverick was cultivated largely out of a few bombastic, and ultimately impotent, legislative challenges to his own party's orthodoxy, along with a few notable criticisms of conservative firebrands, like calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance" who exerted an "evil influence" over the GOP. That scrappy and – then-assumedly – principled criticism of the extremist ideologues on his own side of the aisle made him a media darling and the Republican that even Democrats could love. And then the contrarian senator decided to run for president – and promptly (and deservedly) lost his reputation as a maverick when he suddenly decided to be BFFs with those agents of intolerance after all.
Perhaps Meghan McCain is merely on step one of the three-step McCain Denounce-Bask-Backpedal Plan.
(Her father, who is firmly entrenched in the requisite ass-kissing inherent to step three, cannot even bring himself to publicly side with his daughter.)
Or perhaps Meghan McCain is a genuine trailblazer, the "progressive Republican" she calls herself, who wants to carve out a space in the GOP for a self-assured woman who's bigger and better than the petty attacks and ad hominems, who yearns for substantive debate and rational, compassionate policy.
In which case, I suggest she have a drink with Ron Reagan, Jr, where they can discuss how Hillary Clinton was once the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley College.