Does being a jerk work?

Never has for me, but I don't have the advisors that McJerk does.

Guardian UK

John McCain is a liar and flip-flopper and panderer and bully and whiner. And it seems to be working

John McCain is a jerk. Alternately a bully and a whiner, and a bald-faced liar to perhaps a greater degree than even George Bush and Dick Cheney, McCain is running a stupid and mephitic campaign that insults even Americans of average intelligence virtually every day.

He has pandered to the right-wing to a degree that the word "shameless" can't possibly begin to describe. He has flip-flopped repeatedly, on taxes and abortion and many other matters. And he quite obviously changed his position on offshore drilling in order to raise pots of money from oil interests. Period.

Most surprisingly of all to me, he has demonstrated over and over his lack of a grasp of, and in many cases even a passing interest in, the details of policy. Here is a man who's been a national legislator for a quarter-century. He has clearly been interested in a few things, mostly having to do with military and foreign policy, and to a certain extent energy policy. But there are dozens more realms with which responsible Solons ought to have acquainted themselves over 25 years. McCain seems to have glided through the Senate without even bothering to learn very much at all about fiscal and economic policy, healthcare, social policy (which is an umbrella rubric covering a dozen different things) and a lot of other topics. His campaign, and his partisans, accuse Obama of being a lightweight. But in truth, McCain is the policy lightweight.

More than that, the McCain campaign has established a negative story line about Obama – that he's shallow, just a celebrity, and so on – that is sticking, a little. It's a blustery lie. But blustery lies often work.

Blustery lie-master Goebbels is grinning through the flame and sulfur smoke at how well his M.O. worked for Bush and is now working for McCain.

It took this country years to begin to get it about Bush. We haven't got years to find out about McCain what is painfully obvious to some of us: more of the same, perhaps even worse.