McCain To Elderly: Drop Dead (part 1)

Let's take this one disturbing comment at a time. The Mother Jones blog reports on 7/9/08 that two days earlier at a town hall meeting in Denver John McCain responded thusly to a question about the Social Security system:

Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed.

The MoJo blogger for that post, Nick Baumann, put it simply, and brilliantly:

Here, McCain is saying, again, that the problem with Social Security is that Social Security is Social Security, instead of something else. He's saying the system is broken because young people "pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees." But that is the definition of the system. McCain is objecting to the basic structure of Social Security.

Yes, McCain is objecting to the basic structure of Social Security. And the suspicion that some of us have had that the Arizona senator wants to destroy Social Security is hardly far-fetched.