Rachel Maddow blasts McCain's 'utterly incoherent' policy positions

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow mocked what she described as "utterly incoherent" policy positions of Arizona Senator John McCain on Monday, saying she believes he is so inconsistent he renders "the phrase flip-flop meaningless."

"One of my favorite political conflict stories of all time is the sharp, bitter, decisive, at times inhumanely polarizing political conflict between John McCain and John McCain," Maddow said.

On her show, Maddow showed a number of clips in which McCain contradicted himself on various different issues.

"John McCain, for example, against the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans," said Maddow. "John McCain, on the other hand, totally for those very same tax cuts."

Maddow also showed a clip of McCain from 2008 in which he argued for cap and trade legislation, saying it was a "free market approach" to environmental policy, then, in 2009, McCain is shown deriding cap and trade legislation as "cap and tax."

"John McCain's positions on every major policy issue that he has faced in the Senate are now utterly incoherent," said Maddow. "What John McCain says he thinks about something at any one moment carries this great weight in the Beltway and gets written up and pontificating over, despite the fact that if you wait five minutes, John McCain is likely to have a totally different stance on the same issue."

In October of 2006, McCain said he would support the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" if military leadership supported repealing it.

"The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to," he told an audience of Iowa State University students.

But recently he has attacked the repeal of the ban on gays serving openly in the military, saying the impact such a repeal would have on the morale and effectiveness of US troops must be addressed first.

"Senator John McCain’s stances on legislation and important policy issues and principles are so fundamentally inconsistent as to render the phrase flip-flop meaningless," quipped Maddow. "And yet John McCain is still viewed as a Washington oracle, as a guy you’ve got to win over."

"If you do fail to win him over though, don’t worry, a new John McCain might come along any minute now and maybe you will have better luck with him."