The McCain campaign has made it pretty clear in recent weeks that any or all criticism of their candidate from the New York Times is a product of being "in the tank" for Obama, but there's little doubt that today's column from Nicholas Kristof will bring the campaign some measure of dismay, following the "foreign policy debate," especially since Kristof captures McCain as "impulsive, impetuous and impatient."
Kristof basically sizes up Iran, North Korea, and Russia as the three major locales of concern, and finds McCain wanting in all three:
IRAN: "...if Iran continues its policies as most expect, we might well find ourselves under a McCain presidency headed toward our third war with a Muslim country. The result would be an Iranian nationalist backlash that would cement ayatollahs in place, as well as $200-a-barrel oil, open season on Americans in Iraq, and global fury at American unilateralism."
NORTH KOREA: "Even President Bush recognized the failure of his first term's hard-line policy and abandoned it, instead pursuing negotiations and diplomatic solutions with North Korea. Mr. McCain fumes that this is accommodation and seems to prefer the first-term fist-waving that was emotionally satisfying but failed catastrophically."
SPAIN: "Mr. McCain's lead-with-the-chin approach to Russia reflects the same pugnacity that resulted in obscenity-laced dust-ups with fellow Republican senators, but it's less endearing when the risk is nuclear war. Do we really want to risk an exchange of nuclear warheads over Abkhazia or South Ossetia? The Spanish prime minister, José Zapatero, told me a few days ago that what he fears most under a McCain administration is a revival of the cold war with Russia."
Funny that Kristof gets Zapatero on the record, isn't it? In the same vein, it's probably more than a little amusing to informed readers to hear Kristof describe McCain as someone who would "constitute a dangerous gamble for this country."