There's so much tension in the air now as we trip into tomorrow that folks are forgetting to laugh a bit about the sillier part of elections.
I kind of liked this montage that Media Matters put together on McCain -- but I also think it's a little substantively off target. But for a good chuckle, watch this:
Darn it. . .I am one of those who thinks that John McCain is a maverick. Sometimes he bucks my way, sometimes towards the evangelicals, sometimes towards the realists, and sometimes towards the neoconservatives.
McCain has earned a reputation as a maverick and independent thinker due to his support of legislation on the environment, banning the use of torture on detainees, granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, and reforming campaign finance laws and opposing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
That would leave him well poised to win over the much-coveted moderate and independent voters in a general election, should he win his party's nomination. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cited such initiative in endorsing McCain. "There are people out there that talk about reaching across the aisle, but [McCain] has shown the action over and over again," he said. McCain has also distinguished himself through his honorable service, involving much sacrifice, to his country during the Vietnam War.
Ortiz neglects to mention McCain's strong support of stem cell research in her list, but it's a good roster over all of McCain's marquee efforts that reach across party lines. I have lauded McCain for these.
But the Iraq War is a big dividing line. McCain is for it and perhaps even widening the theater of conflict -- and doesn't see Iraq as I do as the largest single strategic catastrophe that America has embarked on in decades if not the last century.
Ximena Ortiz then changes course and relentlessly pounds McCain for not only the war but other revisionism the campaign has engaged in regarding his own policy positions.
But on the subject of America's Middle East conflicts present and future, she writes about Senator McCain:
On Iran and its nuclear program, McCain has been so flippantly bellicose -- singing "Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran" to the Beach Boys tune -- that some conservatives have warned that a President McCain would take America to war with Iran.
McCain last Sunday said: "There's going to be other wars... I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars."
Presumably, McCain was suggesting his view that a war with Iran was inevitable. When asked by Joe Scarborough about McCain's statement, Pat Buchanan replied: "That is straight talk... You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran." Buchanan said, "That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," adding, "There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president... His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He's in Putin's face, he's threatening the Iranians, we're going to be in Iraq a hundred years."
But if McCain's strategic vision is to strike Iran militarily, he has not explained how that might be achieved without further endangering the already failing U.S. mission next door in Iraq, which he also believes in continuing without a timetable.
McCain's framing of the Iraq War and the inevitability of a war with Iran feels like someone who has not gotten beyond Vietnam -- and whose intellectual prism on the issue is shaped by the view that America took a wrong course when it finally took steps to end its proxy wars in Southeast Asia.
America has had enough of fighting old wars. George W. Bush fought a war with Iraq that was in part motivated by some in his administration who felt the job was not finished during the tenure of Bush's father. Fighting a new round of wars in the Middle East through a Vietnam-fashioned framework of scores to settle is incredibly wrong-headed.
I've admired Senator McCain for many of his maverick positions and will continue to do so -- but hugging the Iraq War and essentially calling for more as an election tactic -- undermines America's interests and American global credibility.
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It's not a Beach Boys tune, they just did a cover version of a Regents song.
As for us being the world's police, it's more like we're stuck with being the world's volunteer fire department, fighting not neccessarily the worst or most tragic fires, but the ones most likely to threaten us if left unchecked.
no one can deal with the fact that mccain is a war criminal for bombing innocent women and children in a country that commited no hostile action toward the united states. i understand that. i also understand that is why mccain will probably be president and involve the us in an invasion of pakistan. no SIR!! everybody will "respect his service", "thank him for his sacrifice", and so on, and forth. no one will bring up his role as shill for keating and the collapse of the savings and loan industry. his war drag punched his ticket out of that one too. no one can skewer this old crab because they won't face tha moral implications of bombing people. so he will be president, unless his constant hero posturing starts to sicken people, despite their bottomless appetite for military exploits against third world civilians and children.
They don't recall a war where American lives were thrown away to support the wild military fantasies of our political leaders, so what do we do? We give them their own debacle to remember!
Will we have to continue this cycle until we finally "win" one of these wars?
"That is straight talk... You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran." Buchanan said, "That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," adding, "There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president... His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He's in Putin's face, he's threatening the Iranians, we're going to be in Iraq a hundred years."
This is one of the few responsible statements Pat Buchanan has ever made.
As for McCain and Iran, he hasn't yet stated how he intends to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan how on Earth does he expect to expand war to Iran and hope to pay for it.
Just because Pat Buchanan blurts something out on MSNBC doesn't make it so. As for McCain saying there will be other wars, yes, there will be. Do you genuinely believe Iraq and Afghanistan are the final two wars in history? (If so, stay in school and don't use drugs!)
McCain was known as the guy in Annapolis who wasn't much of a boxer but who would get in the ring, get pummeled, and keep coming back for more until he was a bloody mess. He didn't win many fights, but he did earn the respect of those who appreciate a kind of unthinking toughness. He is hard-wired to fight, and unfortunately, he isn't the kind of deep thinker who is going to go out of his way thinking about peaceful alternatives to fighting. In certain instances--when you CAN'T avoid a fight, for instance--he might be a good man to have on your side, but let him lead, let his choose when and where to fight, and he will get you into an unfixable, and unnecessary, mess. McCain is deifinitely the wrong choice for POTUS, and if he gets into office, he will involve us in unnecessary, expensive, and deadly military incursions into nations with whom we should have no quarrel.
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Posted February 4, 2008 | 07:02 PM (EST)