McCain Watch - 3

I would hate to be right, but I'm afraid that I might be. I think the Sen. John "Straight Talk" McCain may be the GOP presidential candidate in 2008 and, if the Dems don't do a good job (or if BushCo doesn't do a bad enough job), he may win. This would be dreadful because, as I have said before, I think he's every bit as bad as GWB. Digby has a good post today indicating why.

The truth is that McCain is actually more hawkish and deceitful than Bush. The only difference in their rhetoric on national security is that McCain pretends he didn't cheer every single move Bush made until it started to go wrong. Senator Straight Talk is very, very slick, I'll give him that.

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Slicker than owlshit, as my father always says.

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The key to the mission that McCain and Bush sold was always to have large a multi-national force, which Codpiece and Unka Dick did everything but spit in the world's face to avoid. McCain knows this very well but continued to argue publicly that we could just easily conjure up a larger military to "fix" Iraq and just slides on through like the oily political conman he really is.

It has certainly set him up nicely for a presidential run, though. He gives speeches more stirring than anything Michael Gerson ever dreamed of about liberty and freedom. He made the argument before Bush did that "some say" arabs can't govern themselves, but he begs to differ! Remember, he's Mr "National Greatness" which is all about the Glory That Is Imperial America. And somehow he manages to convince people that he would have magically won this stupid war and we'd all feel better about ourselves today if he'd been in charge --- even though he backed Bush's cock-up every step of the way and only came along later to carp about troop levels once it was already too late.

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And if anybody thinks that McCain is more sane on some of the other foreign policy challenges, think again:

"The greatest single threat that we are facing right now to our national security is Iran," he said. "If they get that weapon, and they have the capability to deliver it, put yourself in the position of the government of the state of Israel. This could be one of the most unsettling and difficult challenges that we have ever faced."

See... yet another example of hyping the Iranian threat.