Elsewhere I have said that language is the first casualty of war, but it is also part of the collateral damage of political campaigns.  Peter Lawler advises McCain to hit Obama on foreign policy, “showing, from the record, that Obama is actually pretty much of a McGovernite.”  I have to assume that here McGovernite does not refer to any identifiable foreign policy views that Obama actually holds, and certainly does not refer to any views that McGovern held.  You would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful similarities between what McGovern was offering in 1972 and what Obama offers today.  McGovern called for us to come home, while Obama tells us to go deeper into Pakistan, wants us to give security guarantees to Ukraine and possibly bomb Iran.  What does McGovernite mean in this statement except “something I don’t like”?   

Meanwhile, at C11 Laurie Kendrick informs us:

Fear not, America is completely ready for its first Black President; we should be more worried about his being a Democrat because Democrats are notorious for whittling away at defense.

So, what can we expect if Obama wins?

Massive cuts in defense spending. The military will just have to do the best it can.

One wonders when the euphemism “defense” to refer to power projection to the other side of the world will be abandoned, but until we find that out it might be useful to remember that Obama promises to expand the size of the Army and Marine and to increase Pentagon spending considerably.  In this election, Democrats are notorious for “whittling away at defense” in the same way that Republicans are famous for competent management and fiscal responsibility, which is to say that they aren’t.

Then there was this:

Thanks to “democrafting”, the words Bush and Republicans are now synonymous with failure. 

All those occasions when Bush and the Republicans failed also help. 

I’m not quite sure why anyone feels the compulsion to return to these tired, irrelevant accusations that last made sense c. 1988, and it’s not clear how denying that Bush and the former GOP majority were failures is going to remedy anything.  It might be more interesting to consider whether the DoD budget actually needs to be increased or whether we might be wiser to reduce the number of our commitments and deployments around the world.  Instead of implausibly painting Obama as a foe of the Pentagon, his critics could question how he can pay for his massive domestic spending plans and his increases to the military budget in the straitened circumstances of the next few years.  If you want to attack Obama, it could be more useful to criticize Obama for his overreaching, hyper-ambitious foreign policy rather than try to define him as a McGovernite.  Whether or not such criticism will be effective in defeating Obama, at least his critics will be able to say that they made credible arguments against him.