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This Is What I Have Been Saying All Along

Bottom line: If you think Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer would make good foreign policy advisors, then McCain is your man. However, if you’re not insane, that prospect will scare the hell out of you. As it should. ~Kevin Drum As some may have noticed over the past two years, I am not a fan […]

Bottom line: If you think Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer would make good foreign policy advisors, then McCain is your man. However, if you’re not insane, that prospect will scare the hell out of you. As it should. ~Kevin Drum

As some may have noticed over the past two years, I am not a fan of John McCain.  I don’t like the man’s politics or his preening self-importance, and his policy views strike me as among the more dangerous on offer in Washington today.  His pretensions to being a conservative have always rankled me, and his claim to being anything more than the technical successor of Goldwater has always been annoying.  The idea that he is any kind of real Southwesterner is laughable on many levels.  (As an aside, let me say that Southwesterners have a bad habit of allowing themselves to be represented in government by people who are only recently residents in their states, as if we actually prefer the new transplants to the people whose families have at least one generation’s connection to the place–this may be why we have deeply dysfunctional relations with Washington.)  His foreign policy is simply lunatic, a toxic mix of extremely acute Vietnam syndrome with respect to projecting American power with the “national greatness” hype of the ’90s and the “unipolar moment” enthusiasm of 2002.  If there is one person who is the embodiment of every dangerous, self-destructive tendency in a superpower nation, his name is John McCain.  If the Republicans have learned nothing from the Bush years, they will heartily back McCain and go down to impressive defeat in ’08.  If the lesson you draw from the last five years has been, “We haven’t been reckless, adventurous and militaristic enough!”, John McCain is your man.  He will send Americans to die in the most obscure parts of the world to make sure that American “leadership” does not disappear, and he will demand that we all pitch in with the effort to make America bleed for no rational reason.  Did I mention that I’m not a fan?

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