US-Election 2008

[acharya]

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/cover.html

The Madness of John McCain

A militarist suffering from acute narcissism and armed with the Bush Doctrine is not fit to be commander in chief.

by Justin Raimondo

John McCain’s reputation as a maverick is no recent contrivance. The senator first captured the media spotlight in September 1983, not long after he’d been elected to his first term in the House, when he voted against President Reagan’s decision to put American troops in Lebanon as part of a multinational “peacekeeping” force.



Prefiguring the revolutionary Jacobinism of Bush’s second inaugural address, which proclaimed the goal of U.S. foreign policy to be “ending tyranny in our world,” McCain was straining at the bit to launch a global crusade while George W. Bush was still touting the virtues of a more “humble foreign policy.” Neither time nor bitter experience has mitigated his militancy.

Other politicians were transformed by 9/11. McCain was unleashed. His strategy of “rogue state rollback” was exactly what the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had in mind, and yet, ever mindful to somehow stand out from the pack while still going along with the program, the senator took umbrage at Rumsfeld’s apparent unwillingness to chew up the U.S. military in an endless occupation. He publicly dissented from the “light footprint” strategy championed by the Department of Defense. More troops, more force, more of everything—that is McCain’s solution to every problem in our newly conquered province.

Rumsfeld became increasingly un-popular not only with the American people—the abrasive defense secretary saw his poll numbers dropping to 34 percent from 39 percent in May 2004, as McCain and Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf took aim—but also with the media, which had grown tired of him. In the bitter winter of 2001, when the War Party was riding high, the Philadelphia Inquirer had enthused, “No doubt about it, Donald Rumsfeld is a stud muffin.” As Rumsfeld’s cachet faded, McCain felt safe in attacking him, and, after Rumsfeld had resigned, declaring him “one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.” As the war itself became more unpopular, McCain managed a feat of triangulation of Clintonian proportions, posing simultaneously as a war critic and a super hawk.

He was unrelenting in his criticism of the Bush administration, even as he pledged to carry its foreign policy forward: he continued to denounce the “tragic mismanagement” of the war, while hailing the surge—and strongly implying that the Bush White House had plagiarized his views. With the war enjoying the support of about a quarter of the American people, however, it was necessary to frame a narrative that would deflect the disadvantages of a pro-war position, while enhancing his image as a straight-shooter who doesn’t care about polls and just tells it like it is.

But “straight talk” has increasingly turned to reckless talk: on the campaign trail, he was caught on video singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann”—not one of his better moments. With his presidential campaign in the doldrums, and Giuliani and the rest of the Republican pack stealing much of his thunder, a new extremism seemed to possess him: in answer to repeated questions from one antiwar voter, McCain told a town-hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire that the United States could stay in Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” and that “would be fine with me… as long as Americans aren’t being killed or injured” in any great numbers, as in Korea.