I really can't think of McCain as a "good man" when I consider that he is in favor of torture, and when I think of how he treated his first wife. I'm sure there are other examples, but those are the two most egregious that came to mind first.
While I consider McCain over Obama as the lesser of two evils, I'm still going to hold my nose and vote for Bob Barr in November. America absolutely has to have a third political major party that is not controlled by the media/big business/special interest groups and the LP is the only choice that there is on a practical basis. If the LP doesn't get some large (6 percent plus) vote totals this time around this country is finished.
McCain is actually against torture. McCain and Paul were the only GOP candidates actively fighting against the US military's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Everything I have read about his split with his first wife is completely one-sided. He may be a douche on that issue, but when a divorce gets nasty, there are typically two douches involved, not just one. Also, the stories each tell are usually different from reality in many ways.
One big problem I have with McCain is that he rolled over on the Silberman-Robb Committee, going from stating that it had to have subpoena power, and needed to look into how the executive used pre-Iraq war intelligence, to blaming it all on the CIA, and giving a stamp of approval to the Goss Purge of the agency.
I want Wolfowitz/Feith/Rubin to plead the fifth in front of a nationally televised Congressional Hearing.
I can't see McClown as a good man after his cowardice and treason on the Senate floor -- S.890 back in 2001, McCain-Feingold, the McCain-Lieberman that would have ratified the Kyoto Treaty, etc., etc., etc.
If he really wants a war with Iran, let him be the first one to jump out of the first helicopter that lands in country.
Tom I played Little league baseball at the base in San Diego, or 'Dago as it was called when I has a little fart, which is why I joined the Coast Guard.
MHW, the navy brat
I don't think you're a hypocrite, Tom, but I do think this very military attachment to the "America as an idea" meme causes much of our foreign crusading and domestic centralization at home. It was Bill Kauffman's essay that really opened my eyes to the problem of McCain's military upbringing and rootlessness in America, a lack of identification with America as a particular place to call home that he shares with Obama:
What's wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the "human race" before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love "the world" unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. America is not, as the neoconservatives like to say, an idea: it is a place, or rather the sum of a thousand and one little, individuated places, each with its own history and accent and stories. A politician who understands this will act in ways that protect and preserve these real places. A rootless politico will babble on about "the homeland"--a creepily totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was not applied to our country.
...
People with local attachments ... will ask the question that never quite gets injected into national debates over war and peace: What are the domestic costs of this crusade? Loving their block, they will not wish to bomb Iraq. Loyal to a neighborhood, they will not send its young men and women across the sea to kill and die for causes wholly unrelated to local life.
This view of America has totally transformed how I think of myself as an American. It makes me feel like a foreigner in my home state. I watch a show like John Adams and feel incredibly disconnected from that legacy. I see a flag waving and it looks so bizarre to me. And yet, I've never been paying more attention, nor feeling my attachment to the people about whom I care, as I do now.
Just something I thought I'd share. Good post.
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