Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up?

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/scheer

Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up?
truthdig
By Robert Scheer

June 4, 2008


McCain is the most confounding of candidates, veering as he does from the stance of provincial reaction to sophisticated enlightenment within an almost instantaneous time frame. He did it last week, when he blasted Barack Obama for being soft in appraising America's adversaries while in the same moment, calling for sensible rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia on nuclear arms control. While such unpredictability can be appealing in a senator, it is unnerving in a possible President.

Unpredictability is welcome as evidence of fresh thinking, but not when it suggests inconsistencies that may be born more of crass opportunism than of insight. There are major contradictions in the McCain America has witnessed over the years that are truly troubling.

snip//

The third major gap between the principled-Senator McCain and the presidential candidate McCain concerns his stance toward the military-industrial complex that has seized upon the fearmongering in post 9/11 America to justify the biggest peacetime military budget in any nation's history. As a senator, McCain was a rare and forceful voice against enormous waste in the military budget for programs designed to fight an enemy that no longer existed and which could not be justified in the name of fighting terrorism. Thanks in part to McCain's vigilance, a defense contracting scandal he exposed resulted in a Pentagon procurement officer and the CFO of Boeing being sentenced to federal prison, when it was revealed that the Air Force was leasing unneeded air tankers at an initial cost of $30 billion.

It was not the first time that McCain had risen on the Senate floor to accuse the Pentagon of being in cahoots with defense industry lobbyists, and he does deserve high marks for being one of the few members of Congress willing to hold the military-industrial complex accountable. But we hear little from that McCain these days as he goes on and on praising a pointless war in Iraq that has become the main excuse for wasting trillions in so-called defense dollars.

This last is the deal breaker. It is simply not possible to be a genuine small-government-give-taxpayers-a-break President while planning to pour trillions more down the rat hole of failed imperial adventures.

[lonestarnot]

1. He can't he's fallen and he can't "git" up!

and he can't git "it" up either!

[meow2u3]

2. He ought to follow Bob Dole's lead

Go from elections to erections :evilgrin:

[lonestarnot]

4. or see a good corn "kernal" dental hygenist.

Stolen from that naughty rager. :evilgrin:

[Gabi Hayes]

3. here he/they are/is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioy90nF2anI