Alaska You Again...

..Why should this woman be one heartbeat away from the Presidency?

It’s a valid question, and one that many in Alaska are already asking. Including her mother-in-law. Faye Palin has confessed that she hasn’t decided how she’ll vote this November. “I’m not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she’s a woman and a conservative.” Clearly, this makes the get-out-the-vote effort for the McCain Campaign a little daunting if they don’t even have her family nailed down.

The Anchorage Daily News has had a few things to say about her, even before her selection by John McCain to be his running mate. Palin appeared on Anchorage morning shock-jock program, “The Bob and Mark Show”, where she laughed as they savaged her political adversary, Alasaka State Senate President Lyda Green. The Daily News’ Dan Fagan called Palin’s appearance “plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I’ve ever seen from a politician.” The Daily News’ editorial page opined, “She came off looking immature herself, almost high-schoolish. It was conduct unbecoming a governor.”

Fagan had a different take. “It was conduct unbecoming a human being, never mind a governor.”

Senator Green is a cancer survivor, which is apparently common knowledge in Alaska, but that didn’t stop Palin from laughing when the “Bob” of the show, Bob Lester, referred to Green as “a cancer.” She also laughed when Lester asked Palin if she thought Green cared about her own children, and referred to the senator as “a bitch.”

The Daily News weighed in this weekend on Palin’s claim that she refused federal funding for the Gravina Island Bridge in Ketchikan, otherwise known as Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” She said in her debut running mate speech on Friday, “I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere.” Daily News writer Tom Kizzia countered, “But Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it,” noting that building the bridge was a central plank in her 2006 gubernatorial run.

This was a bold choice for McCain, but as one pundit pointed out on CBS’ Face The Nation with Bob Schieffer this morning, “there’s a 40% chance” that she’ll say something monumentally-embarassing and possibly campaign-destroying between now and election day, leaving McCain wishing he would have picked Mitt or someone else instead.

The early reports out of Alaska aren’t encouraging for the campaign. However, as Democratic strategist Bob Shrum pointed out this weekend on Air America’s Seven Days in America–and I rarely agree with anything that Bob Shrum says, given that he’s the Buffalo Bills of Presidential politics and can never win the Big One–the Democrats best dial down their rhetoric or they will underestimate Sarah Palin at their peril. If they set the bar too low and say that Joe Biden will destroy her in the VP debate, and she holds her own, then she and McCain win.

Sage advice indeed from a man who has lost more Presidential campaigns than most of us will ever vote in. But this time he’s right.

I will give John McCain credit in that his pick of Governor Palin has succeeded in owning the weekend news cycle. At least until Gustav.

I won’t, however, go back on my earlier assessment that this is a retarded pick. He’s desperate. As a veteran of real battle stories and not just metaphors, he has to realize that he’s won the battle with Sarah Palin but he may well not win the war. But…meh. I’m a lonely voice in the wilderness. But I’ll likely be sharing a coach flight with Senator McCain sometime within the next seven months when there’s no chance he’ll be our next President.

On the other hand, as far as the Obama campaign is concerned, maybe I should just keep my mouth closed. The only thing I’ve called correctly in the last seven months is his nomination, and, like much of the country, I had to wait months before that actually happened.

Oh well. I’ll stick to my guns here anyway, and a number of the people of Alaska. This woman isn’t any more qualified to be Vice President than Giselda at the DMV, and more likely than any Vice Presidential nominee in the last century to accidentally become President, and a bad choice, and I’d make that call regardless of my party registration.

The McCain campaign has apparently been all veins-a-popping this week at the adulation poured upon Barack Obama for his trip across the pond to visit Iraq, the American troops, and our once and hopefully future allies in Europe. As all three network news anchors and much of the prominent media made the trip with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Team McCain wanted an opportunity to steal some of the young buck’s thunder and his headlines. They had a trip planned for the candidate to the platform of an oil rig off the Louisiana coast, but were stymied by the untimely arrival of Hurricane Dolly. Just as well, as they would have been awkwardly upstaged by the flotsam of 400,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil spilling out of the Mississippi River in a twelve-mile swath from an earlier collision between a tanker and a barge.

So back to the German angle. That brought them to…Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant. It was well-intentioned, but probably not the place for a thundering exhortation of “Mr. Schmidt, tear down this wall!” Unless, of course, Schmidt’s was hedging on taking out the non-load-bearing partition between their banquet room and the newly-remodeled bier stube.

These are the days in the McCain campaign, which by its everyday activities couldn’t make a stronger case for senior-staff drug testing. While Barack Obama was stirring up a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, many of them waving American flags, which were previously thought extinct in the Europe of George W. Bush’s Presidency, the GOP nominee decided to counterstrike with his own oratorical line in the sand in a schnitzel and knockwurst diner. Let’s be clear: I’m not casting any aspersions–I understand their sauerkraut-bratwurst balls are zu sterben.

But might it not have been better for all parties concerned if they’d just stayed home and let this Obama Cavalcade play itself out?

I don’t imagine there’s a lot of merit pay being dispensed within Team McCain these days. Maybe there should be. It’s possible they’re trying very hard to keep The Candidate on message and striking where and when the iron is hot, and maybe he’s just not getting it. After all, nary a day goes by when he doesn’t have to be corrected on the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, or that Anbar Awakening happened before The Surge, or that the Czechoslovakia hasn’t existed since 1993, or that Iraq not only doesn’t share a border with Pakistan (in fact, there is a good 700+ miles of terra firma between the two, and it’s called Iran).

In any case, this doesn’t bode well for the Straight Talk Express. On the other hand, they’ve had some fairly stunning poll results of late. One has to suspect the polling methodology–in that most polling organizations still rely on homes with landlines, which excludes an untold number of younger potential voters who told their respective Baby Bell to pound it long ago.

However it shakes itself out remains to be seen, we’re still very early in the skirmish. I’m still siding on the case that the McCain camp would do well with a healthy dose of clarification–in message, strategy, and, most of all, fact. I don’t know if that’s possible, or if they’re working with a candidate who’s a hundred days late for a place with a day room.

That said, if he’s done nothing else, I know where I’m dining if I ever find myself in Columbus. I don’t think I’ve ever had Bavarian Cabbage Rolls, but I’ll bet you’d be hard-pressed to find those in a throng of 200,000 at the Brandenburg Gate.

He’s an engineer, the man who sits at the desk two feet away from mine and directs my day-to-day tasks, and he doesn’t have any patience for the stupid or the intellectually lazy. Their Vietnam simpatico notwithstanding, he doesn’t have much love for Senator McCain.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it many more times before the November 4 election: There’s mature, there’s old, and there’s old. I still have a John McCain for President button that I got in 1999, and would have seriously considered voting for him in 2000. I quoted him in our upcoming book on the Vice Presidents (Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, Top Shelf Productions, by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger [Diamond: JUL084291 - ISBN 978-1-60309-003-2]).

Very nearly everytime John McCain steps on a stage or opens his mouth his days, he proves that he hasn’t maintained his physical and intellectual viability with the same persistence and rigor that allowed him to survive over five years as a Viet Cong Prisoner of War. He changes position faster and with more frequency than even he realizes, he doesn’t know who we’re fighting in Iraq, or might be fighting in Iran–and his flip (and off-key) “Bomb-Bomb Iran” schtick is entirely inappropriate and surprising for a candidate who should know, unlike the stateside President Bush (who joked about the never-found WMD at the Radio & Television Correspondents dinner in 2004) that war is a thin comedic reed, especially when he has over 4,100 dead American kids to answer for, for a war he entered on the basis of an even thinner reed.

The New York Times just printed an article today that only pours more gasoline on the smoldering embers that are the current McCain campaign. A lot of people have pointed out rightfully that John McCain is a bad actor, whichever definition you apply, but it’s a sad truth that he can’t get his lines right. And that’s even worse and more telling when they’re fed to him by his teleprompter.

Senator McCain was giving a speech in Las Vegas this past week when he cited “the Lex-eegton Project.” Quick pause. Regroup. “The Lex-ing-ton Project. The Lexington Project. Remember that name.”

Well, we can. Can you?

He didn’t help himself in Cincinnati the following day, when he called it “the Lexiggdon Project.” According to the NYT article, he “twice tried to fix his error before flipping the name (“Project Lexington”) in subsequent references.”

If there’s one quality you need to possess as a Presidential candidate, it’s the ability to think and adjust on the fly. John McCain used to have it. He apparently doesn’t anymore.

The misfires and misstatements are unrelenting from the GOP nominees mouth. After essentially securing his party’s nomination, he dithered for nearly four months as Senators Clinton and Obama fought it out hammer-and-tong to see who would emerge with their own party’s nomination. When Barack Obama finally went over the top on June 3, McCain declared, “Pundits and party elders have declared that Senator Obama will be my opponent.”

Well, yes, the superdelegates helped put Obama over the top for the requisite delegate count, but the participation of the nearly 20 million voters held no small part in the 30-plus states that Barack Obama won on his way to securing the nomination. That was a dumb thing to say.

He claimed credit for the passage of the G.I. Bill for the 21st Century, which was written and introduced by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, and a vote for which Senator McCain opposed early and often and then didn’t even show up in the Senate to vote against it, to at least support his earlier rhetoric against it. Dumb and disingenuous.

He spent the primary pummeling Mitt Romney for his assertion that waterboarding wasn’t torture. Just three weeks after he took obvious delight in slapping around the former Massachusetts Governor for Romney’s defense of waterboarding, he showed up in the Senate to vote against the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. Again, dumb and disingenuous.

Offshore oil drilling, the gas tax, the Bush tax cuts, “the agents of intolerance,” the unforgivable push-poll attacks of the Bush-Rove team in 2000 that McCain forgave with his cringe-inducing hugs of George W. Bush. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I’ve never thought McCain a moron. He wasn’t, and isn’t. His latest position shifts have smacked of naked ambtion. But this is more than political opportunism. He survived the Hanoi Hilton, and you can say that he’s only surrendering his dignity to the inebriant of ambition, but his statements (and misstatements) would suggest a deeper misfire in the aged senior Senator from Arizona.

Age and mortality. Enemies that none of us can possibly hope to elude. It might turn out that Senator McCain is only nakedly, shamelessly ambitious, and perfectly willing to sell his soul to win the Presidency, but it’s more likely that the chinks in his mortal armour are showing. The Presidency is the greatest stage in the world, and you’ve got to know your lines. If you don’t know them, that’s bad. If you can’t repeat them when they’re fed to you, that’s really bad.

The greatest and most dignified stand is knowing when to stand down. John McCain may be far past his last act. The voters may well make that call come November 4. But someone should feed this line to Senator McCain.

John McCain won’t win himself many overseas absentee votes with any more declarations like he made today. Speaking with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today, Senator McCain was asked by Lauer “If (the war) is working, Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?”

“No, but that’s not too important.”

You could make the case the McCain bumbled Lauer’s question, and the frothing liberal media elite took his misstatement out of context. For the record, he went on to say that, “What’s important is casualties in Iraq… Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties, and the ability to withdraw. We will be able to withdraw. … But the key to it is we don’t want any more Americans in harm’s way.”

Aww, hell. I really wanted to write something breezy and amusing tonight. I give it my all trying to find a yuk if it’s there, but I can’t find a whole lot of knee-slaps in, “Sorry about this retarded war, and your fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh tour of duty, but you’re going to be there for awhile, so just suck it up and deal with it. At least you’ve got your boys in the foxhole with you. Misery loves company, right?”

The Senator’s war strategy notwithstanding, Americans are in harm’s way, right now, and we aren’t getting much of a return on the lives and money we’re ponying up to keep them there. We’re getting dead kids, dismemberment, suicides, brain injuries, and rampant PTSD, and Iraq is just as big a mess as when the British tried to tame it in the early 1920s. And the bad dude we went there for is almost eighteen months dead, and the Iraqis would like us to pack our rucksacks and go, though they’re saying it increasingly less polite terms.

We’re currently knee-deep in a mess of a war launched by a handful of men who’ve only gotten close to combat by watching Saving Private Ryan on DVD. It’s not forgivable, but it’s understandable that they’d have no comprehension at what the cost of war is. John McCain, as everyone knows, spent well over five years in captivity in Vietnam, many years more than he needed to stay after he was offered early release when his captors realized that his father was an Admiral in the United States Navy, an offer McCain refused because he didn’t want to leave his fellow captives behind by taking what he saw was an unfair release. He stayed, was tortured, and while he was gone, his patiently waiting wife suffered a horrible car accident in his absence. John McCain returned to the U.S. almost six years after his capture with a mane of hair gone prematurely white, a permanently damaged right arm that he couldn’t raise above his shoulders, and a former beauty queen wife who was, literally, a good five inches shorter afterwards thanks to a number of operations where surgeons had to sheer away large chunks of her shattered bone just to save her legs.

You would think, then, John McCain might have a greater sensitivity to the personal toll, on themselves and their families, of men sent off to war for years on end. Before he sold his soul in the pursuit of the Presidency, McCain appeared to have some degree of empathy for America’s soldiers fighting abroad, and even launched his first general election ad buy entitled, “I Hate War.”

Just because he hates war, it doesn’t mean he likes you.

What’s utterly confounding is that he’s fighting for the votes of an electorate that is at least 64% against the Iraq War. That would be against, as in “we don’t want to be there.” In other words, the ones to whom it does matter if the troops come home or not. My head is still reeling from trying to keep up with Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign math, but last I checked by any calculation, if you lose with anything approaching 64%, you lose.

This is really mind-boggling. He’s eight ways from Sunday on every position he approaches, and it inflicts whiplash trying to follow it all. As Senator John Kerry said of McCain’s latest befuddlement, “It’s like he’s having a discussion with himself trying to decide where he stands.”

He insists he still has the troops’ best interests at heart, and that’s why he skipped the vote on Jim Webb’s GI Bill for the 21st Century, in favor of his own GI Bill. Last scan of the horizon, that bill still hadn’t materialized, but in all fairness the Senator has had his hands full running his own damage control.

It’s going to be a long, bumpy, embarrassing five months. Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer was on the radio this morning discussing his new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11. He talked of a book reading at a retirement community and commenting to his audience that, “I’m 72, and I don’t think I have any business running for President.” His day-room audience heartily concurred.

There’s young 72, there’s old 72, and there’s John McCain’s 72, which is what he would be on Election Day if the country decides that he’s our best choice for President Of The United States. He’s a comparatively spry 71 and he’s already having an overwhelming avalanche of senior moments.

I don’t want to play the age card, but John McCain is his own Life-Alert commercial. This isn’t the man I seriously entertained voting for ten years ago when he first stated talking about a White House run. And 72 doesn’t have to be old–my mother is still a force unto herself at the age of 78, and until Mike Wallace’s recent health issues, there isn’t a member of the original 60 Minutes team I would have thrown down with.

If he didn’t have his handler, Senator Lieberman, there to set him straight, this could all get very awkward.

McCain just announced today that he won’t be present for the vote (in fairness, neither will Hillary, and Obama isn’t certain he’ll be able to attend). While Clinton and Obama have pledged their support for the Lieberman-Warner Global Warming Bill, even if they can’t show for the vote, Senator McCain has declared that even though he can’t attend the vote, he would almost surely vote no on it.

“I hope it will pass, and I hope the entire Congress will join in supporting it and the President of the United States would sign it.”

Of course, that was three weeks ago, and trying to follow McCain’s careening positions is like trying to follow a hockey game with a head full of barbituates and cheap wine.  It’s disorienting, too fast to follow, and by its frenetic pace inevitably induces nausea.

He could have been forgiven if he’d come out initially against the bill. If you spent any time looking at his voting record, he’s come down against renewable electricity standards and renewable production tax credits, and he has a zero percent rating from the League Of Conservation Voters. With that kind of record, even poll-reactive rhetorical claptrap is a step up. Of course, he doesn’t mean it, but at least he’s pretending to, and he used to not even do that. In 2007, he missed every critical environmental vote in the Senate.

Also when he urged “the entire Congress” to support the bill, he almost certainly wasn’t including himself in that body. “The people of Arizona understand that I’m running for President.” Therefore, I’ll be almost entirely unable to fulfill my job as one of this state’s two elected Senators.

Granted, of all the votes cast by the 110th Congress, Senator Clinton missed 31.8% of 579 possible votes, and Senator Obama missed 41.8%. John McCain missed 60.1%. Obama’s missed votes are no small affair either, but he still managed to cast 106 more than McCain, and he was there on the most important bills, and, unlike McCain, he managed to log more votes than Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who spent much of the year recovering from a brain hemorrhage. McCain managed one impressive phase where he racked up 42 consecutive absences.

The people of Arizona might understand that he’s running for President, but a number of his missed votes occurred before the Presidential campaign began in earnest. Last year, he was the only Congressional Presidential candidate to miss any of 14 critical Iraq votes through May.

McCain has proven loyal to his President with the sub-Nixonian approval ratings–and the one who attempted to destroy him in South Carolina in 2000. Congressional Quarterly reported that McCain has voted 100% of the time with George Bush in 2008 and 95% in 2007. One of the few votes he’s managed this year was a no vote on the torture bill, just a few short weeks after he indignantly took Mitt Romney to task for his naivete if he truly didn’t believe that waterboarding was torture.

Many of his absences have been notable by their conspicuousness. When the White House was pushing its tepid economic stimulus bill earlier this year, the Democrats and several Republicans were attempting to push through a more robust bill and needed 60 votes to invoke cloture. Their effort failed 59-40–and Senator McCain was the only member of the Senate to not even show up for the bill.

Just last week he was one of only three Senators to not even bother to show up for the GI Bill, which passed the Senate 75-22.

It looks like 2008 isn’t going to help McCain’s numbers much. He’s missed 57 of the last 58 Senate votes this year, and if he hadn’t bothered to show up in the Washington D.C. on February 12-13 and March 13-14, where he managed in his hit-and-run visit to his place of employment to cast a whopping 32 votes, he would only have three votes all this year. So far for 2008, most of which he’s spent waiting for an opponent for his Presidential campaign this fall, he’s managed to miss exactly 75% of the 137 Senate votes taken so far. Senator Obama, by anyone’s estimate having a bit of a busier campaign than McCain, has managed to show up for 45% of all votes this year, while Hillary has been present for 42.8%.

Romney is being the good soldier in the hopes of getting a spot on the ticket with McCain and is encouraging unity, but Paul’s supporters want their due, and at the very least aren’t going to let the state Republicans rubber-stamp 31 delegates for a man who took a smaller 13% than their guy.

Gloated Paul’s regional coordinator, “I’ve seen factions walk out. I’ve never seen a party walk out.”

This is the last thing John McCain needs as he’s been enjoying a scrutiny- and judgment-free pass normally reserved for persons with Down Syndrome or debilitating brain injuries. Senator McCain has been a tower of babble the last several weeks and he hasn’t gotten a whit of critical review from the mainstream media. If CNN and MSNBC and FOX News aren’t going to step up, apparently there’s still a cadre of Ron Paul supporters who won’t answer the news that the war is done, and they have a lot of grenades left over that they’re going to use. Sing it, people. This is our REAL democracy in action.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the bumper stickers or the seeming rabble waving signs at you from the overpasses and freeway exits, Ron Paul is a former obstetrician and Congressman from Texas. He ran for President in 2008 and set at the time a single-day fundraising record, gathering $4.5 million in Internet donations in a single day. He’s often derided as a Libertarian nut job, and he voted for the quixotic Secure Fence Act of 2006, but he’s anti-war and he’s got some lunatic ideas that American terror war detainees might actually be entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

Ron Paul hasn’t endorsed John McCain. He won’t endorse John McCain. And he won’t hit the stump for John McCain. This is a bit of a problem for the party’s standard bearer, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun to watch. After John Hagee and his flip-flops on every principled position he’s ever had–Jerry Falwell, the war, torture, etcetera–the war hero deserves to catch a little flak.

That said, my mother doesn’t forget what she said eight minutes ago and hasn’t recently engaged in physical battery on anyone. She really does stand on principle, and when she takes a position on something, she doesn’t take another stand the next day like she’s drawing her line in the sand for the first time. And she’s very eloquent. If she ever needs to explain where she stands on a particular issue, she doesn’t repeat the same one-word dismissal over and over and over by way of articulating her position. She can explain what she believes in and why.

John McCain is younger than my mother and he is too old to be President. And no one in the media, outside of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, seems to care.

The extent to which John McCain is getting a pass in the media is almost maddening right now. Barack Obama has a preacher who has a rightful if sometimes extreme grudge at having grown up as a black man in an America of Bull Connor and unprosecuted lynchings and the Tuskegee experiments. The Senator has denounced his pastor’s comments on several occasions–repudiated them, even. Yet, nary a night goes by on FOX News or Hardball where the name of Reverend Jeremiah Wright isn’t raised in some context unfavorable to Senator Obama.

John McCain has recently recruited a spiritual adviser who despises homosexuals and helped pass an anti-gay amendment in Ohio in 2004 that George Bush used to his advantage to curry favor with the far right in his re-election bid. And he sought and received the endorsement of another televangelist who has a different but no less controversial view on people with The Gay.

That could be excused as expedient–though reprehensible–politics. Except for his appearance on This Week last Sunday when he explained his acceptance of the endorsement–that he sought–of firebrand evangelist Pastor John Hagee who has called the Catholic Church “the Great Whore” and blamed Hurricane Katrina on God being fed up with the prurient tomfoolery of New Orleans’ gay community. Was it a mistake, George Stephanopoulos asked him? “Yeah, it probably was.” But? “But I welcome his endorsement.”

This is befuddlement writ large. The press would have disemboweled Barack or Hillary if they’d come back with that half-baked and hypocritical logic. That’s an “I voted for the $87 million before I voted against it” fivefold.

Keith Olbermann did a handsome number on the Republican standard-bearer this evening. McCain made big hay of the appalling response to Katrina this week. He said if he had been President, he wouldn’t have flown over like Bush did. “I would have ordered Air Force One landed at the nearest Air Force Base and I would have been over here.” He called the President’s response a “disgrace” and said that would never be replicated under a McCain Presidency.

McCain was touring the Ninth Ward in New Orleans this week. “We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: Rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.”

When he was asked about the “tear it down” comment, McCain replied, “I don’t remember ever saying it.” A day later. If that was a convenient Ronald Reagan-esque “I can’t hear you” dodge, he could have chosen better: When your campaign is already rife with more than its share of senior moments, you don’t need to give the press any more ammunition.

Oh wait, the press doesn’t need any ammunition for McCain, because all of their guns are trained on Hillary and Barack.

Rachel Maddow has been railing on the pass that McCain has been getting a free ride on his John Hagee endorsement. When McCain was in New Orleans this week, he was asked finally by a reporter how his visit squared with Hagee’s comment that God was smiting New Orleans with Katrina because of the disproportionately high number of Rusty Trombones and Filthy Sanchezes that would be forthcoming the following week.

McCain responded with an eloquent Obama-like oratory that will no doubt promote reflection and a deeper discussion of the issue between thoughtful Americans. “It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense. I don’t have anything additional to say. It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, I don’t have anything more to say….it’s nonsense. I reject that categorically.”

McCain lost his nut badly somewhere along the way. There are many lucid 71-year-olds out there, but they’re not letting John McCain into the clubhouse. Forget President. He should be sitting at home with a tumbler of scotch writing letters to the editor, complaining to his war buddies about the gooks and the coloreds, and spending his afternoons at the OTB snarling at every loss.

Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before the press comes around. They’re hungry lions, and they’ve got a bleeding gazelle that’s completely escaping their attention.

In The Washington Post this week, a former Senator opined, “(John McCain’s) temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” That wasn’t some sissified liberal like Harris Wofford. That was conservative Republican Bob Smith from New Hampshire.

George Stephanopoulos asked him about his temper on This Week yesterday morning. “I mean, ah, look, I am very happy to be a passionate man…and many times I deal passionately when I find things that are not in the best interests of the American people…Look, 20, 25 years ago, 15 years ago. That’s fine…And those stories are either entirely untrue or grossly exagerrated.” I couldn’t tell from that whether the incidents didn’t happen or were grossly exagerrated, or whether it was okay because they happened 15, 20, and 25 years ago, but no matter.

One incident that didn’t happen 15, 20, or 25 years ago happened late in 2006. As Cliff Schecter writes in his new book, The Real McCain:

“Perhaps the most remarkable story of McCain’s temper involved Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi. Two former reporters covering McCain, one who witnessed the following events and one who confirmed the facts provided by the first, relayed it to me as follows: In 2006, the Arizona Republican congressional delegation had a strategy meeting. McCain repeatedly addressed two new members, congressmen Trent Franks and Rick Renzi, as ‘boy.’ Finally, Renzi, a former college linebacker, rose from his chair and said to McCain, ‘You call me that one more time and I’ll kick your old ass.’ McCain lunged at Renzi, punches were thrown, and the two had to be physically separated. After they went to their separate offices, McCain called Renzi and demanded an apology. Renzi refused. Apparently this posture made McCain admire him, as they became fast friends.”

The Huffington Post carried a report Sunday of a 1992 altercation between McCain and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley. It was 1992 and there was a meeting to discuss some lingering issues of American Servicemen still missing in Vietnam.

“It is unclear precisely what issue set off McCain that day. But at some point, he mocked Grassley to his face and used a profanity to describe him. Grassley stood and, according to two participants at the meeting, told McCain, ‘I don’t have to take this. I think you should apologize.’

“McCain refused and stood to face Grassley. ‘There was some shouting and shoving between them, but no punches,’ recalls a spectator, who said that Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey helped break up the altercation.”

One of my favorite YouTube videos is of septuagenarian Buzz Aldrin punching tinfoil-hat filmmaker Bart Sibrel in the face after he accused Aldrin of colluding to perpetuate the alleged fraud that was the moon landing. In many instances, I applaud more mature gentleman who aren’t unable because of temperament or infirmity to engage in battery, but I’m not entirely certain that I want a President McCain–who’s already having more than his share of senior moments–grabbing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by the throat because they can’t agree on whether weapons inspectors should be let into Iran. That would be, to put it in the most anodyne of terms, “unhelpful.”

Ronald Reagan had to deal with the age issue in 1984 when he ran for re-election against former Vice President Walter Mondale. After a somewhat befuddled first debate that went on on West Coast time far past his usual retiring hour, he came back in the second debate and put the question to rest for the rest of the campaign. He was asked about the age issue and responded, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Love or hate Reagan, and never mind that it was fed to him by a speechwriter, that was a great line and he delivered it with an actor’s precision, and it was absolutely brilliant.

But Reagan’s plus is that he was never angry. John McCain is a very angry man.

This is not an issue that we aren’t going to see again during this campaign. If he lost his nut as recently as late 2006, it’s going to happen again this year. And don’t think for a moment that David Axelrod and Barack Obama aren’t going to be considering grenades they can toss that will set off that famed McCain disposition ammo dump. Rest assured, there are going to be fireworks this fall.

William Atherton was a lawyer and leader in the American Legion and is principally regarded as the author and leading champion of the GI Bill. Atherton wanted to create a comprehensive program to prevent a repeat of the Bonus Army debacle from 1932, when 17,000 Great War veterans marched on Washington D.C. in the midst of the Depression to demand payment for the Service Certificates they received in 1924 which weren’t due to mature and be redeemed until 1945. Atherton didn’t think the bill as it was proposed by FDR went far enough and worked to have the bill expanded to cover women and African-Americans (for all his progressive legislation, FDR had a blind spot when it came to the Negro, like a lot of white men of his generation–excepting Harry Truman, of course).

As social legislation goes, the bill was a big hit with its beneficiaries and did wonders for the U.S. economy for decades to come. Veterans received money to survive while they looked for work and were offered low-interest, no-down-payment home loans, in addition to generous full-ride educational benefits. This is the kind of Communist social welfare that gives up-by-the-bootstraps advocates like Sean Hannity low-level strokes.

Nonetheless, the GI Bill was essentially responsible for the prosperous middle class of the 1950s and 1960s, and estimates are that every dollar invested in the GI Bill returned $7 to the United States economy in human productivity and industry. I’m no economist, but I believe that’s what the green eyeshade types call “a good ROI.”

Congress and the Ford Administration started to gut the GI Bill in the mid-1970s, arguing that men and women serving their country didn’t deserve GI Bill benefits when they weren’t being shot at. This was at a time when the American military was perceived–and to some extent may have been–a motley crew of drug-addicted goldbrickers. It’s been increasingly eviscerated ever since.

And in any case, the days of the birth of the GI Bill were a much more Pollyannish time. We’ve got two wars to fight now, and we don’t know where the hell our enemies are at, except for the 850 or so that are in Iraq, and the young men and women voluntarily subjecting themselves to IEDs and mystery illnesses from exposure to depleted uranium are doing so of their own volition. And, in a recessed economy, they’re quite frankly lucky to be gainfully employed. So, your country thanks you for your service, but if there’s nothing else on your mind, please shut up and get back to work. When your tour is done, we’ll give you a few Benjamins for textbooks.

One of the last Senatorial races to be settled in 2006 was the campaign in Virginia between Senator George “Macaca” Allen and former Reagan Secretary of the Navy turned Democrat Jim Webb. Jim Webb won that race and met George Bush at a November 28, 2006, reception for newly-elected Congressional members. He declined to have his picture taken with the President, as he had a young son in the war in Iraq and had run on an anti-war platform. The President managed to corner him at one point. “How’s your boy?,” the President asked.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” said the President. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President.”

On his first day in the Senate after taking the oath of office in January 2007, Senator Webb introduced the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007, or a “GI Bill for the 21st Century.” While not nearly as far-reaching as the original GI Bill, it does a lot of good and says a lot of thank yous for our kids risking their lives for the War on Terror.

It’s gained wide support in Congress. So far, Webb’s bill has 51 co-sponsors, including nine from the GOP side of the aisle, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is just good politics, and everyone who’s a good American and supporting our wars will be on board.

Except for one conspicuous absence from the list of co-sponsors: Our All-War-All-The-Time Presidential Candidate, Senator John McCain.

J’excuse? There must be some mistake. This is the ultimate friend of the doughboy. This is the man who spent five years getting tortured by the Viet Cong even though his captors gave him a Get-Out-Of-The-Hanoi-Hilton-Free card when they discovered that his father was an Admiral in the Navy.

Nope. Senator McCain is not only not signing onto the bill, but he’s rejected it outright for one very simple and clear reason: It’s going to jeopardize “retention.” In other words, our fighting men and women are going to be so enamored of the educational benefits promised them for their service putting their lives on the line for the United States that they’d rather choose those benefits than re-enlist for another tour or two or three or four. God forbid they might not re-enlist and provide us with more bodies to put on the front lines of this moronic war (I mean the one that we’re fighting; not the real war we should still be fighting but that we gave up on looking for the man who is responsible for 9/11).

I’ll say one thing for McCain: We can’t tar him with the same brush we use for Bush and Cheney, who have no idea what it’s like to be in a combat zone fighting for your life. He’s more familiar with that than any Presidential nominee we’ve had since Bob Dole in 1996. And that makes his refusal of this bill all the more despicable.

This is all an enormous disgrace. I don’t care about John McCain’s service if he isn’t willing to walk his talk and support his fellow veterans. It’s not a dick-swinging thing–that they didn’t endure as much as he had to. I don’t understand his reticence to support this bill. I could understand it if there was a large or monied constituency he was selling out to–he’s certainly sold his soul on tax cuts, extreme religion, and torture, just to name a few–but the only serious constituency against this bill is the Pentagon. There aren’t that many votes there in the grand scheme of things.

He claims he’s going to come out with his own version of the GI Bill, but there’s been nary a hint of it. He continues to talk the talk about respecting the veteran and rewarding their service, but his refusal to support Webb’s Veterans Educational Assistance Act is a two-fingered poke in the eye.

I hope that Barack–yes, Barack; goodbye, Hillary–beats him with this as if with a cudgel come fall. And he surely will. My hope is that in the first days of an Obama Presidency you’ll be able to do a Google search for “petard, hoisted by own” and see John McCain’s hapless debate photo with a link to a YouTube video of Obama handing him his ass in a gunny sack. Bad soldiering, John. You’re on the verge of losing what little you haven’t sold of your soul.

The profits from Iraqi oil haven’t quite paid for the war as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz notes in his just-released book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (he hates America, I’m sure). However, the cynics who said this was just a war for cheap oil were dead wrong as anyone who’s had to sell their car stereo to gas up their car can attest. When we invaded Iraq, oil was at $25 a barrel and futures trading suggested that it would still be at $25 a barrel in 2013. It closed at $105.62 a barrel just yesterday. That’s $80.62 more—I’m no economist, but that’s progress, I think.

Granted, I know we were having such a lovely war, but I have to confess that the novelty of this wore off for me a long time ago. Somewhere around March 2003, I think. But it really set in later, as I stayed glued to the TV. That’s what the hardened war veterans call “battle fatigue.” When we weren’t exactly greeted as liberators and the kids kept dying in droves even though George Bush flew in in his flightsuit and declared that our job there was done, I think I just lost interest and flipped over to 24, where the real war on terror is being fought.

But I’m still a good American (I like to think) and I’m still paying attention, and the last five years have been an education if nothing else. I’ve learned that Saddam Hussein enjoyed Doritos when he was in captivity, before he was hanged on the hottest YouTube video of late 2006. I’ve learned that his sons, Uday and Qusay, were barbaric playboy morons who were as evil as two spoiled sons of a sadistic dictator could be and would probably have been fragged by their own security detail at some point if we hadn’t gone in and killed them.

I’ve learned that yellowcake is not only something you don’t serve at a coffee social, but also that Saddam Hussein was never actually trying to buy any from Niger, regardless of what George Bush said in his 2003 State Of Union Address as we were gussying our guns up for war. I’ve learned that the quickest way to deal with someone who says otherwise is to use your Vice President’s office to out his classified CIA Operations Officer wife to a grumpy old conservative pundit and professional crank with an axe to grind against the naysaying left.

I’ve learned that just because the chief International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspector resigned his post early in the war, conceding that “we were all wrong” in suggesting that Saddam was trying to weaponize ricin or possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, it doesn’t mean that Saddam didn’t possess them in the first place when we went into Iraq.

I’ve learned that the last thing that you want to do when you’re invading a country and trying to win their loyalty is to fire everyone in the largest and almost only solvent outfit in the country, the Army, and give them lots of time on their hands and no money to let their imaginations wander and convince themselves that life was actually better under the dictator who was at least employing and paying them.

I’ve learned that you go to war with the military you have, not the military you want, because the military you want costs money, even if not having it gets a lot more kids killed. It’s a cost-benefit analysis thing that the leaders and their economists have carefully thought through. Besides, if kids die over there, that’s more low-wage jobs available over here.

I learned that a 6′4″ diabetic can survive in the mountains of Pakistan even nearly seven years after the leader of the Free World promises to get him “dead or alive” (in all fairness, that same leader later clarified the intent of his statement to read “I don’t really think about him all that much”).

Along those lines, I’ve learned that we’re fighting Them over there so we don’t have to fight Them here, and that we’re making absolutely sure we don’t have to fight Them here by closing the Statue Of Liberty and banning medium- and large-sized bottles of shampoo from airplane carry-ons, even though our ports, railways, and chemical plants have security holes big enough to navigate a truck or a 737 through. Those are over here, by the way, where we are, and not over there. Not saying the fundamental strategy is flawed, but when you devote so many people to fighting Them over there, you might be a bit distracted to pay attention to our vulnerabilities over here.

I’ve learned that being elected to represent the people doesn’t mean having to say you care, as Vice President Dick Cheney told Martha Raditz when she said that recent polls suggested that 67% of the American people were opposed to our involvement in Iraq, “So?”

I’ve learned that loyalty is paramount and that if, at any point, anyone doesn’t fall in line and goes against the official numbers, then their ass should be out the door faster than three-day-old haddock, like Assistant Treasury Secretary Laurence Lindsey, General Eric Shinseki, and Admiral William Fallon, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill who questioned the prudence of tax cuts when America was preparing for a war. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Lindsey’s September 2002 estimate of an Iraqi war at $100-$200 billion, or about 1-2% of American GNP as “baloney”, shortly before he was shown the door (as of 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that our democracy-building, terrorist-crushing exercise in Iraq would ring up to about $1 trillion by 2017 [or higher—see the aforementioned Joseph Stiglitz reference—but what does he know with his stupid no-count Nobel Prize in Economics]. Not sure how they’d go about firing the whole CBO, though, but I’m sure they’re looking into it).

I’ve learned that no matter how stupid the war, it still costs money, and $343 million a day is a hell of a lot of money, especially when we’re borrowing that, and our dollar is in ruins and foreign tourists are coming to New York City to shop for bargains, and we’re dipping into the kitty to bail out Bear-Stearns but are saying fuck all y’all to the morons who were foolish enough to accept the sub-prime mortgages that were being offered up like Starbucks’ samples in Times Square.

More than anything, though, I’ve learned that John McCain is charming and a captivating interview, and that, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, he believes like he believes in his family and everything near and dear to him (whatever that is anymore) that the surge is working and will be maintained under a McCain Presidency, even if we have to stay there for a hundred years.

In any case, the surge is alive. Long live the surge. I’ve also learned that I have more beer in the refrigerator, and all of this reflection upon what I’ve learned from our continuing and never-ending Mideast adventure makes me want to drink it all, tonight.