I've posted this this as the full article because I think it needs a full and complete airing. McCain recently won the most delegates in my state of South Carolina, much to my embarassment. Not only because he's anti-First Amendment, with his co-authoring of the McCain Feingold anti-free speech act, he's anti-Second Amendment as well with his constant support for a variety of Ted Kennedy's initiatives in the Senate, federal control of private firearms sales being one of them.
McCain's constant support of every overseas military adventure is the issue covered by this article. It may astonish people to know that McCain supported, fully, Bill Clinton's use of force just about every time Clinton ordered the trigger pulled.
The question then becomes, do we want a man like this in the White House?
In my opinion, the answer is a profound, NO!
As a health care professional, I can't say with absolute certainty what McCain's problems are, but as an educated guess, he's still fighting the Vietnam War he was cheated out of as a POW. If that's so, we really need him to not be president, we need to encourage him to make use of his VA benefits to help him live out his years in peace.
Part One
McCain's constant support of every overseas military adventure is the issue covered by this article. It may astonish people to know that McCain supported, fully, Bill Clinton's use of force just about every time Clinton ordered the trigger pulled.
The question then becomes, do we want a man like this in the White House?
In my opinion, the answer is a profound, NO!
As a health care professional, I can't say with absolute certainty what McCain's problems are, but as an educated guess, he's still fighting the Vietnam War he was cheated out of as a POW. If that's so, we really need him to not be president, we need to encourage him to make use of his VA benefits to help him live out his years in peace.
Part One
McCain and the Militarist Mentality
His electoral comeback is an ill omen
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the media-generated hype surrounding John McCain's narrow victory in the South Carolina primary – which portrays him rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of what many considered a failed last hurrah – one anomaly stands out: he did well among antiwar voters. This seems counterintuitive, at first, especially when one considers that McCain is the candidate of the so-called "surge" and has always been among the biggest warmongers on the block – not only when it comes to Iraq, but even regarding interventions that Republicans opposed, such as in Kosovo. In that case, you'll recall, he urged the Clinton administration to launch a land invasion of the former Yugoslavia: just Google McCain and "boots on the ground," and you'll come up with the one underlying consistent theme of McCain's life as a public figure – he always takes the most belligerent foreign policy stance imaginable, no matter what the context.
Iraq war I, the Balkans, Iraq war II, and even when it comes to developing tensions with Russia – here is a U.S. senator who traveled all the way to the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia to personally intervene in the Georgian-Russian dispute over the status of South Ossetia. Not one inch of sovereign Georgian soil shall be ceded to the Russians, he declared, or words to that effect. One would have thought the fate of the Free World depended on stopping the South Ossetians from gaining autonomy over their own affairs. Yet it would be hard to imagine a conflict in which the U.S. has less interest in taking sides. Part of it was no doubt due to the fact that McCain loves to posture and preen, and this was an opportunity he could hardly resist. Yet such unseemly – and foolhardy – posturing isn't just a function of his blustering, overbearing personality: it's a matter of ideology, too.
In the McCainiac worldview, there is no corner of the globe that wouldn't benefit from American boots on the ground. If you liked President Bush's infamous "fire in the mind" second inaugural address, in which he averred that the proper objective of U.S. foreign policy is "ending tyranny in our world," then you'll love President McCain's world-saving neo-Wilsonianism. Matthew Yglesias, writing on his Atlantic blog, succinctly summarizes the McCainiac mentality when it comes to foreign policy issues:
"For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn't need to have a real purpose or be 'worth it' in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as 'it' takes and it doesn't matter if 'it' is pointless or futile or even if 'it' isn't anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale."
Attribution