Wolcott: McCain is a Madman

I used to lean toward the idea that John McCain was indeed a maverick, a Republican who could be reasoned with and who would buck the leadership when his conscience called.  

The Iraq War has exposed him as a fraud.  

I remember seeing McCain being interviewed on a news show a few months back.  He was asked about the crisis in military recruiting.  His answer was essentially that the U.S. military needed to improve its advertising methods, needed to make an even stronger appeal to potential recruits' sense of patriotism.  It apparently never occurred to McCain that we needed to figure out some way to extricate ourselves from the mess in Iraq or that new recruits would be putting their lives on the line for no explainable purpose.  

James Wolcott has more:

I'm watching "maverick" John McCain on Fox News Sunday.

I hereby declare Operation Reach-Out over. There's no reasoning with these madmen. Certainly not this insatiable warrior.

At the time I thought my friend Camille Paglia might have been a wee tad hyperbolic when she wrote for Salon during the 2000 campaign:

"The TV camera does not lie: Just as it showed from the get-go that ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a nervous, shifty, sweaty, petulant mental adolescent, so has it exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the weirdly wary and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks' Hitchcock parody, 'High Anxiety')."

In another Salon column, Camille described McCain as a "choleric hawk," "a manipulative waffler with a mediocre legislative record."

On Fox, his eyes are less lasering, his jawline more relaxed, but a choleric hawk he remains, so fanatically hawkish that he opposes a drawdown of US troops in Iraq: "We don't need to withdraw--we need more troops there," and should reinforcements be unavailable, we should maintain current troop levels so that the newly trained Iraqi units aren't replacements for departing US troops but a "supplement" to them.

Chris Wallace pointed out that the leaks and hints coming from the military brass and the Def Dept are signaling withdrawal at the same time the President is refusing to set deadlines and timetables--why is that?

"I have no idea."

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McCain will hear none of this defeatist talk. "We can't afford to fail," he emptily intoned, and then cleaved to Bush, claiming that Bush is no cold-hearted monster with no time for a Cindy Sheehan, no:
"He cares, and he grieves."

Message: He cares. Bring 'em on. Watch this shot.

It was also clear from the tone of McCain's remarks that he favors military action against Iran. It's difficult to think of any military action he wouldn't favor.

This man is too dangerous to let anywhere near the presidency. He's simply Dick Cheney with a better backstory.

What's even scarier, from our perspective, is all the Democrats that cozy up to this guy.