Concerned about the economy?  John McCain isn’t.  He thinks more tax cuts may be needed but mostly all we have to do is tough it out.  Just like Dubya. Of course the economy mostly bores old John, so he puts most of his concentrated thought onto foreign affairs…like Iraq.  His prescription?  More war.  Up to fifty or even a hundred years of war if that’s what it takes to secure “victory” in that abused locale.

    Iran?  His prescription?  Start a war.  Famously, he quipped in faux Beachboy rhythm: “Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran…”  And he wasn’t joking.  This guy doesn’t joke about bombing.  He means it. That’s what he did for a living in Vietnam.  He believes if we had just done a little more bombing there we could have secured “victory”…whatever that means.

    The Palestinian dilemma?  Nothing going on there that a few good Israeli bombing runs wouldn’t solve.  In fact, waging war is pretty much the John McCain prescription for anything that ails this troubled world.  It is the cowboy solution to every dilemma.  And it is the farthest thing imaginable from what we need today.

    Throw in another quirk of the Arizona Senator, his volcanic temper, and you start to get the full potential for disaster that electing him would entail.  As New Mexico's U.S. Senator Pete Domenici is reported to have said some years ago (though he is too loyal a partisan trooper to admit it today) “that’s the last guy I’d want to have with his finger on the trigger.”

    Yet the national press has a crush on McCain that is really hard to understand.  His relationship with the reporters, print and television, who traipse around the country relaying the stories of the campaign back to the rest of us, is universally positive.  He has charmed them, practically to a person.  Apparently he likes them, spends time with them, fosters their easy access to him…and it pays off: they like him and cover him favorably. 

    We like to believe that our system for selecting a President is the best one ever devised, the model against which other democracies can measure themselves.  However watching the torturous route that this campaign has traveled, the two solid years of debates, television appearances, fund-raisers, caucuses, primaries and examinations under the investigative magnifying glass that have gone on in order to winnow the crowd of wannabes down to the three finalists staggering toward the conventions this summer, I have my doubts.

    I am especially dismayed that the President whose clumsy conduct of his office and whose unmitigated series of disastrous international initiatives has left us less secure than ever before in our history, this most unpopular of all Presidents since that measure began being recorded, George W. Bush, would now have in McCain a worthy successor who promises to push forward in exactly the same vein if we have a national brain lapse and elect him, something that is actually possible. Someone who visits Iraq (as the GOP candidate did a couple of weeks ago) and comes back talking about “victory” being within our grasp needs to be medicated, not lionized.  Yet lionizing him for his “confidence” is what the pundits and reporters are rushing to do.  We need to all take a deep breath and count slowly to one hundred whenever anyone starts foaming on about “victory” in Iraq.