More Thoughts on John McCain

I don't think the Republicans did themselves any favors by nominating a 71-year old man 8 months before the general election.

Especially someone like McCain, who after a compelling personal story, and over 30 years in Washington, seems to have no personal following, outside of members of Joe Lieberman's family.

Obviously, McCain will neither win nor lose this election. The election will be a referendum on Obama or Hillary. McCain will be the beneficiary or the victim of the result.

Given the fact that the Republican Party will get a free pass on this election, it is not clear to me that McCain is really what they want.

McCain, strangely enough, and more than any of the other candidates, seems to me to truly represent a third Bush term.

And it is not clear to me, that Republicans, apart from the abortion issue, really approve of what Bush has done for the last 8 years.

Other than abortion, it seems to me that the thing that Republicans like most about Bush is that he has set liberalism on its heels for 8 years.

But it is McCain who made sure that the toughest immigration bills stalled.

It is McCain who got the education bill passed.

It is McCain who got the torture bill passed.

It is McCain who more than any other Republican got the Wars on a footing where it can truly be the 100-year war that it needs to be in for the United States to "win" these Wars under any normal definition of the word "win".

It is McCain who, while professing not to understand economics, knows the most important economic fact of the 2008 Republican Party

It is the lobbyists who run the Republican Party.

It is the lobbyists who are finding the financing for this war.

It is the lobbyists who are finding the foreign dictatorships and kingdoms who are buying the United States. First the land, then our corporations, then the funding for the war, then the security of our ports, then the banks, now the capitalist investment houses.

Every single complaint that the Republicans have about McCain is really a complaint about Bush.

McCain says to the Republicans -- Bush may have sounded like a good old boy, but he wasn't kidding. And I'm not kidding.

Are you kidding?

Is this the sort of country you want?