More of the same McCain

Well if Commander Guy's new definition of victory in Iraq can be boiled down to producing an acceptable level of violence, it's going to be hard to understand what Johnny Jingo McCain's definition of "surrender" might be. After all, by Bush's lights we must have won in Viet Nam since the violence is gone. By the same token we must have won in Korea, even though the nobody surrendered or declared victory and the "enemy" we defeated is building nukes.

Really the attempt to force our Iraq experience into a metaphorical framework based on Napoleonic warfare where lines of soldiers clashed together without such dubious battles as we have in the streets and markets, schools and living rooms of Baghdad is become comical and Procrustean. When McCain spoke of surrender and defeat and battlefields last night, it was obvious that he was debating about the war he wished he had rather than the gang fights, murders, ethnic cleansing, sabotage and chaos he and his party insist we need to "win."

All the flag waving and drum beating; all the slogan shouting and appeals to bravery, honor and glory won't make this ill conceived shambles into the Manichean struggle he wants it to seem nor will the lies upon which it is based and the deranged incompetence with which it has been conducted be buried by the cries of cowardice.

Whether or not we are forced by circumstances to remain in Iraq, the people and the party whose atrocity this is are not to be trusted with our future and by siding with the criminals who started it, using their rhetoric and misrepresentations to glorify and continue it, McCain puts himself beyond consideration as a candidate.

If McCain had confined himself to nebulous dreams of victory, conquest and glory, it would have been bad enough, but to baptize his infant campaign in the font of Reaganite phony water shows that beyond being besotted with the martial spirit, he's as removed from reality and honesty as the babbling idiot he hopes to make his predecessor.

"They looked in Ronald Reagan's eyes, and in two minutes, they released the hostages,"

he said, forgetting that "cut and run" Ronald's hands had just given them missiles. Meanwhile back in Iraq, tens of thousands of civilians and thousands of our troops are being killed by bullets and bombs while he slings the bullshit. This ideologue, this fabulist, this sloganeer, this ambitious liar and panderer McCain must never be allowed to be president.