I get e-mails

Hillary Clinton, they say, is the only one who can beat McCain. At this stage, who knows? Others landing in my in-box have called Romney "A night in shining armor" which I find an interesting way of portraying a pathetic striver who would look more at home modeling a golf shirt in some resort-wear catalog. He'd be more qualified for that than he would be to be president of Eddie Bauer or Tommy Bahama, much less the United States. Of course our evaluations of candidates is just that superficial in this great land of idiots, that such appearances are sufficient while intelligence and knowledge or even mental stability are not. In a better America, Dennis Kucinich could beat John McCain, but Americans don't often vote in a way that reflects their best interests. Americans overwhelmingly reject Bush's objectives to build a pro-American and unified Iraq regardless of the expense, time, blood and improbability of success, yet the mad blood stirs when McCain, who believes that our Vietnam debacle was both noble and in some indefinable way "winnable," waves the flag and talks of "victory" in Iraq and anywhere else it's possible to invade a third world country.

There's a tendency to impute nobility of purpose and character to victims, and McCain's victim status serves him well and takes away attention from the fact that while he was being tortured, we were skinning Vietnamese patriots alive, killing civilians by the millions, collecting severed ears as suovenirs and filling the air with the smell of napalm and burning children. It makes taking notice of this seem unpatriotic. It makes us somehow fail to notice that despite the overwhelming public aversion to another year of war, much less the hundred he finds acceptable, this is a man who sings "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," to the tune of the Beach Boys'"Barbara Ann" and says North Korea should be threatened with "extinction." The image of another deranged jingo at the helm of the most heavily armed and belligerent nation on Earth is more than I and most of the world can call a nightmare. It would be the genesis of a world that hates America and is willing to attack America far more than it already does. It would be a world far more likely to be at war for another 100 years. Is this what heavily anti-war America will settle for rather than Clinton or Obama? Is this the man we need to restore fiscal responsibility to a nation up to it's eyeballs in debt?

How much does the public know, or care to know about McCain other than that he was shot down and tortured? Not much, as long as he fits the ecstatic vision of a man on a white horse waving a flag. Do we consider it important to know that he ranked 894th out of 899 in his class at the Naval Academy, was rejected by the War College and had to use family connections to worm his way in? Do we remember that reminiscent of the current beneficiary of nepotism in the White House, he never ran a successful business but married into a family rich enough to finance a political career? Like Bush, like Nixon, he's also a brat; prone to temper tantrums. In his own words he writes:

"At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out."

Just the man to lead us in a crisis and no problem as long as he's "pro life."

We seem to have forgotten the Keating Five scandal too. McCain took vary large contributions from Charles Keating in return for using his influence to block investigations of that con-man "for no other reason than I valued support."

According to The Independent, McCain comes from generations of war-mongers. His grandfather helped crush the Philippine resistance to US occupation by herding the population into concentration camps and exterminating the rest. McCain describes it as "an adventure."

His father led "Operation Power Pack," the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and successfully crushed the democratically elected government in favor of a compliant dictator to teach a lesson to "the natives" and bragged of a new "world empire." Our shining hero hasn't said a word to disassociate himself from such tyrannical imperialism. Only if a war has some humanitarian goal, like our intervention in Kosovo, or proposed intervention in Rwanda will John disagree and usually with mockery.

Yet this is a man many in his party dismiss as a "liberal" and whom many liberals find acceptable in some misguided spirit of compromise. God help us if he's elected.