This is the title of a remarkable article on Truthout today about Mccain's role within and ties to PNAC, and the future role of a McCain-led America in world affairs.
I have been troubled lately with all of the remarks about a Colombo-like Mccain as being incoherent, and reminded forcefully of the same Bush Alfred E. Newman act that led the American public to be disarmed by misunderstanding the exact and sinister nature of W's ideas.
So it was with great interest that i followed Elliott Cohen's argument that McCain would move further towards the insanity of the past seven years.
John McCain has long been a major player in a radical militaristic group driven by an ideology of global expansionism and dominance attained through perpetual, pre-emptive, unilateral, multiple wars. The credo of this group is "the end justifies the means," andthe end of establishing the United States as the world's sole superpower justifies, in its estimation, anything from military control over the information on the Internet to the use of genocidal biological weapons.
http://www.truthout.org/...
It has bothered me at a subliminal level, with the teeth jokes and the McAncient "confused" meme, that we might be innocents being gleefully led down a garden path of our own making.
I do not believe John McCain to be a doddering old fool, or a mostly harmless grandfatherly type, and certainly his foreign policy advisors, and the PNAC players have proven to be very scary adversaries who play for power, for greed, and for keeps.
I was happy to read that Wes Clark was on Morning Joe (it comes on too early in AZ for me to see it, 3-6 AM) discrediting Mccain's military leadership credentials and I think that is a wise move.
But a serious follow-on that goes beyond McBush as a slogan needs to be made, and I am not the one to do it.
We have some genuine foreign policy problems we are not talking about that are economic but go beyond money and beyond the criminality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, torture, and so much else. The fact that China owns us and the dollar is weakened as a result of the PNAC Plan is a much bigger security concern to me than the fact that we have to replace mid-east oil with some other form of energy - which is after all a net gain for the world. China is an ancient culture, and they are very capable of just waiting our little adolescent games out (much as we did Russia as they bankrupted themselves in the arms race and foreign wars). I am not a big "red scare" person, but does anyone genuinely believe that the Chinese government is our friend under any form of government?
The fact that we have outsourced so much of the real business of government is a problem not just because it is inefficient and prone to cronyism, but also we are losing control of our commons. The fact that foreign governments everywhere are buying up our infrastructure, and we have moved our manufacturing base outside our control to foreign soil is to me a security issue as much as it is a labor and business competition issue. We are setting ourselves up for a HUGE fall, and I'm just a gramma typing away here in Tucson not knowing how to really address the issues.
I would hope that people with far more knowledge about these things would sound an alarm, cogently and repeatedly, about our folly and the dangers to our children and grandchildren beyond the debt we are loading on them with our military misadventures, and that the Obama team squarely addresses the dangers in a way the public can understand and proposes a plan to restore our strength.