Billmon
McCain, on the other hand, really does seem to have drunk more than his fair share of the Kool-Aid. He not an especially bright guy, and he's deep under the spell of the neocons, who have made the myth of American exceptionalism -- and the missionary impulses it generates -- a key part of their ideology of permanent revolution.
Combine that with the fact that McCain is in many ways even more instinctively hawkish than Shrub, and it's easy to see how a McCain presidency could take U.S. foreign policy quite a bit deeper into the jaws of hell, to the point where the Cheney administration could look downright sane by comparison.
And yet I still run into liberals who think McCain is different (meaning better) than the usual run of right-wing hardliners -- because he's such a "straight shooter," or because of his largely futile, if not entirely symbolic, protests against torture.
That's one of the reasons why I tend to regard McCain as the most dangerous man in America -- even more so than Cheney and Rumsfeld. Not because he isn't a "straight shooter" (he's certainly devious enough about advancing his personal political ambitions) but because when it comes to the cult of self-righteous American power, I think he's the straightest shooter in the bunch -- literally.
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