Wrong-way's wheelhouse.

Okay, now this is getting very strange. This is reminiscent of what my wife and I euphemistically referred to back in 2000 as the "election show" - the recount fiasco. Only this time the meltdown is happening before the voting begins. Holy jeebus - here we are in the midst of an economic train wreck that any fool could have seen coming from about a hundred miles away, and just as our bonehead president is about to close on a bailout deal, Admiral John McCain melodramatically "suspends his campaign" two days before the first presidential debate and declares that he is going to apply his renowned financial acumen to the negotiations. Next thing anyone knows, the congressional Republicans are bailing on their president's plan, raising additional provisions (like their perennial favorite, another capital gains tax cut) and digging in their heals less than a day after their leadership indicated a deal was at hand. Mission accomplished, admiral!

Is it just me, or does McCain seem way too mercurial a figure to be trusted with the presidency, particularly at a time like this? I could almost see some sense in his rushing back to Washington if he served on any of the key committees (or if he had planned to even say anything at the White House meeting, which apparently he didn't), but a knee-jerk move like this appears motivated only by political considerations. It was certainly the "you kids get off my lawn" McCain we saw at Friday night's debate, gripping the podium like it was his fighter/bomber flight controls, grimacing hideously like a man trying to stick to his anger management strategies, and refusing to say a single good word about - or even look at - his opponent through the entire 97 minutes. His petulance made him, if anything, more vulnerable on issues that he shouldn't own by any stretch of the imagination. If it weren't for the sad fact that Democrats - Obama included - needlessly give ground to the Republicans on many of the most important issues of our times, there might well have been a knock-out on Friday.

But again - this is bizarro land. How could Iraq possibly be a positive issue for McCain? Even if he insists on taking credit for reducing violence in Iraq through his support of the "surge" (a crock of shit, but more on that later), he's dodging the judgment issue on the much larger question of invading Iraq in the first place. That - not the surge - was the most important foreign policy question of the last 8 years, and he was dead wrong. McCain pushed for it, voted for it, supported it to the hilt, and the result is more than 4,000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, millions of refugees, a wrecked country, and a new ally for McCain's despised Iranian regime. If that's what victory looks like to you, vote McCain/Palin. Trust me, he and his Alaskan sidecar would get us into new and even more exciting military adventures, I'm sure. (She certainly appears to think war with Russia is a real option. Perhaps it's her rapture-obsessed extremist Christianity at work, hoping to bring about blessed Armageddon.)

Foreign policy is supposed to be McCain's "wheelhouse." All I can say is, if this guy ends up president, they'd better give him the kind of wheelhouse Captain Wrongway Peachfuzz had in Rocky and Bullwinkle - one in which none of the controls are connected to anything. That's the only way we would be likely to get through his administration alive.

luv u,

jp