John McCain, Warmonger

Glenn Greenwald offers up a fantastic analysis of John McCain's philosophy towards war, much of it forged from his Vietnam experience. Money quote:

John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America's hoary, Vietnam era "stabbed-in-the-back" myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over "collateral damage" and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That's how we could have (and should have) "won" in Vietnam and how we'll "win" in Iraq. That's why the central truth of the 2008 election is that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Kristol/Lieberman-supported John McCain is a carbon copy of the Bush/Cheney warmongering mentality except that he's actually more extreme about its core premises.

Exactly right. McCain blames the American public and Congress for going soft in Vietnam, and thinks we could have "won" with a lot more bombing and killing. Naturally, if you read between the lines of his current speeches, McCain believes the same thing vis-a-vis Iraq, Iran, Syria, and other hotspots around the globe. McCain, unconstrained, would make Bush look like a sissy. He likes to play the role of the reluctant warrior who, gosh-darnit, just has to go bomb the hell out of everybody so that America can be left alone.

Electing this man would be incredibly dangerous, to say the least.