McCain = Bush on Steroids

[pnwmom]

You think you hate Bush? Wait till you learn more about McCain.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-welch26nov26,1,7808324.story

Sifting through McCain's four bestselling books and nearly three decades of work on Capitol Hill, a distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge. And it's one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism. And he's trying to accomplish this, in part, for reasons of self-realization.

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Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because "neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation." His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the "Eastern swell who became a man of the people," whose great accomplishment was "to summon the American people to greatness." In Roosevelt's code, McCain writes approvingly, it was "absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country's sake." This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain's departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans' faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.

"Our greatness," he wrote in "Worth the Fighting For," "depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions." So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a "transcendent issue," requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood's voluntary movie-rating system? A "smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices." Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? "Barbaric" and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They "do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue" and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.

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McCain has been banging the drum from nearly Day One to put more boots on the ground in Iraq. "There are a lot of things that we can do to salvage this," he said on "Meet the Press" on Nov. 12, "but they all require the presence of additional troops." McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon's failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of "rogue state rollback." He's a fan of Roosevelt's Monroe-Doctrine-on-steroids stick-wielding in Latin America. And — like Bush — he thinks too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.