The media never mentions McCain is a big fan of this mandatory national service BS. Wonder why?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-welch26nov26,0,3481494.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail


<snip>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.

The price of all this war-making, in money and manpower, would be staggering; it's hard to imagine without a draft (McCain has long been a fan of mandatory national service, at the least). But the costs to his political ambitions may even be greater. The nation is in no mood for the war we've got now, let alone a doubling-down on Iraq and ramped-up unilateralist tough talk in the Middle East. The trend lines of public opinion on these counts are not pointing in McCain's direction.

One of the many charming confessions in "Worth the Fighting For" is McCain's complaint that the man he replaced in the Senate — Republican icon Barry Goldwater — was "never as affectionate as I would have liked." Small wonder.

Goldwater, a man who seemed to emanate from Arizona's dust, was the paragon of limited government, believing to his core that the feds shouldn't tell you how to run a business or whom you can sleep with. McCain, on the other hand, is a third-generation D.C. insider who carpetbagged his way into office, believing to his core that "national pride will not survive the people's contempt for government." On Nov. 7, those conflicting worldviews collided when Arizonans voted on whether to outlaw gay marriage. McCain campaigned in favor of the ban, in the name of "preserving the sanctity" of heterosexual unions. His exhortations went down to surprising defeat. Not, one suspects, for the last time.

[MADem]

1. Because they want to pimp him to the top of the GOP ticket, flanked by

Giuliani and Mitt the Shitt Romney, who will duke it out to be handmaiden to the king. Then, he can have the "showdown" with Hillary.

They love to control the entire spectacle, rather like a hyper-organized maiden aunt who tells everyone, from the octegenarians to the preschoolers, precisely where they must sit at the Thanksgiving table, with no deviation permitted!!!

Of course, their foolish scenarios always end up falling by the wayside. Primaries and debates have a way of kicking the shit out of putative front runners. Ya just never know....! The article notes the tabula rasa quality the media puts on him, coupled with an interesting psychological assessment of the reasons why he's the way he is:

People are forever filling in the blanks with their own political fantasies. Third party candidate! John Kerry running mate! Far-right warmonger! Republican In Name Only! But with the announcement that the popular Arizona senator has formed his presidential exploratory committee, it's time for our long national guessing game to end.

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.

The first clue to McCain's philosophy lies in two seemingly irrelevant items of gossip: His father was a drunk, and his second wife battled addiction to pain pills. Neither would be worth mentioning except for the fact that McCain's books and speeches are shot through with the language and sentiment of 12-step recovery, especially Steps 1 (admitting the problem) and 2 (investing faith in a "Power greater than ourselves").

Like many alcoholics who haven't quite made it to Step 6 (becoming "entirely ready" to have these defects removed), McCain is disarmingly talented at admitting his narcissistic flaws. In his 2002 book "Worth the Fighting For," the senator is constantly confessing his problems of "selfishness," "immaturity," "ambition" and especially "temper," though he also makes clear that his outbreaks of anger can be justifiable and even laudable when channeled into "a cause greater than self-interest."
....

[MrPrax]

2. K & R

Nice find...good info.

Don't peak too early on the anti-McCain stuff though, people will simply get burned out by the time this dick head is on the campaign trail.

Is there an ongoing McCain archive here? If not, there should be and you two have made a good start -- it would be nice to have a little forum just for this guy, so folks at DU can be directed to it on the occasion and have their memories refreshed.

There is a lot of weight to a post dated in the past that seems 'topical' when read in the present...it shows consistency and can't be simply dismissed as a 'spur of the moment' campaign smear if people were talking about it 18 months previously.

Also the media has a way of scrubbing it's own stories and changing text when it suits them. Nothing makes this more obvious is when you find a old quoted article with a link and then try to FIND that linked MSM story -- looks bad and makes it look like the media IS revising previous editorial criticism simply for the election cycle.

[hsher]

3. Because they know he'll be against it next week

;)