It makes me feel empty inside.  My pants.

There's a pretty interesting article in the latest issue of Atlantic about how the conservatives have drifted off-course - showing how John McCain, despite what you hear in the media, is not only conservative, but the only true conservative running.

They forgot to include Hillary in that article, but still... made some good points...!

And I think as much as he likes to portray himself as "above the fray" and claiming that he is not using his opponents words out of context, he has done that with McCain on the "100 Years of war" line, and with Clinton on the Bosnia thing.  His Annie Oakley line was genius though.

***

I don't think he's taking Senator McCain's "100 Years in Iraq" line out of context.  Senator McCain's original statement was the following:

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years…

McCain: Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

Now, Senator McCain fairly points out that he isn't talking about hundreds of servicemen dying in Iraq every year for the next 100 years.  He's talking about a situation where "Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."  The problem is that he never explains how we get from here to there.  He never explains how we get from IEDs and car bombs to a base like Ramstein or Okinawa.  He just assumes that the Iraqis will magically stop trying to kill us and get us out of their country, and will magically become happy ot have our base there.

He compares Iraq to South Korea and Japan, and we could add Germany to his list.  But we toppled the Hussein regime in April 2003.  It's been five years.  How many U.S. casualties occurred in Germany in 1949, 5 years after the Third Reich fell?  How many in Japan in 1950, 5 years after Hirohito's surrender?  How many in South Korea in 1958, five years after the armistice?  It's not enough to say "There won't be any fighting and we'll just have a base there" because it presumes something -- that there won't be any fighting -- that simply isn't true.  Moreover, I would argue, as long as we have a presence in that part of the world, there will never be an end to the fighting because there is a small but significant number of Muslim radicals who would view a U.S. military base on Muslim soil as an act of war.

As for Senator Clinton's comments, I'm not sure what kind of contect you could put those in to make them reasonable.  She repeatedly claimed that she was under fire when, in fact, she wasn't.  Then she tried to blame the whole thing on being tired (all while telling us that she's the best equipped to handle a crisis at 3 a.m.).

Come on!  He's giving out cheeseburgers now!  You HAVE to vote for him!  He's like an LOLCAT...

I can't really hold the 100 years thing against McCain.  If he loses, it might be to me his Mondale Moment - where you lose votes by being honest about unpleasant truths.  And that's a sucky way to lose votes.

(Yes, Mondale was likely to lose anyway.  Yes, McCain might not consider it an unpleasant truth.  I'm too tired for a more coherent post.)