Tuesday, February 12, 2008

McCain - Living in the Past

Pat Buchanan is a mixture of good and bad. But his recent column on McCain's backward looking world view is on the mark:

Thinking is hard work, said Twain; that is why so few engage in it. For too long, conservatives have not been thinking, but living on the inherited intellectual capital of the past. They have failed to see that the world has changed since Reagan’s time and we must change with it.

The truth is the prospective Republican nominee is frozen in the past. Though an invasion of his nation is taking place on the border of his own state, John McCain is still reciting Emma Lazarus on the Golden Door. Though China manipulated its currency to seize our markets and loot our industry, and the EU imposes VAT taxes — tariff equivalents — on U.S. imports, McCain is still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley.

Though the Cold War has been over a generation, McCain has become more bellicose. He warns us new wars are coming, demands the ouster of Putin from the G-8, threatens Iran. If there is a single trip wire for war laid down in the time of Acheson and Dulles that John McCain thinks we should pull up, or a single alliance he has urged us to review, this writer has not heard of it.

With the president at 30% and the party about to lose seats in both houses, conservatives should not be closing ranks but demanding to know why.

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