No Straw Men

McCain mastered the art of political triangulation to become perhaps the Senate’s most influential member.

As we near the major party conventions, here are a few questions for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, the New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon.

It was in Ohio the other day when a supporter neatly summed up the obstacle lying between John McCain and the White House. “When,” the young man implored, “are you going to go out and say, ‘Read my lips. I am not the third term of Bush’?”

The prosecution for genocide is a historic step that also creates an opportunity in Sudan, particularly if China can now be induced and shamed into suspending the transfer of weapons used to slaughter civilians in Darfur.

It’s one thing for a conservative to admire T. R.’s style and gallantry, the charge up San Juan Hill, the rounding up of crooks in the Badlands. It’s something else for a conservative to identify Roosevelt as a fellow reformer.

I searched Google for “obama healthcare” and “mccain healthcare.” I was shocked by what I found.

Like a modern general addressing his modern army in what Erickson terms the “Freedom Revolution,” he was precise and direct in how the activists in the room could make an immediate difference.

Less than a week after publishing an op-ed on Iraq by Barack Obama, the New York Times has rejected a rebuttal op-ed by John McCain.