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This man for President?

Strange as it seems to outsiders - read, non-Americans - John McCain is leading Obama in opinion polls in the US. Perhaps its the scare campaign underway about Obama or the fact that Obama is not white. Whatever, it must be a concern that McCain is seriously in contention to become President.

Leaving aside that he is now the subject of ridicule that he doesn't even know how many homes he has - he ventured the suggestion, 4, when it's actually, 7 - that the man is ill-equipped to lead any country, let alone the US, emerges from this piece in The Nation "MCain's Warped Worldview":

"The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the ten French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the US government's imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for President, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?

The economy is in a downward spiral, the national debt is at an all-time high, the dollar is an international disgrace and inflation in July had the steepest rise in twenty-seven years, driven by oil prices fivefold higher than when George W. Bush invaded the nation with the world's second-largest petroleum reserves.

While the oil-rich Mideast nations we protect refuse to fully open the oil spigots as payback for our military efforts, McCain celebrates General David Petraeus as his number-one hero for "victory" in Iraq. Aside from the reality that victory there is now defined as returning to the level of stability provided by Saddam Hussein, who the Bush Administration admits had nothing to do with the bin Laden-led terrorists, even that goal requires the cooperation of our former sworn enemies, Iran's ayatollahs."

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