McCain Loses His Head

George Will on John McCain’s “Off With His Head!” political philosophy.

Excerpt:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Can we survive four more years of rash, misguided, shoot-from-the-hip political decisions that can dramatically alter the course of this nation’s (and the world’s) history?

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1 Comment

  1. WaPo Insists: Don’t Trust WaPo!
    By Tim Graham | September 23, 2008 – 08:10

    It was incredibly odd to watch the Washington Post denounce a McCain ad for using such a flimsy source as…The Washington Post. But James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal really used the perfect metaphor to mock it on Monday, a Star Trek episode where an all-powerful computer had to be fed self-contradictory statements so it would self-destruct:

    Invariably, Captain Kirk and the other protagonists would save mankind by using illogic to fight the computer. They would feed the computer some paradox or logically incoherent statement, such as “Everything I say is a lie,” which would overload the computer’s logic circuits and destroy it.

    Last week John McCain’s campaign put out an ad criticizing Barack Obama for his ties to Franklin Raines, former CEO of Fannie Mae. The ad said that Obama relies on Raines “for ‘advice on mortgage and housing policy.’ ” The Washington Post claims that the McCain ad is “a stretch”:

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