The rationale behind the recognition of John McCain as a military hero eludes me. I give him high marks for service to country, but hero?

I think that we have stretched the term hero a little too far. In other cultures, captured military are not necessarily thought of as heroic since it is not something that is optional.

Conduct during imprisonment can be honorable, but let start using designations such as hero with greater accuracy.

John McCain has many characteristics that make him unacceptable as the person to be in charge of a vast military establishment.

Among them is his age; his obvious infirmities; his fondness for military solutions; his doggedness in the face of overwhelming contrary opinion. Consensus is what brings about the best decisions.

His presidency will not lean towards consensus building but, as one would expect of the military mind, he will rule by directive. He is certainly not a Dwight Eisenhower.

President Bush is of minor intellectual ability, but he is a healthy man who has been able to endure the riggers of his position.

John McCain, though glib, is also of minor intellectual ability. In addition, a problem for the country is that he could physically crumble under the strain of the presidency and produce many bad decisions.

I believe that John McCain is the most dangerous of any of the candidates of any party.

John McCain enjoys inordinately good press; they have not examined his record for ethical conduct, nor have they taken a serious look at his physical fitness for the job.

McCain will certainly be too old (at 72) to assume the presidency in 2009. So he should let well enough alone, retire, go home to Arizona, and putter around in his garden, dreaming of the wars he could have started.

McCain's propensity to threaten more warfare -- in fact, he almost assures us of such unacceptable behavior -- is reason enough to send the man packing.

Could we really expect any other attitude from a man who comes from a war-mongering family? We don't need more militaristic arrogance and swagger in the White House -- eight years of that foolishness is enough.

Finally, McCain's explosive temper needs to by highlighted. He flies off of the handle at the drop of a hat -- a notorious personality defect that predates his POW years.

His temper would almost assuredly guarantee that we would be waging war in very short order under a McCain administration. Many of his colleagues have witnessed his disturbing behavior and condemned it, including his Republican buddy, Thad Cochran.

America most definitely does not need such a volatile man in the Oval Office. Why doesn't the press pounce on that important and disturbing issue?

The Certifiable McCain

If I were the Democratic candidate for president, and it was September and my opponent were John McCain, here's the ad I would run: A street in the middle east. Some cute children playing games.

Some women carrying groceries. A dog trotting by. Back to the children. Cut to McCain singing "Bomb bomb bomb Iran", but speeded up a little, to remind people how crazy he is.

Cut back to Iranian street scene. The dog joins the children. Blow them up.

Ever see "Failsafe"? That's what happens at the end. The last few scenes are of folks minding their own business on the streets of New York. Then they're gone.

The next ad I would run would be film clips of American soldiers in Iraq, dead, dismembered, dying. Cut to Walter Reed Army Hospital.

American soldiers, men and women, struggling with their injuries. Cut to funeral for American soldier. Cut to John McCain, smiling, welcoming a hundred years of war in Iraq.

But I'm not going to be the candidate, and, according to Bill Clinton, if Hillary is the candidate, she is going to sell us out, because "she and John McCain are very close."

They've agreed to use the campaign to put the voters to sleep so that they can get on with consolidating the military-industrial corporate base of the US government.

The press concedes the race to McCain already. In Sunday's column (which I read in the International Herald Tribune, my Times substitute), Frank Rich maintains that Bill Clinton's surge into the primaries will bring him serious trouble from the Republican noise machine, as they rake up one indiscretion after another and throw them in Billary's face.

If McCain wins the nomination, according to Rich, the Clintons can't beat him because when Bill and Hillary were in law school, McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and because Independents like McCain.

Apparently, while everyone will rake up Billary's past, McCain's will be allowed to slumber peacefully, and, with the connivance of the swooning press, the US will get to elect a crackpot.

You may remember that in May of 2006, McCain stumbled into the commencement exercises at the New School in New York City, intending to give the same speech to those lefties as he had given to the graduating class of Liberty University, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a 22-year-old girl who gave him a sound talking-to.

Those kids sent the old man home with his tail between his legs. I would show that, too, in my campaign ads.

Any Republican president would be a disaster, but McCain would be the biggest disaster of all, because, both by who he is and what he professes, he encourages the US, as Reagan did, to engage in sentimental, nostalgic wishful thinking about the effects of American "goodness" and "power".

The nation, which is at last waking up to the disasters of the last twenty-eight years--the disasters of the "free market" and "making the world safe for democracy" as a cover for ruthless exploitation of all natural resources no matter where they are and who owns them--would succumb the fantasy again, at least long enough for those disasters to be compounded and rendered absolutely unfixable.

McCain is a walking delusion--that we really are brave, that we meant well, that mistakes were made but the policies themselves were sound.

McCain reassures us that we weren't so bad after all, when we were. We can't come to terms with why the US is in the pickle it is in without consigning McCain to the dustheap.

The majority of Americans do not want to stay in Iraq. The majority of Americans think that policies McCain supports take the country in "the wrong direction".

The majority of Americans do not agree with McCain, but Billary and the press are already telling us that, once he is the nominee, they aren't going to touch him.

They are going to let him break the army. They are going to let him break the bank. They are going to let him continue and expand the Bush presidency, because he's a war hero, and if a war hero likes a war, then nobody else's opinion matters.