Gypsysavage’s Weblog

With record turnout at voting locations through PA today and after watching the candidates’ recycled sound bites flash on network news channels over and over again, I’ve turned my attention for the time being toward John McCain. Everything I’ve ever read about the man makes me like him, God forbid, and if it weren’t for his stance on the war, on which he rests his entire candidacy, I would consider him a wise choice for the presidency.

An old man, bitter, brooding, and often too candid about his economic ineptitude, he still represents to me a pragmatist, someone capable of running the highest office with integrity (as if that ever mattered to me), and competence.

His leftist leanings are appealing, and as someone who breaks rank at the behest of his own conscience (he never much cared to stick by his Republican brethren when it came to legislative reform), he strikes me as a wily statesman who can and will rumble with anyone for right reasons… which makes me wonder: what does he know about the war that I don’t? He’s spoken many times about the troubling and fateful implications of the military industrial complex as an American cultural problem (see, Why We Fight), and he’s been a victim of torture in a damnable war forty years ago, so why is he so adamant about this one?

And is he capable of winning this election? I’m sure. I’d like to think that if Obama wins this primary instead of Clinton, we just may have a constructive discourse on issues that have been ignored for far too long.