John McCain visited Utah to raise funds over the last few days. I caught some of his comments on the radio. This is good stuff.

"Any political ambition I might have is negligent compared to what has already been sacrificed and is being risked by young Americans," he said. "So any impact it might have on my political ambitions I'm not concerned about."

OK, let's see. First, compare your ambitions to ... dying troops. And then, observe that war discontent doesn't concern you because .. er, wait. What?

"Americans aren't so much worried about troops in Iraq - they're worried about troops in Iraq dying," McCain said. "We've had troops in South Korea for 50 years and nobody complains about it."

Senator McCain makes a good point. Americans don't mind troops in Iraq. This isn't about the war, this is about troops dying. Because they aren't dying in South Korea. So what we need to do is get them to stop dying. We need to address the real problem here, which is not failed policies. It's failed lives.

But McCain also said the nation needed a larger military, noting that the current pace of deployments has left the military "very badly stretched." For that "terrible failing," he blamed former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who advocated a smaller, stealthier and more technologically advanced military.

A larger military. But that's Rumsfeld's fault, since Americans were previously signing up in droves to go die in Iraq. McCain has real vision. I won't even bother asking him how he would get the United States a larger military. Does realism mean nothing to these people? We don't have a larger military, Mr. McCain. Perhaps we should not engage in nation building which presumes that resources are not a factor.

Are we done yet? Nope. Here's the best part:

"The only thing worse than an overstretched military is a defeated military, and if we fail in Iraq, we will see a defeated military,'' he said.

The Vietnam veteran and a former prisoner of war said he returned home from that war as part of a defeated military. "And it took decades to repair our military," he said.

I'm not sure I can parse this bit, but let me try. "Failing" in Iraq would probably mean that our stated objectives do not come to pass, and those have something to do with deposing a regime that was amassing WMDs to destroy the United States or something. But they also include bringing stability to the country. And if that does not happen (no time frame given), it will indicate that we have a "defeated military". Again, ladies and gentlemen, the Iraq debacle is not the fault of a flawed foreign policy enacted over false intelligence. Whose fault is it? Why, it will be the military's fault. Last time I looked, this means the troops. So if we leave Iraq, it means our troops will have failed at their mission in Iraq. Nothing to say about the impossibility of that mission. The Patriot himself would blame the military, whose commanders largely disagreed with the war to begin with. Witness the logic of the War Party, which sends its men and women to die in a needless war, keeps them there year after year, and then calls them "defeated" because they "failed" at who-knows-what mission they were expected to carry out. McCain knows this because he was once part of a "defeated military" in Vietnam.

Do not adjust your televisions.

Might I submit that the reason it "took us decades to repair our military" after Vietnam was because we stuck deeply in a war where we did not belong, and not because we "lost" it? Pray tell, how would "winning" eliminate the need to rebuild our military after any protracted and astronomically expensive operations like Iraq?

I can't profess to knowing whether this man believes the bullshit exiting his mouth, or just thinks that the only Republican candidate who stands a chance at the White House is the one who is framed as Bush's logical successor (the "denial" votes). I can tell you that he represents the worst kind of politician, one who is not culpable for anything he says or does, whining about his powerlessness to get things done the right way.