On the other hand – it might be amusing

Pat Buchanan wrote here http://www.townhall.com/columnists/PatrickJBuchanan/2008/02/09/a_rapprochement_with_the_right

McCain has said he will stay in Iraq another 100 years if necessary, that Russia should be thrown out of the G-8, that he will do whatever it takes to halt Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. He has told us: “There’s going to be other wars. … I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.”

To the neo-isolationist crowd that sounds like the script for a horror movie. Others see tough-minded realism.

I tend toward the latter, but it doesn’t matter. McCain is the anti-Ron Paul (who is great on domestic issues, hopelessly naive on foreign policy). He may believe that America must be strong enough to confront evil and survive in a dangerous world, but is absolutely clueless about how a nation’s strength is maintained.

In a word, McCain hates capitalism and individualism – the source of our strength and incredible economic vitality.

To put it bluntly, if we don’t have a healthy (i.e. free-market capitalist) economy we can’t maintain a strong military. Look, for example, at National Socialist Germany. They had what may have been the best trained and equipped military in the world at the time – which didn’t matter in the end as the US out-produced their economy and strangled it by cutting off essential resources.

I won’t belabor this point, the essays cited in the previous post do enough of that. What I will do is to point out something I believe eveybody has missed so far, how much McCain and Hillary are alike personality-wise.

Both have less-than-stellar academic credentials* but seem to consider themselves wiser than everyone else around them. Both disdain success in the private sector (McCain going so far as to insult Romny for his). Both have problems cooperating with those they disagree with, indeed seem to see disagreement as prima facie evidence of villany, and explosive tempers they controll with difficulty.

McCain has proven courage, but then I think Hillary probably does too. In this respect she’s the anti-Bill (intellectually brilliant but undisciplined and cowardly).

McCain does have one significant difference with Hillary. The chances are better that the job will kill him fairly soon. The frustrations of dealing with people who stubbornly hold to their own opinions in the face of his unshakable rightness may make him blow a gasket.

Hillary will probably just send them to Guantanamo, after she’s emptied it out so it can house all the real villains (i.e. people who disagree with her.)

Of course, Hillary despises and McCain idolizes the military, but then again Hillary wants to regiment American society into something very much like a military organization anyway.

Of course, people who are this much alike, in this way, generally don’t get along. Or to put it another way, they hate each other’s guts.

If it comes down to these two, this might be the best show in town for the next year.

Of course, after that wild party we’ll be cleaning up the mess for some time.

Next: the advantage of an Obama presidency. (Now if THAT doesn’t get you going…)

*Full disclosure: my academic record has been spotty in the past – and I obviously don’t consider myself a dummy. In future posts I’ll go into factors of academic success and related subjects.