“Only one of the candidates is a real man, and in wartime, we can't afford anything less as commander in chief.”

I suppose the above statement could go a long way toward explaining the mess we’re in now, if it wasn’t the non-sequitur conclusion of yet another diatribe at (as Sheila calls it) The Weakly Standard, one that again leaves me feeling like I must live in a parallel universe. Stuart Koehl, whoever the hell he might be, argues that the presidency isn’t about a candidate’s stand on issues or even about his experience: it’s all about character, and by his reckoning, John McCain has it and Barack Obama does not.

In case you don’t read the whole article, here in a nutshell is Mr. Koehl’s reasoning:

“. . . with John McCain, you know where you stand. He's not likely to soft-soap you, or talk out of different sides of his mouth depending on the audience. What you see is pretty much what you get. That's a refreshing change in a politician, one that stands in stark contrast to the ‘Candidate of Change’, who changes so often that it has gotten old in a hurry.”

Like I said, parallel universe. And talk about talking out of both sides of one’s mouth: this guy wants to say it doesn’t matter where a candidate stands while telling us how much it matters.

But Mr. Koehl has apparently spent the last few months under the porch. We don’t, in fact, know where we stand with McCain because he has so recently changed his position on such major issues as torture, immigration, tax policy, Roe v Wade, gay marriage, and wiretapping (just to name a few). Who knows where he will stand on other big issues by the time November rolls around? Once a principled man who took stances unpopular with the lowest common denominator-faction of his party, McCain ’08 has been busy as a tap-dancer selling out to the far right, and there’s nothing new or refreshing about that in Republican politics.

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