McCain on Proliferation

[Matt]

I'm a bit behind the curve, but it seems that John McCain offered up a perfectly reasonable speech on nuclear proliferation issues yesterday. It wasn't earth-shatteringly good and didn't break any new ground, but it did involve him embracing several ideas that liberals and non-proliferation experts have been pushing for a while now and that Barack Obama has already embraced.

I guess that's good news, but as Ilan Goldenberg writes it's pretty annoying to see people hailing McCain's ideas when they're so contrary to his record over the past ten years including things he was saying just months ago when we were going to be booting Russia out of international organizations and forming a League of Democracies to battle to the death with the forces of autocracy. Certainly I'm not one to say a politician should never be allowed to change his mind, but when you see someone abandoning a decade of extremism in favor of moderation in the middle of a presidential general election campaign it's reasonable to suspect that you're seeing some "tacking toward the center" rather than genuine rethinking of things. Would it be too much to ask to get some kind of explanation from McCain of how he wants to square these new ideas with his old ones?

Comments

McCain's speech, from what I heard, was a perfect example of the kinda "let's define the left edge of acceptable discourse, the right edge and measure out a position half-way in the middle and call it just" approach to everything that the media uses ... and why St. John McCain is so loved by them.

He begins by making a strawman version of Obama's position (which is really more along the lines of what McCain ultimately ended up saying he supported), a version of GW Bush's position that conservatives would no doubt call a strawman version (why the right still dislikes McCain) and then he came up with something in the middle.

Forget that Obama's position itself is fairly moderate in the grand scheme of things (what's Kucinich?* chopped liver?). McCain was saying we shouldn't talk to dictators, we shouldn't go to war against them, nu what do we do? ... would McCain be a real conservative and say we should try doing nothing?). McCain's position was a parody of mealy-mouthed centrism (like his "friends, let me give you the straight talk" is a self-parody) and that's what passes for bold thinking?

This is exactly what has gotten us into so much trouble in the first place, enabled the GOP talking machine to yank the center to the right by putting forth more and more bizarre versions of the right side of discourse requiring the so-called liberal media then to further inch to the right their golden mean. Yet I reckon too many people still fall for McCain's shtick ... alas.

* one could argue that McCain's strawman version of Obama's position is actually the correct position to take and that more talk is indeed exactly what we need to effect arms control, provided moonbat Kucinich is elected POTUS. If Kucinich could talk his hawt wife into marrying him ...

Posted by DAS | May 28, 2008 5:37 PM

I once drove back through southern Manitoba at night. I was stunned by the beauty the prairies can offer. I remember the sleepy farming towns at rest - a reminder of the legacy of honest, hard working people who built a nation.

Posted by Tim K | May 28, 2008 5:42 PM

McCain, in that speech:

Many believe all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven't tried talking to these governments repeatedly over the past two decades.

Actually, we haven't tried talking to Iran about much of anything (aside some Iraq/Afghanistan stuff recently) since April of 1980--certainly not their nuclear program. In fact, it's our stated policy not to talk to them. (Of course, this isn't covered as a gaffe, for reasons passing understanding.)

This speech is an example of how John McCain reasons on foreign policy. He indicts a leftist strawman for the spot we're in today and then prescribes a corrective--more of the same hawkishness we've had all along. Yeah, that's "perfectly reasonable."

Maybe I just picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.

Posted by southpaw | May 28, 2008 5:58 PM

I forgot to link to hilzoy, who's written about this far more eloquently than I could.

Posted by southpaw | May 28, 2008 6:02 PM

"Would it be too much to ask to get some kind of explanation from McCain of how he wants to square these new ideas with his old ones?"

Actually, it is because he'd get all cranky and stuff.

Posted by asl | May 28, 2008 6:09 PM

1. John McCain is older than splitting the atom.

2. I would think that for someone like McCain, nuclear weapons just kind of take the fun out of war. There's not as much glory in the endless struggle against evil if you can just nuke them. I mention this honestly as a reason why I would expect McCain to be more sensible on nuclear proliferation issues than he is on most war- and military-related stuff.

Posted by Christopher M | May 28, 2008 6:18 PM

That wouldn't stop McCain from either starting a war with Iran or nuking Iran if the war started to go badly - as it will.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 28, 2008 7:09 PM

And BTW, Matt, despite banging his girlfriend at the beach, STILL doesn't have enough balls to either answer my two questions on Iran OR specify what HE would do about Iran.

Truly a gutless "pundit". Bill Kristol is sneering at you, Matt. SNEERING.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 28, 2008 7:12 PM

Bill Kristol is sneering at you,

no, that's his normal expression. he has no soul, you see, so his face just naturally curls into a sneer. he'd look like that if he won the lottery on his birthday while banging a half-dozen Miss Universe contestants during a solar eclipse.

and he's a McCain foreign policy adviser.

Posted by cleek | May 28, 2008 8:17 PM

Matt, quite reasonably, asks:

"Would it be too much to ask to get some kind of explanation from McCain of how he wants to square these new ideas with his old ones?"

"YES."

Yet another edition of SATSQ!

Posted by PQuincy | May 29, 2008 9:26 AM