Doubting McCain

Frank Rich launched a withering attack on an out-of-touch and over-the-hill John McCain, in this weekend’s New York Times:

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

[...] most Americans have turned their backs on the Iraq war, no matter how much McCain keeps bellowing about “victory.” The Bush White House is now poised to alight with the Iraqi government on a withdrawal timetable far closer to Obama’s 16 months than McCain’s vague promise of a 2013 endgame. As Gen. David Petraeus returns home, McCain increasingly resembles those mad Japanese soldiers who remained at war on remote Pacific islands years after Hiroshima.

[...]Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose
Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

Americans have a lot to choose between this November: black and white, old and young, experience and inexperience, change and continuity.

But the idea of electing a man who sees a world through decades-old eyes, who is unfamiliar with Google, who repeatedly forgets that Czechoslovakia ceased to exist fifteen years ago, and who can’t see beyond Vladimir Putin’s Soviet past really worries me.

Surely White House advisors have enough to do briefing the president on national and international events each morning, without having to take him aside every other day and give him a crash course in contemporary history and computer literacy?

Last Call for Change We Can Believe In (NYT)