McCain The Hawk

Great op-ed by Matt Welch on what John McCain actually thinks about the world -- roughly, that George W. Bush has been overly disinclined to threaten the use of military force or to actually use it; that in the wake of Iraq, the country needs to become more militaristic in its approach to the world. As Kevin Drum says on this issue, at least, McCain is neither a centrist nor a standard-issue Republican -- he's the single furthest-right figure on the American political scene.

And, yes, he'll combine his more-hawkish-than-Bush approach to the world with a greater level of frankness and intellectual engagement, but at the end of the day I'm not actually sure how that's supposed to help.