Worst of all is McCain's insistence that having been a prisoner of war for five plus years taught him something about when and why and how to conduct a war. It didn't. McCain's rhetoric indicates he doesn't know any more about the subject than does his ideological soul mate Joe Lieberman, and you forget more about the art of war every time you blow your nose than Joe Lieberman will ever learn.

McCain's war talk consists of the same Rovewellian boo noise we hear from the rest of Bush's echo chamberlains. He cautions that if we withdraw from Iraq, we'll fall into isolationism, which means that his idea of being engaged with the rest of the world is to invade and occupy it. He warns that victory in Iraq is essential because defeat will lead to bigger fiasco that the one we've already created.

Let's get something straight. The terms "victory" and "defeat" long ago lost any relevance to the situation in Iraq and the so-called war on terror. "Defeat" would entail our troops dropping their weapons, throwing up their hands, and allowing the evil ones to cut their heads off on videotape while one of Osama bin Laden's thousand-and-one number two men holds up a sign in the background that reads "Jihad Accomplished." "Victory" would involve bin Laden signing articles of surrender on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln while latter day American Caesar David Petraeus looks on.

McCain either knows this, and knows he's pitching us a bale of humbug, or he suffers from an even worse case of arrested cognition that Bush has.

Many of us, including and especially me, share McCain's self-confessed "many failings;" but many of us including me aren't running for president. McCain is a slob. He has no patience for detail. He is vindictive. He is a hypocrite, a fawner and a panderer who loudly condemns the practices of fawning and pandering. Newsweek's Thomas relates that as an "angry toddler," McCain would hold his breath until he passed out, a habit his parents tried to cure him of by dropping him in a tub of ice water. Today, he's a perpetually f-bombing temper tantrum with a 71 year-old life support system. McCain won't outgrow that sort of thing once he's in the Oval Office.

In some ways, I can admire those traits in McCain, and I rather hope Congress always has a "Senator Hothead" or three to shake things up when they need shaking.

But as president of the United States, John McCain would be the most dangerous human being of the face of the earth.

Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals will be available April 1, 2008.