Another right-on Krugman column

Like one or two of my brethern on the left, there have been times when I was quite impressed with John McCain. His apparent candor, respect as a war hero, and given the lack of any truly dynamic candidates in the last election...well, I suspect it's easy to see why some of us fell for him.

Thing is, the longer you look at McCain, the more you notice that for all hus cultivated image as "the maverick republican," he does things just as bad as the rest of them. Whether it's singling out Michael Moore from the dias of the Republican convention to criticize F-9/11 (which he hadn't seen). Or the way he swallowed the dirty tricks Bush and Rove played on him and his family in the 2000 election to suck up.

Or a few things Paul Krugman talks about in this column (via TGW)...

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.