Imagine if John McCain were president right now

(Hooray! I even beat Chris Ryan over at Americablog today! And I don't gripe about generations, either.)

I was walking around the lovely city of Cologne yesterday while John McCain was seeking to revive his flaccid member by talking of boarding the North Korean ship suspected of carrying illegal weapons to Burma and the equally flaccid but even more bellicose John Bolton all but called Barack Obama a pussy on national television.

But I for one am glad to have a president who doesn't bomb first and ask questions later. It's easy for these armchair quarterbacks to call this president a pussy, but the reality is that Barack Obama is dealing with actual threats to not just the U.S. but to the world at this point, while George W. Bush was destabilizing the Middle East with his little My Dick is Bigger Than My Daddy's adventure in Iraq. And a certain amount of consideration of consequences is going to be vital if and when actual military action occurs.

George W. Bush made us a rogue nation in his dealings with loose bands of terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. When dealing with state operators, we're not going to be able to go it alone. So while Congress was passing meaningless resolutions of solidarity with the Iranian demonstrators that would cut off all possibility of engagement with Iran if the rebellion fails (and if we were to go in there militarily and make it succeed, Mir-Hossain Mousavi would be perceived in the Middle East as Shah II: Electric Boogaloo).

The famous definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We've done the Wild Wild West thing for eight years -- destabilizing the Middle East and convincing the Madman of North Korea that it is WE who are the threat to HIM, not the other way around. I'm willing to give the consideration of consequences of our action a try before we bring out the nukes.

I do wonder, however, why the outrage from the right about a possible North Korean missile attack directed at Hawaii. Wasn't it the wingnuts who said that Obama was an illegitimate president because Hawaii wasn't really part of this country?