Getting back to McCain...

According to the advance text of a speech John McCain gave today, he again questioned what good would come of meeting with the Iranian leadership. He said:

it’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another.

Really. Forgive me if I'm surprised that sort of thing bothers you, Senator, because as reported in The Nation (via Yahoo!)

In his sermon, "The Final Dictator," [John] Hagee described the Antichrist as a seductive figure with "fierce features." He will be "a blasphemer and a homosexual," the pastor announced. Then, Hagee boomed, "There's a phrase in Scripture used solely to identify the Jewish people. It suggests that this man [the Antichrist] is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx."

Exposed here for the first time, Hagee's comments identifying the Antichrist as a partly Jewish homosexual arrive in the wake of a furor the pastor provoked by describing the Holocaust as an act of God. Hagee's chilling sermon about the Holocaust prompted Sen. John McCain to reject the preacher's support, an unexpected turnabout after McCain spent over a year soliciting his endorsement.

Emphasis mine.

But now that Hagee's political allies have listened to the preacher's sermon identifying the Antichrist as a homosexual Jew, how can they still share a stage with him? Is attributing Jewish ancestry to the Man of Sin not anti-Semitism in its most classical form? Are the conspiratorial screeds of Nesta Webster,Henry Ford, and David Duke not replete with passages disturbingly similar to this most recently revealed jeremiad of Hagee and to many of his past sermons?

Later in the NYT blog post about the speech by Michael Cooper, we find:

Mr. McCain – who has taken a hard-line stance on Iran, and who joked early in the campaign by suggesting renaming the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann’’ as “Bomb Iran” – referred in his speech here to creating “real-world pressures’’ on Iran.

To me, this appears as though McCain invented that joke--which would be sobering enough on the face of it, a would-be world leader joking in public about making war. But in fact, McCain was just repeating a joke I remember being fairly common in 1979...when I was in elementary school.

Cooper's to blame for that one, but McCain continues:

“If our troops are ordered to make a forced retreat, we risk all-out civil war, genocide, and a failed state in the heart of the Middle East. Al Qaeda terrorists would rejoice in the defeat of the United States. Allowing a potential terrorist sanctuary would profoundly affect the security of the United States, Israel, and our other friends, and would invite further intervention from Iraq’s neighbors, including an emboldened Iran.

Yes. God forbid Iraq should become a terrorist sanctuary. A civil war in Iraq? My gracious, that would be terrible, wouldn't it?

McCain strikes me as a referee who arrives after the soccer riot has already started. Or like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, standing up, screaming "All is well!" as the crowd tramps over him. Or like the driver who thinks to check his brakes after he's already started down Lombard Street.