McCain and Pascal
McCain's stump speech contains a couple of interesting points, but neither one works well.

First, he states accurately that he was pushing for 'The Surge' long before Bush did it. This is supposed to reassure hawks, but it doesn't reassure me. Many of us in the blogworld were advocating a normal pattern to the Iraq war: keep going until you win. In the modern political world this apparently seems weird and radical, but in the longer run of history it was so trivially obvious that it didn't even need to be discussed. Kudos to McCain for being the only major power player to understand the insanity of the Bush approach. (Start a war with great enthusiasm, then stop halfway to smell the roses while the enemy kills our soldiers.)

Problem with this: McCain is a power player, not a blogger. He's been in the Senate long enough to have plenty of seniority, and his party had the majority from '02 through '06. He may have been advocating a normal war strategy, but he didn't say it audibly at the time, and he apparently went along with Bush's abnormal and insane strategy. Bush didn't switch to normal conduct ('The Surge') until the other party took over Congress, which tells us which side he respects. So McCain is not entitled to claim this as a reason to vote for him; in fact, it's evidence that he lacks leadership ability.

Second, he's making a Pascal's Wager on the subject of the all-encompassing and genocidal fraud of 'global warming'. McCain says that he tends to believe in the Earth Goddess Gaia [pbuh] but even if you don't believe, we'll be better off if we follow the orders of Gaia's High Priest Albert Gore.

This is logically and factually wrong. Pascal was dealing with a purely indeterminate question - the existence of a god and the presence of an afterlife - so there was no data to weigh on one side or the other. He was free to bet on pure possibility. On the question of anthropogenic global warming, we have data, and the data indicates that we've already passed the peak of this particular hump in the temperature cycle. The data also indicates that CO2 increases after the earth's surface warms, so it can't be the primary causative factor. Thus anything we do to decrease the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is absurdly useless ... sort of like pushing your car's speedometer needle down instead of hitting the brake pedal.

And most of the steps recommended by High Priest Gore will not even decrease CO2; they will just drain trillions of dollars from the Western economy and leave more room for China to generate more CO2. Which was the whole point all along, since Maurice Strong, the First Prophet of Gaia, has always been an agent of the Chinese Government.
  ¶ 6:59 AM