[sailaway21]

With all due respect, a person who declares themself to be a Republican/Libertarian with the intensions of voting for McCain has one of three conditions; cognitive dissonance, a lack of understanding of what the Republican or Libertarian parties and ethos are, or no idea of the politics of John McCain.

For the record; John McCain is a genuine war hero who was apparently not a very good pilot, the plane shot down in VietNam hardly being the first he'd put on the ground, a poor student at best at the US Naval Academy, his very admission suspected of being the result of long-standing Navy nepotism, and a singularly undistinguished Senator with a record of disasterous legislative votes both for the country and his party. He's widely regarded as not being an overly deep or principled thinker and he couples that with a short temper.

In retrospect, he was correct in seeing the need for a larger military force in Iraq. but this hardly makes him a military strategist on the order of General Petraeus. Petraeus success has less to do with numbers than it does to do with military strategy, a subject McCain probably slept through at Annapolis.

I will not vote for McCain under any circumstances, preferring the disaster of a second Clinton presidency. I believe that it will be easier to dispose of a President Clinton in 2012 than it will be to undo the damage that a McCain presidency would do to conservatism and the Republican party.