McCain and the Cult of the Warrior -- Is The Coming Election Going to Be a Military Coup?

Links for this Post:

The Cult of The Warrior -- Jack Kemp Was Right: McCain Would Be Too Dangerous as President  by Frank Schaeffer in the Huffington Post

Also The Militarist by Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect

When John McCain says in the YouTube music video which I posted about in John McCain's Hundred Years War,

"There are gonna be wars, lots of other wars."

In the essay the Cult of the Warrior, Frank Shaeffer discusses what I and a lot of other people who have watched the McCain during the current Presidential Election campaign have been thinking. Here are a couple of clips from which is the essence of his commentary:

McCain isn't a civilian. He sees himself as in tune with a higher calling. He sees himself as a military man first and everything else comes second, including our economic interests.

It is no accident that McCain's memoir is titled Faith of My Fathers. Faith is the operative word here, faith as in religion, faith as in blind belief in things that reason might refute.

On the cover of McCain's memoir are pictures of McCain's military ancestors and of course Senator McCain as a young military man. To McCain and his family, military service is a religion, a self-defining way of life, the question and the answer.

McCain's reasons for keeping America at war in Iraq are religious, the expression of the cult of the warrior -- the liturgy of combat. No matter what war we were in right now McCain would say "stay the course" and "on to victory!" He'd do this in the same way that any priest would want to finish a liturgy, mass or service once begun, no matter what disturbances might threaten to interrupt it.

A McCain presidency would essentially be a militarist coup.

Schaeffer is not the only one talking about McCain's military obsessions. The Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (a Democrat) recently spoke out on the same subject according to Harkin says McCain's military history a negative by Darwin Danielson.

The libertarian Right is also hip to McCain's militaristic tendencies. Justin Raimondo's "The Madness of John McCain" in The American Conservative describes the Republican as, "a militarist suffering from acute narcissism and armed with the Bush Doctrine is not fit to be commander in chief."

Even some of McCain's Republican colleges in the Senate are wondering about McCain's militarist posturing. Nebraska Senator  Chuck Hagel, a fellow Republican has repeatedly criticized McCain for his bellicose rhetoric.

Matthew Yglesias in the Militarist the second article linked at the top of this post begins his lengthy essay:

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain may protest that he hates war, but no American leader has promoted it more avidly. McCain is not only the most hawkish neocon on the horizon; he genuinely sees war as America's most ennobling enterprise.

I hope that the Democrats get over their current inter-party fighting soon and focus on beating McCain. If these views of McCain are accurate and from what I have observed they are, then the past eight years of Bush might be like a Sunday School picnic on a warm summer day compared to what McCain is offering.