Honest, he's all wrong..,

...and that's alright.

As you may have noticed, I'm not a particularly big fan of all the Kerry/McCain speculation. I'm not even a very big fan of John McCain, who is a doctinaire Republican conservative, after all. On the other hand, it is kind of fun to see him stick his finger in his fellow R's eye and call them to account for their supposed principles.

He's not going to be the VP pick, though, and is exceedingly unlikely to abandon his Senate seat for the transitory honor of a cabinet post, even if asked by a President of either party. Nope, he's going to stay right where he is for as long as he (and the voters of Arizona) pleases. Which is fine, for the very reason pointed out at Pandagon today in a comment on the Hastert/McCain dustup that's in the news.

...what happens when someone says the wrong thing and McCain decides to go all maverick on them? He has enough credibility to both maintain his Republican voting record and criticize his own party strongly enough to turn people against Bush (and other Republican incumbents). McCain isn't Zell Miller. He actually has the ideological credentials to be a critic of his own party and persuade members of his own party to follow him.

As long as McCain continues to point to the hypocrisy of the Republican leadership, making them look foolish in the process and even more foolish to the degree they contradict him, the better off we are. McCain may be idealogically wrong about almost everything, but being an essentially honest man, he's also honestly wrong, and the liars who run his Party today can't do anything but suffer under the scrutiny of that honesty.