Did you catch this? From a recent op-ed by the libertarian writer Matt Welch in the NY Times:
"BEHIND any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual....in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of “serving a cause greater than self-interest.”...“We are fast becoming a nation of alienating individualists, unwilling to put the unifying values of patriotism ahead of our narrow self-interests,” Mr. McCain warned in a speech during his 2000 presidential campaign. He added that “cynicism threatens to become a ceiling on our greatness.”...Teenagers are cynical about professional sports because of steroids (a “transcendent issue,” Mr. McCain once thundered in the Senate), so he has proposed that the government be given the authority to demand that even Division II college athletes be subject to the personal intrusion of random drug testing and punishment. Likewise, because betting on college sports could make one cynical about games possibly being thrown, Mr. McCain wanted to make that a federal offense."
Yikes. As an acquaintance of mine said the other day, what many of us worry about is that, if McCain becomes president, every day he's going to wake up and think about how he can stick it to conservatives (not to mention libertarians). Can he be trusted?
