Well done for McCain for coming around on climate change. Us crazy progressives have been waiting for a conservative to man up for quite a while. Republicans are changing their tune because their fundamentalist/evangelical Christian base are slowly realizing that the rapture is going to be self-induced. Immigration is a scapegoat issue (that still needs to be addressed, but not before economy/war/energy). It is used by the GOP in the same way gay marriage was used in 2004, turn your base into a bunch of hot-head bigots and they will go to the polls. I have always admired McCain for taking a sensible, non-partisan approach on this issue. Being from Arizona, he understands the complexity of the issue. Usually complex issues repulse neoconservatives. Shoot first, ask questions later. Heres a difficult fact for McCain to deal with… The war is causing inflation. Keeping our enormous military mobilized for “100 more years” will be very expensive, if not plain impossible. Us, the US tax payer is currently on the hook for 500 billion (projections are even uglier). This is real debt, China’s trust in the dollar (of which they own 1 trillion) will only last so long. In the last 8 years the mostly Republican government has taking deficit spending to a level Democrats could only dream of. McCain has not demonstrated that he even has a rudimentary understanding of macro economics. Here’s quick lesson for him…

If we taxpayers elect to pay for endless war in the middle east and elsewhere; these will be the returns on our investment. Lockheed, Ratheon and all the other arms companies will reap huge profits from government contracts. We will continue to send our neighbors, sons and cousins into foreign cultures without a clear mission. (fighting bad guys is not a mission, it is a game i played when I was 8) Our service men and women will most likely not be killed but brutally injured by an IED. If they complete the ever-lengthening tours without physical injury, they will have absorbed most of the horrors in their psyche. They will then return to our neighborhoods where the will continue to have psychiatric problems. Depression, paranoia, anger from PTSD will lead to drinking, violence, and despair and homelessness. Feeling unsupported by neither their civilian neighbors or their government many will take their own life. All this happened in the other un-winnable war called Viet Nam.