McCain is the most dangerous of the Republican candidates. Precisely because there’s this perception of him as safe. As someone sane, and kind, and of good character. He’s the media’s golden boy (no, I’m not talking about his age).

I don’t get it. Does anyone remember his comments about Chelsea Clinton when she was just a kid? If you don’t, here’s a reminder.

Of course he apologized for this later…

He’s supposed to be one that liberals can live with…. um, why, exactly? He’s against reproductive choice. He stubbornly supports Bush’s Iraq war, although he does draw the line at torture, but this seems to me not so much a moral ceiling to which we aspire, but the moral floor below which we may not sink (to paraphrase the law professor who presented my property law bar review course). McCain also wants to “bomb Iran,” relishing the thought, it seems.

He supported South Carolina’s choice to fly the confederate flag on the state capitol as an expression of “heritage.”

Of course he apologized for this later…

When a campaign worker asked him how they would “beat the bitch” referring to Hillary Clinton, he laughed and said “that’s an excellent question.”

He didn’t apologize for that. Though he did add that he “respected” senator Clinton.

All this apologizing and double-posturing brings me to something else I don’t get about him: his reputation for “straight talk”; he may say things that are unpleasant and/or offensive (as in the examples above) but “straight”? I think he’s just as evasive and waffling as the next politician. I thought I was going to have to do some work and remember a bunch more things but someone has already done this (and made my job a hell of a lot easier).

McCain seems to be beyond the taint of anything. Bill Clinton is considered — even by many who thought he was a pretty good president — a slime ball because he cheated on his wife. McCain cheated on his first wife repeatedly, eventually leaving her for his much-younger current wife and being estranged from his children for some time. Yet, this is the man of “character.”

Why the media love affair with McCain? Because he was a POW and we don’t say bad things about our brave veterans? Far be it from me to decline to give a man his due for courage and resilience in war, but where was McCain when John Kerry was vilified — in connection with a service that earned Kerry a purple heart — by a guy who got Daddy to bail him out of the same war? Oh, yeah, he was standing next to and supporting the guy whose Daddy bailed him out.

So, again, why DOES McCain get a free pass — is it because he seems like the kind of guy you “want to have a beer with” like our current president? (McCain was quite a party boy in his youth, as turns out). People keep talking about “liking” him. Is that it? If so, then, judging by both men, callousness, lying, incompetence, and a spiteful sense of humor are the qualities we look for in a guy who we want to get drunk with and entrust our country to.

Welcome to the frat boy gold standard of the American presidency.