It's Walnuts vs. Mittens!
by Jean Carnahan

        It looks like the GOP is down to two ponies in this presidential steeplechase, with Huck, Fred, and Rudy unable to stay in the running.  There’s only “Walnuts” and “Mittens” left in the homestretch, with the odds-on favorite being “Walnuts” McCain.  (Nicknamed for his fondness in funding Walnut Canyon National Monument in Arizona or, some say, for the creepy photos that make him look like he’s cracking walnuts with his teeth.)

            What an “enee-menee-minee-moe” situation this is for Republicans trying to sort through their sorry lot of presidential contenders.  Of them all, McCain has got to be the scariest. Those who have worked with McCain are well aware of his unstable and volatile personality, hardly a qualification for being within a finger’s length of the nuclear button. 

The Arizona senator and veteran of the Vietnam era still has a taste for war and has told us that we could be in Iraq for another hundred years.  Frankly, I prefer a president who offers a more favorable timetable than that.  McCain sees everything through the lens of war, which is a dangerous perspective in today’s world.  

By his own admission, McCain says that he doesn’t know much about the economy.  But, being joined at the hip with Joe Lieberman, (the smart twin), he can always inquire, “Golly, gee, Joe, what’s a recession?”   

            I won’t even mention that McCain would be three years older than Ronald Reagan was when taking office and eighty by the end of a second term.  I feel a shutter run up my spine just writing of a possible McCain presidency at any age.

Heaven forbid that in an attempt both to counter the age concern and capture the evangelical vote, he would team up with Huckabee, placing the reverend a heartbeat from the presidency.

Here’s a campaign slogan for the Senator, as he attempts to become the heir apparent to the Bush legacy: “For more of the same, vote for McCain.”  And, if he sticks with the policies of this failed presidency, he might acquire yet another nickname: “Teflon John.”

Seriously, voters want real change and I just don’t see that in McCain.  At long last, the momentum is on the Democratic side this year.  These lines from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney come to mind:  “Once in a lifetime, the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.”

            This is such a time.