John McCain's Bucket List

I can't take credit for this -- I was speaking with a friend today with libertarian tendencies who would have been alright with McCain until he chose Palin and revealed himself as more interested in winning than anything else -- including, as Obama pointed out today, his own integrity. If you saw McCain getting some actual grilling by Barbara Walters and the women on The View, you'll find yourself nodding in agreement:

Today on "The View," John McCain defended his campaign's latest ad campaign, which has been debunked repeatedly as both false and sleazy. In running the sleaziest campaign since South Carolina in 2000 and standing by completely debunked lies on national television, it's clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.

Since he laid out zero plans for the economy, zero vision for the nation, and no actual foreign policy doctrine at the Republican National Convention; since he now lies every day, admits to being divorced from reality, flipflops on major defense sinkholes, supports huge pork-laden legislation while claiming to be against earmarks, has hired a long-time oil company lobbyist and ex-Nixon employee to handle his transition team (should he win), has Republican operatives working to disenfranchise voters and can't seem to hold his own in interviews with local television reporters...one has to ask, why the hell does he want to be President?

My buddy had the answer: getting "President of the United States" on his resume is the #1 item on John McCain's Bucket List.

You know, like the movie, all that stuff you're supposed to write down and then do before you "kick the bucket."

We're all victims-in-wating of what John McCain has admitted himself is purely driven by his own outsized ego:

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."

A lot of us who thought more of John McCain when he ran in 2000, before he was bitch-slapped by the man he came to embrace for what one hopes were purely political reasons, have been saying that McCain has changed, that the McCain who's pandering so whole-heartedly now is not the same man he was back then.

Well, maybe he is. Only now it's even more urgent for him, and somehow he's trying to con this entire country into filling the checkbox on the top of his personal bucket list...even if it means that once he's kicked it, he's left us with President Sarah Palin.

And he infers that Obama is unpatriotic?

Right.