John McCain, a man who has survived all manner of vicious attacks with a degree of dignity and honor which all Americans ought to respect, is signalling his desire to once again be torn to shreds by the very machine which he has recently defended.

McCain, whose decision to seek the Presidency surprised no one, was considered a maverick and independent spirit within the Senate until he sold his prestige and cache with swing voters in order to boost his bona fides with the Republican electorate that will reject him a little more than three years from now.

In 2000, McCain mounted a tough challenge to George Bush in the early Republican primaries. As the campaigns reached South Carolina, Bush reached into the family's bag of dirty tricks. Anonymous push polls told likely voters that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. A fringe veteran group began attacking McCain's patriotism. A whisper campaign started that McCain was a Manchurian candidate, either brainwashed by his Vietnamese captors or so tortured by the personal hell he survived that he lacked the patience to be president.

Bush went on to with the South Carolina primary before eventually being elevated to the presidency by the Supreme Court.

In 2004, John Kerry offered McCain the vice presidency. It is difficult to imaging a Kerry-McCain ticket losing the hard-fought election, but McCain chose to forgo the vice presidency. Speculation has swirled that McCain did not want to wait until the end of a second Kerry term to run for president.

McCain to consider possible 2008 presidential run

From AFP, November 22, 2004

Maverick US Republican Senator John McCain, who ran against President George W. Bush four years ago, indicated he might be considering another presidential bid in 2008, despite the fact he will be 72 when the next election rolls around.

"I do not foreclose the option," said the Arizona lawmaker as he appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" show. "There will be plenty of time to consider whether to run for president again."

He added he believed it would be inappropriate for him to speculate on his political plans less than three week after a heated presidential contest that resulted in Bush winning a second term at the White House.

McCain said for now, he was determined to help the president with his agenda.

But it did not escape the attention of local political pundits that shortly after the November 2 vote, the senator paid a little-publicized visit to New Hampshire, the northeastern US state that hold the first-in-the-nation presidential primary every election year.

He denied the visit had anything to do with his putative White House aspirations, saying he was responding to a longstanding invitation to give a speech before a local audience.

Freepers say:

I have mixed feelings about this, he could beat Hitlery, but he is so damn annoying and he's a RINO. (link)

He won't rule it out, but conservatives will. (link)

I will never, even if he's running against Hillary, vote for John McCain. It's not that he opposes some elements of the Party or the President, it's the manner in which he does it. (link)

He also seems to have some psychological problems left over from his imprisonment at the hands of the communists the leftist he loves love and his torture. In addition, he is scientifically ignorant. He thinks global warming is caused by man's activities, when there is NO data to support such a claim. He had a hearing on it which was populated by scientists trying to feed out of the public trough. We should suspend payments for all such silly research. The Earth has been warming and cooling over millenia. Antartica used to be a tropical paradise. (link)

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McCain's campaign would face an unrelenting barage of attacks like this:

What is the real story behind his days as a POW? The U.S. Veteran Dispatch had an article in June of 1996 entitled "POW Songbird McCain Wrongly Described As A Hero." It recounted numerous instances where John McCain violated the Military Coda of Conduct, which specifically orders American personnel to give the enemy no information other than name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. It requires that they accept no favors from the enemy, and to make no written or oral statement disloyal to the United States.

The fact is, in exchange for better medical treatment, McCain violated this code four days after being captured on Oct. 26, 1967. In a U.S. News and World Report interview dated May 14, 1973, two months after he was released, McCain admitted that he exchanged military information in exchange for spending six weeks in a hospital normally reserve for North Vietnamese Military officers.