The reason I quote Todd Beamer, one of the people aboard United 93 who pushed away the terror of impending death and saved countless others by not remaining a sheep, not remaining silent and pliant, is because, although our situation does not match the gravity of that for which his immortal words were spoken, we are nonetheless in a situation where we have a lot of opportunity to do good for something greater than ourselves.

George Bush was supposed to be a custodian president.  Given the reins of a flush economy, he could have just served out a term or two with relatively little flourish.  He was already intending to go into Iraq, but the case would've been a hard sell to even a Republican congress had 9/11 not fallen into his lap as the perfect lever to con us into a brutal and unnecessary war.

Because of this, we have spent nearly $508 billion in the Iraq misadventure and lost the lives of 4011 American soldiers and nearly 1.2 million Iraqis.  Thousands if not millions more people are facing life with limited mobility or dexterity or mental capacity due to heinous wounds suffered in the line of duty.  145 of our soldiers have taken their own lives rather than continue with their demons.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

When I was in junior high, a bully, pumped on steroids, sucker punched me and knocked my glasses down the hall.  I got up and grabbed the nearest person that could've been the bully and took him down, only realizing my mistake after I'd already hurt them.  To my credit, I backed off when I realized my mistake.  George Bush would have beaten that innocent bystander to death while the real culprit walked off with a smirk on his face.

Why am I telling you these things?  Is it a long and tasteless April Fool's joke?  No.  I'm telling you these things because John McCain wants to further tarnish the sacrifice of Todd Beamer and his compatriots.  He would turn his eye to Iran, another country that was not behind 9/11, and extend the cycle of war for another generation.  He still does not see the difference between Sunni and Shia, or understand the 1400-year-old rift in religious dynasty that has split the middle east into countless wars.

Should we still be embroiled in Iraq when this happens, John McCain, who so bravely fought in one long war with a draft, may turn to Selective Service to supplement our already-cracking military.  There has been some reporting that the machinery for instituting the draft was spooled up in 2005.  An international coalition in this fool's errand seems unlikely at best; this might be the only way such a war would be possible.

John McCain cares little for the economy.  He and his family and his friends have done fine under the Bush economic policies of borrow-and-spend.  Why would he need to change?  Bush saw no need to take up the American people on our offer of service and sacrifice after 9/11, instead telling us to go on vacation, to go to the mall.  There is no "wartime economy," just an economy where more and more power gets siphoned off to corporate interests as plunderers try to make off with as much loot as they can before someone rational gets back into office and realizes that maybe, just maybe, putting the lobbyists in control of government policy regulation might result in problems down the road... and our home owners now suffer forclosures at thousands per day. Our gas prices reach greater levels than ever before. It costs more just to feed families because the cost of freight has gone up.  

All this is okay with John McCain.  Somebody else will have a look at it.  Lobbyists have been pretty good to him, despite their differences.  They even serve on his campaign, they can't be that bad, right?  The free market will sort everything out, anyway.  But at what cost to normal Americans like you and me?

John McCain is a hero himself, but he dishonors the sacrifices of Todd Beamer, of his fellows on United 93, of the firefighters that ran into collapsing skyscrapers just to save another life, of our soldiers that have given their lives or their limbs in the service of both an unjust war in Iraq and a nigh-forgotten just war in Afghanistan.  These men and women are heroes, too.  

John McCain and those like him starve the government when it suits their purposes, just to see how long they can go before fixing a bridge, in hopes that it won't collapse before someone else is in office.  The real heroes risked their lives to save a busload of children.

John McCain and those like him support a disaster institution that still has not provided a proper reckoning or repair of the worst natural disaster to strike our shores in decades.  The real heroes were those who went out to save people from the roofs of houses, and those who opened their own houses to refugees.

John McCain and those like him support new Supreme Court Justices with comparative records as thin as their commitment to the honest and neutral interpretation of the law.  Just one more extreme conservative justice to replace 88-year-old Justice Stevens, and women will start losing control over their own bodies and methods we deem as torture (as John McCain did once) or infiltration of our rights to privacy will become perfectly fine.  The real heroes were the members of the Justice Department who refused to politicize their jobs, and lost them as a result.

Many think that John McCain is somehow different from George Bush, that he is a maverick... but those days are long behind him.  Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

John McCain once could have been a great president, but he stared into the abyss too long.  He became the monster he fought when he quietly stood by and let Karl Rove and George W. Bush smear his adopted daughter Bridget, only 8 years old at the time.  He went back to these people for help.  He is owned by them.

His lesson is our lesson.  We cannot remain divided.  For years we have fought the Republicans.  Some of the most successful Democrats have won by emulating them.  We must be wary of losing our soul the way John McCain has.  

We get one shot at this every four years.  Our choices might end up not being perfect, might not be everyone's ideal, but we owe it to all the heroes that came before us not to let their sacrifices be squandered for personal gain of a cabal of wealthy men suckling from Haliburton, Airbus, or the Carlyle Group.  

Don't be a sheep.  Don't let neocons tell us what to think about our candidates.  Don't let fear win.  We need to stop John McCain, and we need as much help as we can get.