I knew it was coming – the minute the republicans  announced that they were holding their 2004 convention at Madison Square Garden, I knew that they had co-opted the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and internalized it, and would make it a stalking horse forevermore.  

Even knowing this, the “9/11 tribute” they showed tonight was just too fucking much.  

Where to even start?  How about with the smarmy and dishonest fact that they devote the first third of their little propaganda piece focusing  on Iran; and misleads the uninformed to the wrong conclusion that Iran was somehow culpable in that tragedy, when they were not.  

Saudi Arabia on the other hand – now had they started with footage of the Khobar Towers bombing instead of the Islamic Revolution…but no, they took a cheap shot to catapult the propaganda and plant a seed in the minds of those viewing the film that Iran has had it coming for 30 years, and Johnny Mad is just the guy to give it to ’em.  

Disgusting.

And I won’t even get into the August 6 PDB that aWol dismissed with a glib “OK, you’ve covered your ass now.”  Y’all know I have been in a slow boil over that for years.  

But tonight, it boiled over.  

After all that warmongering and sleight-of-fact, John McCain stood in front of the crowd and declared – again – that he hates war, it was too much.  

For someone who claims to hate war so damned much, he sure doesn’t seem to have ever met one he doesn’t like.  

He was on the warpath by sundown on September 11, 2001, the most dangerous place to be was between McCain and a media microphone.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

He was lightyears ahead of the Bush administration in getting out in front of the administration in advocating for war on Iraq, making the case to the public fully six months before the administration started pitching the sale.    

He would probably prefer that we forget that he stood four-square behind Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney back then – and that he was a supporter of the oft-discredited conman Ahmad Chalabi that conned this country into the war.  McCain pushed Chalabi’s suspect accusations all over the media.

He also promulgated the lies about Hussein’s mythical WMDs and terrorist ties, including al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11.  

Later, he blamed Iraq for his propensity to glibly assert facts not in evidence.  Saddam ran an opaque show, you see, so it was his fault that McCain was out there lying his NeoCon ass off in an effort to gin up the war machine.  

He isn’t very good at absorbing lessons learned.  He still stubbornly insists that Iraq was a danger.  Just days ago, he reasserted that “his [Saddam Hussein’s] regime posed a threat we had to take seriously.”  Even though Iraq (nor Iran) was not involved in the events of that horrible day (nor was Iran) McCain repeated that the attacks were still a reminder of the importance of international action “to prevent outlaw states – like Iran today – from developing weapons of mass destruction.”  

Let me repeat:  He said that less than a month ago.

He has made the principle that the exercise of military power sets the bargaining table for international relations a consistent theme of his career ever since, and in his 2002 memoir he wrote that one of his lifelong convictions was “the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary’s provocation.”

No, I can not square any of that with what he said tonight:  “I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination. I’m running for president to keep the country I love safe, and prevent other families from risking their loved ones in war as my family has.”

Where I come from, when someone says they hate war, but war is their default position, we would call that lying.  

And we see what eight years of an unrepentant, pathological liar has gotten us.  

We don’t need four more.