Pundits Spar Over McCain as Dubya Redux

Righty says speech shows foreign policy shift; lefty has deja vu
By Jonas Oransky,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 28, 2008 2:19 PM CDT
Pundits Spar Over McCain as Dubya Redux
Framed by a painting of the Iwo Jima flag raising, Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain.   (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

John McCain’s foreign-policy address Wednesday split watchers, with David Brooks, in the New York Times, declaring the Republican candidate a breath of fresh air and Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, seeing four more years of George W. Bush. Brooks says the “personal, nuanced and ambitious speech” shows McCain to be a JFK-style internationalist, highlighting maverick criticism of the Iraq war in late 2003.

But Greenwald says the speech was a nearly exact replica of Bush proclamations past, and that McCain might be more "purely" neoconservative than the president he seeks to replace. Bush pays “lip service to the same pretty concepts of internationalism” as McCain, who might be even more likely to commit the military to defend empty democracy-spreading rhetoric. (More John McCain stories.)

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