Okay, here’s a hypothetical: It’s 2000 and John McCain is the darling of the GOP. He is, in a way, the Barack Obama of 2000 - suddenly offering a very credible threat, to the annointed front runner who, in 2000, was George W. Bush.

Since McCain was thwarted by the unabashed racism of Bush’s So Carolina attack and his seeming alienation from the nuttier elements of the Christian Right (Largely Falwell and Robertson at the time. McCain had described them as “agents of intolerence”) so we never really asked ourselves what kind of leader McCain would have been.

Although it was well known that columnist, editor, talking head and neo-con shill, Bill “the Bloody” Kristol was a mmber of McCain’s team, who knew that McCain also counted the neo-con prince Ahmed Chalabi among his supporters? Did you know that McCain had been there from the very beginning, when Chalabi’s vanity special interest group, the Iraqi National Congress, first showed up in Washington back in 1992? I didn’t.

The money quote from Aram Roston’s new biography of Chalabis, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi,:

“Chalabi’s favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.”

So, hmmm. Would McCain have persued a similar interventionist policy? Like the neo-cons he continues to be fixated on Iran - for whom there has long been a grduge - while continuing to cozy up to and reward top regional malfactor, Gen Musharraf of Pakistan.
(Since much of our current foreign policy is driven by fantasy - the same fantasies that McCain endorses - we seem to always be blaming Iran and forgiving Pakistan when it is clear that Pakistan is everything we claimed to see in Iraq - wmd proliferater, terror sponsor and nurse maid to the Taliban.

Our foreign policy is so clearly driven by ideology and profit mixed with cover-ups and blowback that it’s sometimes hard to know, if not impossible to know, a closer, objective analysis than the very flawed, cartoonish model currently embraced by both George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain.

So, folks what’s the verdict? Is Maverick John McCain a member of the Neo-Con Frat?