As I watch John McCain posturing and strutting in front of Old Glory, his eyes bright with the memory of battle, his stubby arm thrusting upward (below, right), I recall images from a 1964 movie called “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
I recall Peter Sellers, as the mad bomb-loving scientist (left), struggling to keep his arm from flashing upward in a Nazi salute. It was funny then. It is not funny now.

This time the pantomime could be for real. Americans are being asked to elect as President a man whose temperament seems gravely unstable. They are facing the possibility of placing this man’s finger next to a red button that could blow up the world… A man whose response to every international crisis is to rally the troops, who apparently would not hesitate to let loose the dogs of war, who seems to cherish the memory of mangled bodies and blazing buildings, whose eyes show no awareness of the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I know that he could not possibly be serious… or could he?

Is he just acting? Or is this the real John McCain? Did those five years in a Viet Cong prison unhinge his mind?

Please God, let it be nothing more dangerous than political posturing!