So that's how it started!

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — At a meeting in his Pentagon office in early 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman told Capt. John S. McCain III that he was about to attain his life ambition: becoming an admiral.

But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs.

. . . Mr. McCain declined the prospect of his first admiral’s star to make a run for Congress, saying that he could “do more good there,” Mr. Lehman recalled. But Mr. Lehman knew duty was only part of the reason.

“He just loved it up there,” Mr. Lehman recalled. “Like very few military people, John heard the music up there, and he really wanted to do it.”

And that's it in a nutshell. McCain grew up in the somewhat austere precincts of a military family then spent years on active duty then more years in a hellish POW camp. Then he gets to Washington and sees the luxury that the Senatorial hogs wallow in and wanted some for himself (this also helps explain his choice of a rich woman to marry).

The year, 1981, also explains why McCain chose to join the Republican party rather than the Democrats, with whom he shares a far deeper affinity. In 1981 Reagan and his conservatism was the "coming thing" in American politics. If you wanted to be popular you had to ride the Reagan bandwagon (I remember Democrats running for reelection in house races in 1982 and 1984 airing commercials where they bragged about how totally they supported Reagan's policies).

So because of a pure accident of timing McCain, only to serve his personal ambition, joins a political party in which he does not belong and, again for no reason other than craven personal ambition, becomes a "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution".

So now the circle is almost closed. Twenty-seven years ago McCain joined a movement he did not believe in and now he is on the brink of having the power to destroy that movement.

How much better off the nation would have been if McCain had just taken his star and served out his career with honor. He could even now be retired and enjoying his 15 minutes of fame as a Democrat military analyst on Fox or CNN.