"Pay no attention to that man behind the green curtain. What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

McCain will drag us into Iran if Bush doesn't do it first. What is wrong with the American public that they do not see this? Are we really that blood thirsty?

Why is McCain given a free ride like this? Where are those friggin' "Support the Troops" people now?

is leading in match-ups against obama and clinton.

say- what!?

please people, focus: drive the republican party out of existence. then we can deal with the democrat party, too, but right now mccain should hold your attention.

if recent history is any guide McCain will overwhelmingly win the military vote. As Rumsfeld presciently stated, "you go to war with the Army you have."

But by statistically small margins (actually Obama is tied).

This all means that those within the Democratic who believe that a prolonged fight only benefits the party are delusional. The pollsters note that many Clinton/Obama supporters are claiming to vote for McCain in the fall if their nominee doesn't win. My take on this is that they are not Democrats to begin with. How could they be?

McCain is a pathetic grandpa who doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, and believes that Reagan actually cut deficits.

Talk about senile...

GOP doctrine of recent years has been to spend as little money as possible on used cannon-fodder, while using the fiercest of spin to pretend otherwise. The American public has been falling for it so far, just like they keep falling for the one about the GOP being more fiscally responsible.

I wonder how hard McCain has fought this policy. Has he been dragged to it kicking and screaming, forced to sacrifice his love of the troops on the altar of GOP support? Or has he just casually tossed it aside like he has done to most of his other principles? I'm guessing the latter, but we don't really know. And I guess it doesn't really matter. Either way, he's slime.

McCain is a cynical, hypocritical so-called "patriot," and his ambivalence about supporting veterans is appalling.

What is even more appalling is that the press is letting him get away with so much. Even on NPR, for God's sake, I just heard a smarmy piece about how McCain reinvented himself to become a reliable, stable brand ...

Give me a break.

Steve, you are doing a great job. In the last few days, this is the only place where I have found intelligent, incisive, factually-based reporting on McCain.

I am luv luv lovin' the War Room these last several days. Excellent job Steve Benen. You're covering a fantastic range of topics.

Reporter:

Senator McCain in spite of overwhelming support for the bill from military personnel and their families the, the Bush administration is threatening to veto a bill that would increase funding for the GI bill.

Senator McCain: So.

Keep on doing War Room, please.

You're a lot better than Alex and just as good as Tim Grieve.

Not black vets - many were cheated out of their rightful due...

- Supports lowering taxes on income of GOP cronies.

- Supports spending tax money to subsidize GOP cronies

- In favor of cutting spending that doesn't go to GOP cronies.

- Against cutting spending that goes to GOP cronies.

trying to put out fired, put lipstick on the pig, and explain what he really meant ... or sumthin ...

Reagan had already served a term before his "age" started to become "apparent" ...

McCain is a terrible candidate ... (which is lucky for "us) ... unless he wins ...

McCain can't support this bill and at the same time prepare for another war in IRAN. We are running out of troops......

perhaps another draft???

I don't doubt that many American WWII veterans of African ancestry were cheated out of G.I Bill benefits, just as so many were (and are) cheated out of other positives in our government and society.

Still, my understanding is that historians and economists are close to unanimous that the G.I. Bill was the single most important element of the creation of a middle class among African-Americans.

On of the loveliest things about this is that it gave absolute lie to the notion that higher education was beyond, or wasted upon, the average African-American. Whaddya know - take take an average person of any race and lay some education on them and (for the most part) instant and equal achievement!

Given the ethnic makeup of our volunteer armed forces, an enhanced G.I. Bill would be of enormous benefit to young African-American men and women today.

I don't know whether Senator McCain realizes, or cares about, that effect, but the fact that the press is not making the point of the racial aspect of fighting improvements to the G.I. Bill is just more evidence of the free ride McCain gets from most reporters.

really want my support, they should be focusing their campaigns hard on taking this guy out, instead of nitpicking with each other.

This guy is a breath of fresh air.

Wow--what a difference in the War Room entries in just a few days of Steve Benen. I really miss the Blog Report, but at least I can read Steve's work here. Benen's analysis is more incisive, less "horse racy," and just more intellectually challenging in terms of subject matter than Mr. Koppelman's. As a reader, I feel I'm learning a lot more than I have been from War Room.

I think Mr. Benen is a tremendous resource who could handle this column with depth and acuity (his background knowledge seems to exceed Mr. Koppelman's which adds a lot of context that is often missing in this kind of analysis). And he's just about the right amount of opinionated. If he isn't kept on this column, he should be given something else equally substantial to do.

Good work, Steve!

The Bush White House never does anything which might help the common man, or the environment, or wildlife, or the arts, or culture, or anything besides the filthy rich. In fact, it goes out of its way to reap death and destruction of anything that might be positive. For example, taking wolves off of the endangered species list so that the yahoo ranchers out west can kill them without fear of prosecution. That's the Bush White House in a nutshell: evil bastards.

McCain, for a brief shining moment, actually embraced rationality and compassion, but whatever personal demons are at work inside of him have convinced him that only becoming as godawful a human being as Bush and his twisted base (the 30 percent of dead-enders in this nation who support him) can bring him the power he obviously craves. McCain is a lost cause. To borrow a trite phrase, he has gone over to the Dark Side.

It is imperative that McCain lose in November.