Bill Scher from LO has a great post on Huffington Post showing how what

McCain: Most Dangerous Man in America (31 comments )
READ MORE: Iraq, Tim Russert, Google, 2008, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush

I read Arianna's lament about Sen. John McCain with empathy. I too fell for the Straight Talk Express in 2000. I never committed to voting for him in the general election, but I temporarily switched my party registration to support him in the GOP primaries, thinking that he would at least be less dangerous than Bush.

I see now how wrong that vote was. Not because McCain has changed in any significant way (though both Arianna and Ari Melber have noticed some unpleasant changes), but because of what has stayed the same.
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He also described his foreign policy philosophy during that debate, and afterwards, as being "Wilsonian," as in Woodrow Wilson. That's how neoconservatives characterize themselves to give their unilateralist views a phony democratic, idealistic veneer. (Fareed Zakaria once dubbed them "Armed" Wilsonians.)

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"I was not a big Bush supporter in the primaries ... I knew George W. Bush, now President Bush, at that time, and hadn’t really been that impressed by him. I preferred McCain in the primaries, mostly because of foreign policy, because McCain articulated something much closer to what has now become the Bush Doctrine, in terms of a muscular internationalist American foreign policy that addressed both American interests and American principles."