Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:
You know McCain actually did call Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance” during the hotly contested 2000 presidential primary. He was also on the receiving end of Bush/Rove smears (“fathered a black baby”). He even took on some of his party’s most sacred cows like when he opposed the 2001 Bush tax cuts. He worked across party lines on campaign finance reform, greenhouse gas initiatives and restoring relations with Vietnam. For these reasons, in addition to his military service and time as a POW, I had some respect for him.   
In many ways, though, he has always been a doctrinaire Republican — anti-public education, anti-regulation, and anti-government. For those reasons, in addition to his many love affair(s) and divorce from his first wife, who’d raised his kids and kept the family going during his captivity, to marry his political “sugar mama,” the beer baron heiress, I never seriously considered supporting him myself.
Now he has literally embraced the Bush/Rove machine who’d excoriated him in 2000. He has even flip-flopped on one of his own signature issues (and one on which virtually no one could speak with more authority) when he voted to uphold W’s veto of the bill to ban torture by Americans. His off-the-wall pick of young-earth creationist, book-banning, half-term Gov. Sarah Palin for his vice president is the culminating evidence in my book that he will do anything to become president. 
When someone is willing to do anything to win, he cannot be trusted. McCain’s recent flip-flops on taxes and torture tell me he is quite willing to put winning before his principles. 
Jo Davis
Shawnee