John McCain has a fondness for the acronym P.O.W. and can't seem to hold a conversation without bringing it up. M.I.A., on the other hand, seems to have fallen out of favor ever since he decided that making the Vietnamese Communists hand over Americans who'd gone Missing In Action had to take a back seat to American enterprise doing business in Southeast Asia. Some people still hold that decision against him and bring it up every chance they get, as their web presence, VVAJM attests.

One suspects that the veterans are a minor irritation for a man who can claim responsibility for the first volleys of the Fourth World War and directs so many other alphabet organizations.

While the list is very likely incomplete, it should certainly include:

NCP = New Citizenship Project

MSCF = Media Support Center Foundation

IRI = International Republican Institute

PNAC = Project for a New American Century

INC = Iraq National Congress

FH = Freedom House

CFLI = Committee For the Liberation of Iraq

Not surprisingly, the significance of these (mostly) eleemosynary enterprises is reflected in the biographical sketches of McCain's foreign policy advisers: RANDY SCHEUNEMANN

BACKGROUND: Former Congressional aide to Trent Lott and Bob Dole. Co-founder, president and executive director of the Committee For the Liberation of Iraq. Drafter of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Project director at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In 1998, founded a firm which lobbied on behalf of the NRA, and later the governments of Georgia and other former Soviet Bloc states benefiting from the invasion of Iraq. Claims to have authored McCain’s concept of “rogue state rollback.” Known as “McCain’s bulldog” for his attacks on McCain’s detractors.

MAX BOOT

BACKGROUND: A former Wall Street Journal editor and current senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Boot advocates an imperial role for the United States similar to the British Empire. Believes that the United States needs a “colonial office” inspired by the British system in India in order to better fulfill its role of transforming the world. Advocate of a sort of foreign legion wherein immigrants and other non-citizens would receive citizenship in exchange for U.S. military service.

JAMES WOOLSEY

BACKGROUND: Former head of the CIA. Subscribes to the “World War IV” formulation (in which the Cold War was World War III) and believes that the United States has been “at war” with Islamists since 1979, when “they Iranian revolutionaries seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran.” Suggested during an interview on September 12, 2001, that Iraq had sponsored the 9/11 attacks, and also attempted to exhume the discredited idea that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

(It might be noted that Gen. Woolsey has also recently made a name for himself as a proponent of the electric car)

ROBERT KAGAN

BACKGROUND: After serving as an adviser to Congressman Jack Kemp in 1983, and then working as a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Schultz, in 1985 Kagan was chosen by Elliot Abrams to head the Office of Public Diplomacy, whose mission was to create support for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Kagan was a co-founder of PNAC, and is currently a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Co-author with Bill Kristol of “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in which he advocated “benevolent” American global hegemony based upon military dominance and “elevated patriotism.” Advocate of a “concert of democracies” to supplant the UN Security Council in order to grant legitimacy to U.S. military interventions around the globe. Recently recognized the need to talk with Iran, if only to establish a record to use against Tehran.

MARK SALTER

BACKGROUND: McCain’s former Chief of Staff, and co-writer of McCain’s books. Salter worked for Jeanne Kirkpatrick when she was United Nations ambassador and later when she moved to the American Enterprise Institute. He joined McCain’s staff in 1989, and is “widely regarded as the senator’s alter ego.”

JOHN BOLTON

BACKGROUND: Former U.S. diplomat, Senior Vice President for Public Policy Research at the American Enterprise Institute, and member of the Project for the New American Century, Bolton was one of the signers of the January 1998 PNAC letter sent to President Bill Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. . . . At a conservative conference in 2008, Bolton described how “McCain secretly tried to shepherd his nomination to the United Nations.” Bolton currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

GARY JAMES SCHMITT

BACKGROUND: AEI Fellow and PNAC signatory. Co-author with Abram Shulsky (overseer of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans) of a book on the political though of Leo Strauss as applied to intelligence gathering. Subscribes to the Straussian view that “deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.” Advocated war against “the Saddam/bin Laden axis” as a way to “restore national honor.”

DANIEL MCKIVERGAN

BACKGROUND: McKivergan is a former research director for the Weekly Standard. He joined McCain’s staff as legislative director in 2000, and in 2002 he became deputy director of the Project for A New American Century, helping to coordinate the push for war in Iraq.

The Obama/Biden campaign has been quite insistent that McCain in the Oval Office would constitute a third Bush term. If McCain's direction of the named groups and individuals, or their direction of him, is accurate, then the Obama team is in error. McCain clearly seems intent on taking charge and implementing policies and strategies which the Bush/Cheney administration has failed to carry out as McCain's ideologues had planned. We could call it the ultimate do-over.

Moreover, the activities of the Media Support Center Foundation alone would seem to indicate that John McCain has been pursuing foreign policy initiatives on his own and subverting the national interests of the United States--and not just in the latest Georgia/South Ossetia dust-up. Which, btw, Russia and France seem to be dealing with rather successfully, now that Scheunemann has been gotten out of the way.

Note: It seems that, like so much else in the neo-conservative vocabulary, "free" has a special meaning--i.e. the denial of a social obligation to carry out the will of the people by, in effect, severing the connection between give and take. That is how predators act.