John McCain has proudly proclaimed of George W. Bush that he "did everything he could to get him elected and re-elected President."

He also famously said

"I'll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance."

Since we've had evidence of the latter in spades of late, let's just put that in context first. This ambition to embarrass Democrats was already flowering back in 1988 when McCain orchestrated a verbal challenge to the newly designated Governor of Arizona, Rose Mofford, during a courtesy appearance before the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on Appropriations.

One has to wonder what McCain, just two years into his first U.S. Senate term and already angling for the Vice Presidential spot on the ticket with George Herbert Walker Bush was thinking. Might it have had something to do with Poppy settling on another native Arizonan, Dan Quayle, instead? And does his disappointment then account for the rather plaintive "everything" he's alluding to now that he thinks his turn at the top stop has finally arrived?

It may have started then, but the "everything" is much more extensive and involves the co-ordination of a whole host of recruits into an agenda of "political warfare"--

“Political warfare in short, is warfare–not public relations. It is one part persuasion and two parts deception. It embraces diverse forms of coercion and violence including strikes and riots, economic sanctions, subsidies for guerrilla or proxy warfare and, when necessary, kidnapping or assassination of enemy elites.

“The aim of political warfare... is to discredit, displace, and neutralize an opponent, to destroy a competing ideology, and to reduce the adherents to political impotence. It is to make one’s own values prevail by working the levers of power, as well as by using persuasion.”

which began to be developed as early as 1962, when the young naval aviator was still carousing in Florida. Originally aimed against the Soviet menace by the National Strategy Information Center, the strategy continued to be incubated in various think tanks to inform the agenda of New Citizenship Project, organized by McCain soon after the '92 election, as a conduit for funding its more flamboyant descendant, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). While John McCain isn't listed among the original PNAC gallery,

Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz,

both he and Senator Joseph Lieberman carried the water for this group, first by proposing and orchestrating passage of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 in the interest of acquiring a foothold for U.S. military assets in the Middle East, and then by insuring, perhaps inadvertently, the elevation of Dubya as a sort of figure head demonarch to the White House.

Indeed, it's probably not too far fetched to say, considering the path Joe Lieberman has followed since, that the PNAC gallery had all the bases covered in the 2000 election. With Lieberman on the ticket and the Nixon retreads (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Abrams and Wolfowitz) ready to take the reins from Bush, Al Gore didn't stand a chance. McCain's claim that the did "everything" to get Bush elected is the literal truth, even if he would have preferred to step into the limelight himself.

Even though Wikipediatells us that PNAC has come to an end, on the word of Gary Schmitt, one of McCain's major foreign policy advisers, as is the wont of many such groups, the membership had continued to expand from its founding in 1997 and the list of signatories to the Statement in Support of the People of Hong Kong in 2004 is telling,

William Kristol, Dick Thornburgh, Morton Abramowitz, Andrew Y. Au, Maureen Aung-Thwin, Carolyn Bartholomew, Gary Bauer, Robert Bernstein, Max Boot, Ellen Bork, Steven C. Clemons, Midge Decter, Thomas Donnelly, Nicholas Eberstadt, Robert W. Edgar, Amitai Etzioni, Jeffrey L. Fiedler, Jeffrey Gedmin, Sam Gejdenson, Merle Goldman , Bruce Jackson, Robert Kagan, Max M. Kampelman , Penn Kemble, Craig Kennedy, Harold Hongju Koh , Louis Kraar, Anthony Lake, Perry Link, Connie Mack, James Mann, Will Marshall, Derek Mitchell, Wing C. Ng, James C. O'Brien , Robert Pastor, Danielle Pletka, Norman Podhoretz, John Edward Porter, Samantha F. Ravich, Sophie Richardson, Kenneth Roth, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt , John Shattuck, Sin-ming Shaw, Stephen Solarz , Leonard R. Sussman, John J. Sweeney, John J. Tkacik, Jr., Jennifer Windsor, R. James Woolsey, Minky Worden, Yu Mao-chun,

if only because so many of them are now promoting John McCain overtly. (William Kristol, wearing his hat as New York Times op-ed columnist and seeming to distance himself from McCain is not to be taken seriously. The rats scurrying back into the woodwork is nothing new.)

If so many people hadn't died in the process of carrying out their subversive plans, it would be the height of irony that the PNAC gallery,

dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle

has used its unprecedented influence in the Administration of George W. Bush to leave us with an America whose leadership has sunk below the waves, whose military is near worn out and whose moral authority has been shredded in Guantanamo.

As Senator Christopher Dodd suggested so succinctly, the substitution of "the example of our force" for the "force of our example" was a really bad idea. We can thank McCain and his PNAC gallery for that. Let's make sure that, unlike after Nixon, this time there will be no second act.