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The Libertarian warning about McCain is made by Reason’s editor in a NY Times op-ed.

BEHIND any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.

The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public with frank confessions of his failings, from his hard-living flyboy days to his adulterous first marriage to the Keating Five scandal. But in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of “serving a cause greater than self-interest.”

Such sentiment can sound stirring coming from a lone citizen freely choosing public service. But from a potential president, Mr. McCain’s exaltation of sacrifice over the private pursuit of happiness — “I did it out of patriotism, not for profit,” he snarled to Mitt Romney during the final Republican presidential debate — reflects a worryingly militaristic view of citizenship. …

McCain said yesterday we can win the hearts and minds of Islamic youth by sending them to college here. Mark Steyn thinks he needs to get out more.

… There’s plenty of evidence out there that the most extreme “extremists” are those who’ve been most exposed to the west – and western education: from Osama bin Laden (summer school at Oxford, punting on the Thames) and Mohammed Atta (Hamburg University urban planning student) to the London School of Economics graduate responsible for the beheading of Daniel Pearl. The idea that handing out college scholarships to young Saudi males and getting them hooked on Starbucks and car-chase movies will make this stuff go away is ridiculous – and unworthy of a serious presidential candidate.

Robert Samuelson says, as far as the economy goes, hold the hysteria.

… The economy, said The New York Times last week, may be on “the brink of the worst recession in a generation” — an ominous warning.

Perhaps, but so far the concrete evidence is scant. A recession is a noticeable period of declining output. Since World War II, there have been 10. On average, they’ve lasted 10 months, involved a peak monthly unemployment rate of 7.6 percent and resulted in a decline of economic output (gross domestic product) of 1.8 percent, reports Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. If the two worst recessions (those of 1981-82 and 1973-75, with peak unemployment of 10.8 percent and 9 percent) are excluded, the average peak jobless rate is about 7 percent.

No one doubts that the economy has slowed. Many economists think a recession has already started. Zandi is one. He forecasts peak unemployment of 6.1 percent (present unemployment: 4.8 percent) and a GDP drop of 0.4 percent. If that comes true, the recession of 2008 would actually be milder than the average postwar recession and milder than the last two, those of 1990-91 and 2001. …

Although much more investigating is to be done, WSJ Editors celebrate the truth telling about the real problems with Eliot Spitzer.

… And now that Governor Steamroller is Private Citizen Spitzer, leaks from the DA’s office are making clear that Mr. Spitzer was deeply involved in the smear campaign, even repeatedly calling Mr. Dopp at home to ensure that the leaks would produce a damaging story. Mr. Soares got Mr. Dopp to talk by offering him immunity from prosecution. But there’s no question that every public employee in the state — from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to the Public Integrity Commission to Mr. Soares himself — was, at a minimum, treating the question of Mr. Spitzer’s involvement with kid gloves as long as he remained Governor.

That the truth is only coming out now underscores how corrupt the political culture of Albany is, and how reluctant the political class was to question the malfeasance of a powerful and vindictive Governor. Now that he’s out, we may finally learn the truth. But New York voters can consider themselves fortunate that a sex scandal ended Mr. Spitzer’s career before his sense of righteous entitlement did far more harm to their state.

George Will says liberals are cheapskates.

Residents of Austin, Texas, home of the state’s government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming “Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All,” “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty,” “The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion,” “Arms Are For Hugging,” “Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India),” “Jesus Is a Liberal,” “God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts,” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,” “Republicans Are People Too — Mean, Selfish, Greedy People” and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”

Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.” The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.

If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:

– Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

– Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood. …

Number 2 son spots Wired Science report on invention that might solve the problem of clean water. Perhaps he really saw it on Colbert Report. ‘Cause that’s where he gets the news.

There has been much buzz about the water-purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report last week (even taking on the bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos that Colbert added). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that “you stick a hose into anything that looks wet … and it comes out … as perfect distilled clean water.”

So far as I can tell however, it’s true. …

You might think this is silly, but Pickerhead thinks what Russian scientists do with styrofoam cups two miles below the surface of the ocean, is pretty cool. Yes we have pics.

Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.

The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing. …

We have a complete section on Hillary’s lies. Notice it is near the humor section. That’s because Borowitz and Scrappleface want some too. Dick Morris starts us off.

The USA Today/Gallup survey clearly explains why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is losing. Asked whether the candidates were “honest and trustworthy,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won with 67 percent, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) right behind him at 63. Hillary scored only 44 percent, the lowest rating for any candidate for any attribute in the poll.

Hillary simply cannot tell the truth. Here’s her scorecard:

Admitted Lies

• Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (She was in bed watching it on TV.)
• Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. (She admitted she was wrong. He climbed Mt. Everest five years after her birth.)
• She was under sniper fire in Bosnia. (A girl presented her with flowers at the foot of the ramp.)
• She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. (It didn’t cover the market back then.)

Whoppers She Won’t Confess To

• She didn’t know about the FALN pardons. …

Christopher Hitchens’ Daily Mirror blog.

… She now says she “mis-spoke”. I’m not sure that covers it. Footage shows her landing in Tuzla, then Bosnia’s most peaceful city, and strolling with a smile, her daughter in tow, to be met by flowers, children and dignitaries. In other words, there’s not a word of truth in her original assertion.

It also illustrates the question of Mrs Clinton’s respect for the truth. There is, first, her attempt to block access to her records.

 

Second, her habit of making hugely inflated claims about herself. Third, a smarminess about matters of fact, as in her recent utterance that Barack Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know”. …

Peter Wehner in Contentions.

I wanted to add my thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s fabricated story about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. It is a damaging, and probably deeply damaging, blow to an increasingly weak and desperate candidate. It will now become fodder for late night talk show hosts. It also builds on other false claims she has made, from her role in the Northern Ireland peace talks to S-CHIP legislation. And the sniper fire tale reinforces an existing impression about the Clintons: they cannot be counted on to tell the truth in matters small or large, about them or about others, about policy or about their personal conduct. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that Senator Clinton acknowledged the story was false only after indisputable video evidence (in this case from CBS News) emerged. Like her husband and the blue dress, the Clintons only concede their untruthfulness when they’ve been caught – on camera or via DNA – in their untruths. …

The Captain, now blogging at Hot Air.

Has Hillary Clinton’s Tuzla fantasy opened a bigger can of worms for the presidential aspirant? Jake Tapper at ABC News wonders whether the press should take a look at earlier Hillary anecdotes to determine whether a pattern of fabulism exists. Sure enough, he discovers an old chestnut from 1994 that Hillary has not bothered to dust off for the current campaign:

In light of Tuzla-gate (catchy, no?), reporters are going over past statements by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, (and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois) to see if others don’t stand more rigorous examination.

One that may get renewed scrutiny is a story she told “Women in Military Service” in 1994 — that shortly after the end of the Vietnam war, she looked into joining the Marines.

In June 1994, Clinton told an organization trying to build a memorial for women who had served in the armed forces, that while living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975, “I decided that I was very interested in having some experience in serving in some capacity in the military. So I walked into our local recruiting office…”