Fantastic piece here. Time to call it what it is.

The emperor has no clothes.

And the maverick is utterly incoherent.

Great writeup, Hilzoy. But you are too nice at the end.

It is not confusion on the part of McCain, it is terminal dishonesty. He knows exactly what he is doing---as with the race and religion baiting he does until he discovers it doesn't work.

He wants to be elected because, well, he deserves it. It is his turn.

He is trying to play Greatest Generation games. Only he isn't. He is an Nth generation Navy legacy admit who graduated near the bottom of his class (just like his admiral father) but did not make admiral (unlike his equally badly tortured fellow POW Admiral Stockdale) because of his lousy performance and carousing as an officer. He quit the Navy a week after his father died.

Honesty, like honor, turns out only to be a convenience to McCain, not a principle.

This campaign has exposed him for what he is, and the public has figured him out. Good riddance.

He realizes that nobody is really paying attention, so why not say anything he feels like? "Low information voter" is a nice way of saying "no information voter" - just voting on what feels right.

Great writeup, Hilzoy. But you are too nice at the end.

It is not confusion on the part of McCain, it is terminal dishonesty. He knows exactly what he is doing---as with the race and religion baiting he does until he discovers it doesn't work.

He wants to be elected because, well, he deserves it. It is his turn.

He is trying to play Greatest Generation games. Only he isn't. He is an Nth generation Navy legacy admit who graduated near the bottom of his class (just like his admiral father) but did not make admiral (unlike his equally badly tortured fellow POW Admiral Stockdale) because of his lousy performance and carousing as an officer. He quit the Navy a week after his father died.

Honesty, like honor, turns out only to be a convenience to McCain, not a principle.

This campaign has exposed him for what he is, and the public has figured him out. Good riddance.

I know this seems unbelievable, but it now looks to me like we were lucky not to get McCain in 2000. This guy is worse than Bush.

McCain is not "against-it-before-he-was-for-it", he's "against-it-while-he-is-for-it".

In all fairness to McCain (whatever fairness he deserves at this point), this is just politics. Candidates pander to the audiences they are facing.

And since McCain's not sure just what part of the electorate is actually still supporting him, he feels the need to fertilize both sides of the fence.

Astonishing as some may find it by this point, I think McCain still genuinely believes he would be a good president, and is frustrated that others don't see things the same way. He long ago lost the capacity to be objective, and probably believes he could bring at least some of his campaign promises to fruition. This is being as kind to him as I can be, because what it looks like to the impartial observer is unfocused thrashing around, and saying whatever his advisers inform him the voters want to hear this week.

What a train wreck. It's astounding that some still see McCain as a viable candidate, never mind as the only candidate. Sad, really; at least a little bit, because McCain once gave a pretty convincing performance as a man of principle. Maybe it was all an act even then - you don't find too many men who have married a fortune, and are still men of principle.

I think the Times article was excellent. The insane argument you criticize was (correctly) ascribed to McCain supporters. This is following the rule of journalism to let people on both sides of a question have a say. I think that's a good rule, even if it creates the risk of "opinions on shape of earth differ" nonsense. In this case, the article clearly presents the proof that McCain is not pragmatic but rather incoherent and Presents that interpretation in the journalists own voice.

It doesn't draw a conclusion, because Michael Cooper is pretending to be a reporter not an analyst, but it presents enough facts that even the least alert reader can only draw one conclusion. Also the headline line isn't "Opinions on whether McCain contradicts himself differ" it is "A Candidate Who Embraces Opposites." A very clear article. Basically Contra McCain with the concluding sentence deleted.

Actually, many candidates come up with wrong policies that are still reasonably coherent--the connections between them make sense. They all go in one direction. But hilzoy's point is that McCain's policies go in opposite directions at the same time.

I'm a little skeptical that it's purely McCain's personality, and I don't attribute it all to his tremendous dishonesty, which has indeed been on display this season in all its splendiferous glory. I think that in terms of policies, McCain's candidacy for Republicans this year reflects their incoherence. Their policies have plainly failed, but they just can't give up their beliefs that less government is *always* better, unless it's military, in which case more is always better (which, itself, is an incoherent policy). So now that these policies have failed (less government: Katrina, the financial system; more military: Iraq and Afghanistan) they're flopping around, and because he's heading the ticket, McCain's flopping around more than any other Republican. Some of it is dishonesty, and some of it is pandering, but a lot of it is that the world just doesn't work the way they thought it did; the policies in line with their beliefs about the world have crashed and burned, and they are lost and baffled. And mad.

Like an obstinate child who doesn't get her way, they're having a massive tantrum and making no sense, saying, "yes it does" when it (whatever "it" is) clearly doesn't, and otherwise screaming and pounding on the floor (e.g., the Palin rallies).

McCain health-care short: Well, if they are going to die, then they had better do it---and thus decrease the surplus population!!!

Forget Marley.

Forget the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future.

Send McScrooge to hell on November 4, and make damnably certain that he never, ever forgets that it was we, the People of the United States of America, who sent him there.

Unfortunately, McCain is not all that unusual in the incoherence department. I think a lot of this is related to the fact that the world as we know it and depend on it is largely unsustainable. We are trapped in the catch 22 of having to keep the wheels on an inherently unsustainable system at a great opportunity cost to investing in the infrastructure needed to get us past this incredible bottleneck. This by nature is causing tremendously incoherent and schizophrenic policy making particularly in Washington DC which is racked with a multitude of conflicting interests.

What is lacking, greatly lacking, on both sides of the political divide is a vision that bridges the needs of our current unsustainable system with a credible and democratically acceptable vision of the future for the nation and the world.

McCain seems to be especially trapped in this dilemma. My hope is that the younger Obama can at least see this potentially fatal trap and can begin to formulate a vision for getting us past it. The most opportune time to have really confronted it was during the cold war. It is very possible that McCain is still a prisoner of that cold war mentality and is not capable of getting his head past it and into the future.

"But Mr. McCain's detractors see his contradictory proposals as a cynical effort to be all things to all people"

That's not true of all his detractors. I don't see it as pandering, but as a sign that McCain is addled and incompetent.