"McCain is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the neoconservative movement."

McCain goes to great lengths to say that he is not running for Bush's third term, but the facts tell a very different story. Last year McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time. That is simply a fact. Maverick, he is not.

However, the truth is not so much that McCain represents a continuation of Bush, but that - much more damagingly - he represents a continuation of the neo-con policies which have proven so catastrophic over the last seven and a half years.

Carpenter believes that the more realist advisers such as Henry Kissinger on the McCain campaign are largely window-dressing to protect him from Democratic charges that he is really a neoconservative.

"John McCain is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the neoconservative movement when it comes to foreign policy," Carpenter said.

"The Democrats have to go on the offensive and stay on the offensive. The message has to be: John McCain and his foreign policy team are very, very dangerous for America," he added. "A worried American electorate on that score might very well shy away from McCain."

The fact that McCain is a dangerous neo-con is obvious from the people who he has chosen to surround himself with and from the people who support him.

Few of McCain's top advisors are well known to the general public, and even fewer are directly linked to the highly unpopular Bush administration.

However neoconservatives, whose thinking has directed Bush's foreign policy following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, are ever-present and powerful in McCain's inner circle.

When Bill Kristol is singing his praises it's time to realise what this man really is:

But John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian — rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled. Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs.

The best that Kristol can come up with is that he is "rigid, self-righteous and moralizing." And, of course, Kristol comes up with that other Republican obsession that McCain is "manly". For a party of homophobes, they really do some serious man-loving in order to sell their candidates "qualities" as a way of avoiding being confronted on their appalling policies.

And, in McCain's case, those are the policies of the neo-cons.

Tags: McCain, neo-cons, Bush, US election 2008