by Suzy Charnas

Created on: September 22, 2008

John McCain won his status as a war hero the hard way, and no one can ever take that away from him. But in the many years since those terrible events, he has transformed himself - or allowed himself to be transformed - into just another Republican politician, a rich man with too many houses to keep in his failing memory, an amiable person with an engaging speaking style who has nothing useful to say about the political and economic crisis in our country today.

But as a voter, I find the prospect of a McCain Presidency horrifying for other, sadder reasons: Senator McCain is too old, not because of his age in years but because he is beginning to show signs, in public, of what a doctor friend of mine (a specialist in geriatrics) tells me in is early signs of senile dementia.

This shows in his many memory problems, his obvious fatigue and frailty (trying to think about hard and complex things with a failing brain is exhausting), and his unmistakable confusion of the present, the past, and the never-was (Spain as our enemy, for a recent, glaring example). Frankly, I am more than prepared to allow that a man of his age who endured what he did those many years ago is fully entitled to a relatively early onset of senility; you don't go through that sort of experience without suffering PTSD, for starters, a disorder that our military has not handled well in its veterans of that era (or this). For that destructive groundwork to prepare the way for early senility is not remarkable, and it's not blameworthy.

But it is a very, very, very good reason to refuse to vote this old man of declining mental sharpness into the White House at a critical and, frankly, frightening time in our nation's life.

It can be said that of course, McCain wouldn't be running the administration if he were mentally inadequate, and indeed there are examples of physical and mental debility being deliberately concealed so that a sitting President might continue to occupy his Office (Woodrow Wilson, massively crippled by strokes, and FDR, phsically crippled by polio, come to mind).

In McCain's case, however, consider who would actually run the country in his place, one way or another: first, Sarah Palin, a woman of shallow political experience and not much evidence of common sense (she's experienced about Russia because you can sometimes see bits of it from Alaska? This is the pronouncement of an overconfident, unreflective fool). She is, moreover, not just a fanatical Reactionary in her thinking (reacting

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