We are NOT Amused.

Here's the thing.

I've been a soldier for 22 of my 51 years. I've spent a LOT of time around soldiers. A lot of soldiers are real arrested development cases; they can be, the Army pretty much mommies you and daddies you until it needs to wad you up like a kleenex and throws you away. You get three hots and a cot, your decisions mostly made for you, your clothes, your recreation...you can be a sophomore frat rat without the coursework for twenty years, if that's what you want.

So, particularly in the hooah side of the Army - the Infantry, Armor, the combat arms where you're guaranteed to spend long stretches of your life away from women - you often get a kind of perpetual adolescent, a strutting, sniggering boy who both wants and loathes women and anything suggestive of "girlyness". It produces a very...odd...mindset. I've often thought that if you burned out one hemisphere of a person's brain, the one that houses the intuitive, creative, empathetic, curious parts of your personality you'd end up with a person like more than a couple of the GIs I've hung out with.

So when I come across examples of John McCain showing off this sort of personality it makes me go "hmmmm...". Because I wouldn't want someone like my old ambulance driver SP4 Varney running my country; he was a great guy, but he was also a clueless, impulsive, hindbrain-motivated dork whould could be bamboozled by a shiny object and lived his life primarily by a set of bumper-sticker slogans whose simplicity would have embarassed a blandishing gorilla.It would have been a very Varney-like thing to, having nastily insulted two women, first try and deny everything and then - and this is the critically dumb thing - apologize to the MAN who was the father and the employer of the women involved. Because, see, in the VarneyWorld only the Men Count.

That would have worked in, say, 1808. But this is 2008, and we're not trying to select a new Pasha of the Hareem. I'd consider an attitude that comes right out of the He-man Woman Hater's Club a major negative as an attribute for the Chief Executive of my country.

(The Poetess says much the same, and better, here, regarding what the whole Sarah Palin selection says about the GOP's attitude towards 51% of the American public.)