In an article titled “Hothead McCain,” for the upcoming issue of The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss quotes Col. Larry Wilkerson (Ret.) — former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell — saying that with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “[n]o dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained.” Wilkerson added that McCain is “hardheaded,” “arrogant,” “hubristic,” and “too proud for his own good.” Referring to McCain’s foreign policy advisers, Wilkerson said: They “scare me.” “Scare me.”

UPDATE: In an article in Salon, Mark Benjamin writes that some military officials are worried about McCain:

“I like McCain. I respect McCain. But I am a little worried by his knee-jerk response factor,” said retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004 and is now campaigning for Clinton. “I think it is a little scary. I think this guy’s first reactions are not necessarily the best reactions. I believe that he acts on impulse.”

In a conference call today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), a Catholic herself, condemned Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for accepting the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church “The Great Whore,” an “apostate church,” the “anti-Christ,” and a “false cult system.’” The Huffington Post reports:

“That behavior is outside the circle of civilized debate in our democracy,” Pelosi said during a Thursday conference call. “I certainly think John McCain should reject his endorsement and I’m sure it won’t be long before he does.”

During today’s White House press briefing, a reporter asked spokeswoman Dana Perino about the “prospects” for the Protect America Act (PAA) “from the White House point of view.” Perino quickly attacked Congress’s request for a 21-day extension to find a compromise between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

To underscore her point, Perino pulled out a slide that she had been “waiting to use” for “a couple of days.” Her attack fell flat, however, when reporters pointed out that the quote on the slide was inaccurately attributed to the nonexistent “Senate” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer:

PERINO: Well, what’s interesting is, you know, I actually have a slide I can actually bring up, now that you’ve asked. … We’ve been waiting to use this for a couple of days. [...]

About four weeks ago, everyone in this briefing room was asking why President Bush wouldn’t accept a three-week extension. And everyone thought it would be very reasonable to just give them 21 more days to work. Well, we’re nearing — I think we’re at 20 days today and they’re not even here.

QUESTION: Steny Hoyer is the House majority leader, by the way.

PERINO: He is. That is a bad slide.

QUESTION: That says Senate.

PERINO: I know, and it’s the House. That’s why it’s bad.

Watch it:

The reason Congress asked for the 21-day extension is because the White House claimed that the expiration of the PAA undermined America’s national security. Yet despite this fear-mongering, conservatives rejected the extension.

Since that time, congressional Democrats have held a series of bipartisan meetings to work out a solution. White House officials have skipped the meetings. “I don’t understand why the White House hasn’t been more active in pushing the solution they want,” said Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV). “It’s very strange.” House Republicans have also prevented their staffs from attending the meetings.

Transcript: Read more

In “one of the bloodiest days in the capital in recent months,” two coordinated bomb blasts blamed on al Qaeda “killed 55 people in a crowded Baghdad shopping area on Thursday, on the day the U.S. military said it was withdrawing 2,000 troops from the Iraqi capital.”

Survey USA’s aggregation of 50 independent state polls sure does lead to some interesting results. Here’s Obama versus McCain:

And here’s Clinton versus McCain:

Provocative, but I don’t buy it. Each of these polls has a sample size of 600, so the margin of error will come into play. What’s more, there are 100 separate polls being aggregate here, so the odds are that several of these are just bad samples. On top of that you have all the usual problems with early polling. Were I to inject some pro-Obama spin into this, I would note that there are Democratic Senate pickup opportunities this year in Oregon, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia where the polls show Obama winning and Hillary losing, but there are no such races in Arkansas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan or New Jersey where the map shows Hillary winning and Obama losing. But as I say, while I think this method is clever, I don’t really see it as methodologically sound — Clinton’s not going to lose Washington, Obama’s not going to lose New Jersey, and what happens in Michigan will have more to do with whether or not McCain runs demagogic attacks on the Democrats’ global warming plans than on who the Democrats nominate.

During the “All-Star Panel” segment on Fox News’s Special Report last night, Roll Call Executive Editor Mort Kondracke said that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign is worried about appearing too aligned with President Bush and they’re seeking “ways to separate themselves in some way from Bush.” They need “some issue that he can be distinctive from Bush,” said Kondracke

Noting that McCain is the same as Bush on the war and tax cuts, Kondracke said that he doesn’t want to be seen as “just the third term” of Bush:

I know, as a matter of fact, that they’re talking in the McCain camp about ways to separate themselves in some way from Bush, and they haven’t figured out how to do it–some issue that he can be distinctive from Bush about.

Clearly it’s not going to be the war. It’s not going to be tax cuts. It has got to be something reasonably major so that the Democrats can’t say this is just the third term.

Watch it:

McCain has a reputation as a “maverick” for picking fights with Republicans. But as the Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti recently wrote, “when you look over the list of his deviations…one cannot help thinking of … George W. Bush.”

Kondracke notes that Bush and McCain are the same on the war and taxes, but in reality McCain represents a third term of his buddy Bush on issue after issue:

TORTURE: Despite McCain’s reputation as an opponent of torture, he has consistently supported legislative language that protects the Bush administration’s prerogatives to use it. Most recently, McCain voted against a ban on waterboarding and urged President Bush to veto the bill.

SURVEILLANCE: Echoing Bush in his CPAC speech this year, McCain called it “shameful and dangerous” for Democrats to oppose a surveillance bill that contains retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. He then voted “to terminate lawsuits against” those companies.

IMMIGRATION: In 2005, McCain told the New Yorker that “the President and I share exactly the same views on the issue.”

SOCIAL SECURITY: In 2005, McCain was “a big booster” of Bush’s Social Security privatization plan and last week he told the Wall Street Journal that as president he wants to reform Social Security through private savings accounts “along the lines that President Bush proposed.”

HEALTH CARE: After examining his health care plan, the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn recently concluded that McCain will act “like George W. Bush” as he supports policy ideas that “President Bush has embraced.”

Not only is McCain the same as Bush on most policy issues, but he would hire the same types of ideologues to staff his administration. McCain is said to believe that John Bolton is “the type of ambassador that ought to represent the United States at the United Nations.”