John McCain Is A National Embarrassment

It doesn't get any more pathetic than this:

U.S. Sen. John McCain - a likely 2008 presidential candidate who once labeled the Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance” - will be Liberty University’s graduation speaker on May 13.

“I was in Washington with him about three months ago,” Falwell said. “We dealt with every difference we have. There are no deal breakers now. But I told him, ‘You have a lot of fence mending to do.’”

Falwell, LU’s chancellor, said McCain, an Arizona Republican, is among the presidential candidates he could support in 2008.

“This is not an endorsement,” Falwell said.

McCain, 69, was out of his Washington office on Monday and could not be reached for comment.

McCain’s visit to the LU campus is, at the very least, an attempt to make peace with conservative Christians prior to the presidential campaign.

While running against then- Gov. George W. Bush in the South Carolina and Virginia primaries in 2000, McCain denounced Falwell and Virginia Beach televangelist Pat Robertson in what was seen as a move to lure more moderate voters to his campaign.

“Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right,” McCain said at the time.

McCain lost the Virginia and South Carolina primaries and Bush won the nomination.

This year, some polls show McCain as the early front-runner for the Republican nomination in the campaign to become Bush’s successor.

Falwell said McCain’s appearance at LU’s graduation is another sign that McCain is wooing evangelical Christians.

“He is in the process of healing the breech with evangelical groups,” Falwell said.

I'm not surprised by this. As the photo on the left indicates, McCain is willing to do just about anything if he thinks it will improve his chances in 2008.

But this is the reality of GOP politics. If you want to win primaries, you have to aggressively pander to radical right wing religious extremists, even though Falwell and folks like him have more in common with Osama bin Laden than with anyone else.

One of these days, the Democrats might actually figure out how to use this GOP weakness to their advantage.