The XX Factor: What women really think.

Mmmmmm, Moderately Crazy??

OK, Anne, I’ll go there with you. But only because you called me an old-timer.

I don’t dispute for a moment that John McCain is a true maverick. But—and I can’t say it better than Matt Taibbi did—McCain’s “arrogant refusal to be a craven imbecile” is not moderation, either, even if it “makes McCain suspect in the eyes of Limbaugh and Coulter, who are terrified at the prospect of a Republican president uninterested in book burnings.”

Yes McCain has partnered with moderates and even liberals on occasion, and he’s shown us over and over that he’s nobody’s lackey. He has evinced an admirable desire to solve problems rather than howl at the moon, and for a while there, nobody but McCain was leading the charge against reverting to the rack and screws in the war on terror. But perhaps in trying to mollify the book burners he’s also managed to turn himself into a parody of a wing nut. He wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent? The man who has crusaded against torture voted against requiring the CIA to constrain interrogation techniques to those permitted in the Army Field Manual? He’s suddenly fallen in love with Justices Alito and Roberts? And as you point out, Anne, on the one issue most of us care about most, the war in Iraq, this is the one guy in America whose enthusiasm for the project has soared of late.

We can bicker about these details, but I take your linguistic point. But my response is that McCain may be independent-minded, even contrarian, but I don’t believe he’s a moderate. And certainly not on the issues that worry me the most.