While I have great admiration for John McCain for surviving the torture to which he was subjected while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and I have for several years thought he might be a viable candidate for the Presidency, his actions in the past several months have dissuaded me from any belief that he is the candidate most worthy of leading this nation.

Amidst the outcries of anger, disbelief and betrayal we’ve heard in the past several weeks concerning Barack Obama’s relationship with his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, it occurred to me that John McCain’s recent rush to embrace the tenets of George Bush and Dick Cheney represents a more dangerous relationship than does that of Obama and Wright. From the moment he locked up the Republican nomination, it seems more often than not that while it is McCain’s mouth that moves, it is George Bush and Dick Cheney doing the speaking as he parrots the same “tough on terrorism no matter the cost” rhetoric to which we’ve been subjected for the past six years.

This nation should not have to endure another four years of the policies enacted by a President whose main goal for eight years has been to imbue the Executive Branch, and himself, with unprecedented unilateral powers that go far beyond those granted by the Constitution while systematically stripping away individual rights and liberties in the name of “National Security.” When this happens in other countries, we call it a “dictatorship.”

By embracing the current administration’s stance on the Iraq war and putting into words what Bush and Cheney have not been willing to be so public about, namely, that the United States is willing to stay in Iraq for “a hundred years,” McCain has planted his feet firmly in a foreign policy that has not only been a dismal failure unsupported by the American people, but is one that has killed over 4,000 Americans, cost this Nation over $500 billion and seriously eroded, if not destroyed, our position as leader of the Free World.

This war has caused the documented deaths of over 80,000 Iraqi civilians, with strong evidence that suggests the number is actually well into the hundreds of thousands. According to CNN, about 2 million Iraqi refugees have fled the country and about 2.5 million more are displaced inside Iraq. To run for President on a platform rooted in continuing this ill-conceived and ineptly-executed travesty is nothing short of lunacy.

Earlier this year, McCain revealed he is willing to set aside his own moral conscience for the sake of political expediency. When the Senate brought to a vote the bill to restrict the extent to which both military and civilian arms of the U.S. government can go when interrogating prisoners, McCain, a man who endured years of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese and who has said for years that the United States should abide by the Geneva Conventions, chose to abandon his principles and voted against the bill. His primary reason for doing so appears to have been to gain the approval and support of conservative Republicans in his bid for the Presidency.

Finally, over the course of a couple of weeks, McCain made reference on four separate occasions, one in writing, to the fact that Iran is training Al-Qaeda insurgents and sending them into Iraq. Two of his references were made after he was seen to have been corrected by Joe Lieberman on their recent trip to Iraq. While it is probably true that Iran is training insurgents and sending them into Iraq, these insurgents are not Al-Qaeda. The ruling clerics in Iran are Shi’a Muslims; Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization. And if a candidate for President doesn’t know, or can’t learn, the difference, then he is not qualified to lead this nation. For in this instance, an understanding of the motivations driving Shi’a and Sunni Muslim conflicts is as important to dealing with the situation in Iraq as was an understanding of the differences and history of the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland throughout the 20th century.

While I still respect John McCain, he is not the person we need to have as the next occupant of the White House.