ARTICLE: "McCain Names Drawdown Date: Troop Withdrawal Predicted by 2013 Amid Victory in Iraq," by Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2008, p. A4.

ARTICLE: "Bush's Mideast words go over hot, cold: trip ends in Egypt with a bit of a thud, analysts say," by Charles Levinson, USA Today, 19 May 2008, p. 6A.

McCain is not impressing me lately. When he compares the magnitude of Iran's threat to that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he strikes me as a closet hysteric, and when he promises "victory" in Iraq (a bad term to use since it stopped being our fight about five years ago) in 2013, a year after his presumed re-election, he seems merely the conventional politician.

McCain, as much as he worries me, seems better and smarter than both of these two strange positions. Again, the guy could well end up president in an America uncomfortable giving the Dems both houses of Congress plus the presidency, so this sort of frantic staking-out of positions disturbs me, especially when I don't sense that he needs this sort of thing to beat Obama. Indeed, by making such statements, he makes Obama seem more the statesman than himself.

Meanwhile, Bush's latest trip to the Mideast summed up his two terms nicely: lotsa preaching but no real answers to security dilemmas there. The Middle East is undergoing a huge amount of social and economic and demographic change right now—stunning really. But Bush keeps only to his democracy message, which is fine, but it comes off as disconnected from today's tumultuous developments, some of which he started with Iraq.

But here's the bit that stunned me for its apparent goofiness (as in, I can't believe he actually said it so I'm wondering if the press got it wrong):

When Bush first launched his Middle East democratization push in the wake of 9/11, he thought he could achieve these goals by the end of his second term, [Meyrav] Wurmser [director of the Middle East program at the Hudson Institute] said.

On Sunday, Bush described the goals as predictions for the year 2068.

That's just plain weird. I don't think any serious thinker would extend the process that far. I would expect the region to be largely democratized no later than 2025.

I suspect Bush was just displaying his odd sense of humor here, but that's rather off-putting considering what he's started in the region and the unfinished jobs he's left behind.

Given that, I would also hope McCain would watch his mouth far more carefully in the weeks and months ahead.