A little followup on one passage from that Jeffrey Goldberg interview with Senator McCain:

"I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions."

Two things jump out. Referring to the "nation's" stated purpose instead of the "government's" stated purpose. When we talk about accountability and foreign policy, conflating a citizenry with the decisionmakers at the top (both internally and in marketing your foreign policy to your own people) seems like a key element on the path to feeling OK about going to war.

Two, the guy who says he can be the chief negotiator in the region doesn't "try to divine people's motives"? I'm no diplomat, and not to sound too thespian about it, but wouldn't grasping the motivations of the parties at the table be kind of a fundamental tool in creating a solution?

I mean, you're not fixing an engine, you're figuring out what makes people tick in order to improve your chances of getting what you want. Or is that kind of "psycho stuff" too nuanced?

I've been a bit uncomfortable with the hard Bush=McCain tack from the Dems, but maybe there's a little more to it than I thought. After all this, our electorate will surely connect the dots between an obvious disdain for real diplomacy and the likelihood that our troops will get deployed and killed unnecessarily.

Won't we?