Is McCain a warmonger?

The Obama camp apologized last week when radio host Ed Shultz called John McCain a warmonger at an Obama fundraising event. My copy of Webster's dictionary defines warmonger as, "One who stirs up or advocates war."

I wrote here about McCain's apparent confusion regarding Sunni versus Shiite Muslims. He has repeated the "gaffe" at least twice more in the following days; once in a written statement on his own website and again yesterday while questioning Gen. Petraeus in the senate hearing. I now believe that he is deliberately trying to confuse the issue and link Al Qaeda and Iran. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." This is right out of the Bush-Cheney playbook. After all, over 30% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 9/11 attacks.

And here is McCain jokingly singing 'Bomb Iran' to the tune of the Beach Boys song 'Barbara Ann' at a town hall meeting. (Full disclosure: I sang the same song during the Iran hostage crisis; of course I was in the sixth grade and was not running for president of the U.S.)

Is McCain a warmonger? Yep, I have to agree with Ed Shultz.

Update: Foreign policy advisers include neocons Max Boot, Randy Scheunemann and Robert Kagan. All of them support the use of the American military to spread American democratic ideals around the world. It calls McCain's judgment into question when he surrounds himself with advisers who were all exceedingly wrong on the biggest foreign policy issue of the age, the war in Iraq.