In a "time of war," who will the American electorate say is the right candidate for the moment? John McCain or Hillary Clinton?

The refrain about Iraq has been: Bush overruled the advice of seasoned combat advisers by invading. McCain is a seasoned combat vet and knowledgeable about military affairs and he's more experienced than Hillary as a Senator as well as in years. Hillary loses Iowa and she tears up. McCain gets tortured in Viet Cong captivity, survives and comes back as a maverick senator. You get the idea. Who is up to being Commander in Chief between the two of them? It'll become an issue.

McCain's scorned trip to Baghdad to play Baghdad John takes on a new look as counter-insurgency tactics have been given a chance to work in Iraq. He'll claim that he was an avid supporter of the approach and believed that it would pay off if only given the chance to work. He will say "but for Rumsfeld-Feith-Wolfowitz."

And if Iraqi stability improves over the next several months, the Republicans are going to claim the whole kahuna: they rid the Iraqi people of dictatorship; stabilized a terror-state; and secured strategic resource access. All this, they will claim, while the Democrats played chicken little and the Republicans made something edible out of a bad stew.

Obama, however, would be able to say, whatever the short term result of the Iraq invasion and occupation, it was the wrong thing to do, and the full ramifications won't play out by November 2008. "How long?" he'll ask, rightfully, will Americans have to live in Iraq to hold the cap on the Babylonian version of Pandora's Box? And he won't have any flip-flop appearance-of-hypocrisy issues.

Hillary will have to say, well, it was the right thing to do believing what I did at the time, but not the way it was done and so on and so forth, putting her in a position to explain herself too much. It is essentially the argument that John Kerry used. It will make her look irresolute or perhaps inexpert, and she has enough Vietnam War protest photo-history to suggest that she's a Janey-come-lately to the smart-hawk-flock.

McCain had been pushing a counter-insurgency approach to Iraq as early as 2005 and backing President Bush. Petraus helped carry out the counter-insurgency tactics, finally. It wasn't just the surge, i.e. more troops, as McCain also advocated, differing with Rumsfeld.

Hillary may be a smart lawyer (not always the American peoples' favorite image) and a skilled senator, but she's not with the war-wizened viewpoint as much as Senator Obama is.

The Schwarzkopfs, Powells, Zinnis and others were not afraid to say that the Iraq war was the wrong thing to do under the circumstances. Obama has stayed consistent with that, and not only for self-righteous formalism. It is because Americans are now and may be committed for a long term, expensive and speculative investment of lives and treasure in Iraq. Will it have been worth it if better energy source development could have averted it?

Superpower status is built on energy. The last several years have been spent bolstering a petroleum industry with taxpayers' money while that industry takes more from taxpayers at the pump, too, and drives up inflation everywhere else as companies pass the cost to the little guy. And that plays right into the anti-democracy Russian Federation's hands, because it has dominant petroleum product stores under its soil.

Obama's stand is more like what the combat seasoned advisers in 2003 told the Neocon-flush Pentagon to no avail. They said don't go in there. His views also include a decided advocacy for a shift of power away from corporate influence over war policy, something independents greatly await. You see, elites simply don't lose children in wars as much as little folks, so they are willing to pull the trigger for dollars with much less reflection, and frankly, a lack of character. Senator Obama, more diplomatically than I am, speaks out about this.

The establishment requires checking against populist common sense when it comes to making Commander in Chief decisions. The populist common sense includes a rounded connection to enlisted persons. Obama is the candidate who will reflect on the priority of sending them wisely, while Hillary may yet still have something to prove just as her husband apparently did when lobbing ineffectual cruise missiles about the Middle and Far East.

[Warning: Graphically Disturbing Content in Link that Activates on Visiting the Page]

While we witness the political slaughterhouse of the campaign trail, with candidate after candidate's campaign stunned and dismembered, a sinister slaughterhouse in Southern California tortures cows in the flesh. They prod them, jab them in the eyes, kick them, shock them, drag them by their legs across cement and ram them with forklifts. I write this, not as an article per se, not as a blog entry only, but as a lamentation of our depravity.

The cows cry, bellow, call, moan and husk as they experience the breach of trust that mankind has visited on them with increasingly demonic cruelty as the industrial nature of it all serves unnecessary consumption, that is, gluttony.

As I eat my cottage cheese I wonder now if the the dairy cow who gave of herself to supplement my life is now somewhere shivering in a stockyard smelling of fear and chemically tainted manure, turning weak and feeling sick from cattle car rides in the frigid, exhaust polluted winds of winter on tractor trailer rigs going 75 miles per hour.

Just being in the situation, if I were a cow, might make me a  "downer cow" that is, one of those that cannot bring herself to get up when the cutter comes calling. You see, in Chino, California's Hallmark Meat Packing plant, one that produced meat for the school lunch program in California, downer cows have apparently been condemned to torture before execution. Why? Because there is pressure to get them to walk into the slaughterhouse on their own power. By that simple act, USDA inspectors will apparently deem them "passed" to join the food supply.

What manner of chemical excretions must fill the weary muscles of these victim creatures as the bloodletting trolls torture them to get up so that they may "pass inspection."

Gracing the human race with calcium rich protein-power to help its members be healthy and work hard, this dairy cow gets no pension in a gentle pasture with animal loving tenders as gratitude for a life of service to mankind.

No sir, in Chino, California, she is given heavy metal fear to precede her slaughter. Her udders have worn out from mechanical jerking on an overcrowded production line, so here she is, with a mass of bovine innocents on death row, being pushed toward the stun gun and industrial slicer.

Money is offered men who do this job, and viola, wanting better pay, men and women oblige.

What is this all about? Gentle readers, it is about hamburgers and school lunch programs. It is one thing to subdue and kill for food, or employ in milk production. It is another to torture the servant animals. The former is a life cycle relationship, but the latter is the spiritual depravity of cruelty, murder and the ingestion of the victims.

Long ago in my college years at the University of Texas at San Antonio, philosophy professor Mark Bernstein (now author and distinguished applied ethics professor at Purdue) asked his students whether human beings could become kind to each other if they did not first master kindness to animals. His scholarship has made a difference in this area, and I hope it is through such thinking that Americans will reconsider what is permissible or not for us to eat.

When I consider what happens in modern war for resources, it occurs to me that we may be doing something similar to civilians caught in the crossfire of resource wars to what has been done to the Chino cows.

In a sense, Hillary Clinton has already been given place to govern. She was an active, working architect of a health care policy reform proposal during Bill Clinton's presidency.

This fact, and the number of errors made by the Clinton Administration that haunt us today, will be a shell magnet in the shooting word war of tomorrow's partisan campaign.

Hillary is a partisan attack magnet. Her female gender status will not provide her any cloaking or up-armor her campaign. The GOP candidate will be ruthless, and the electorate can also be ruthless, reading it as killer instinct required to win and defend the Republic as Commander in Chief.

They will ask the nation again and again if Hillary can be a credible Commander in Chief. And Hillary, to be convincing, will be tempted to show here capabilities as a Commander in Chief. Bolstered by the Internationalist Interventionists on the Left, she poses a greater international intervention risk than Obama. For her it is more about the career marks. It is about "clearing" the Clinton legacy by all perceptions. She will get hammered, and the Democrats will be lamenting this for the next several years.

Not that I give a darn about partisan sympathies, considering that they've helped concoct the caustic gridlock of this present stench.

On Lefist interventionalism and its geo-strategic implications, we do not hear enough daring self-criticism from the partisans in the GOP or the Democratic Party. We do not hear it because after this past several years no one wants to claim it. It is why "America Abroad" came grinding to a halt on this blog site. No one wants to think of American abroad. They want to think of America rebuilding itself from within and coming to our senses.