The actual intent of Mao's "hundred flowers" campaign is debated, even among Chinese. I am going by the assessment of Jung Chang, the co-author (with her husband) of *Mao: The Unknown Story," a somewhat controversial 832-page biography of Mao. It is indisputable, however, that the "hundred flowers" policy was followed a severe crackdown on political dissent.

I found it somewhat ironic that the narrowness of the range of permissible thought and political speech among Republican standard-bearers these days would actually be "Maoist" were it to be imposed by a government, rather than the proprietary hallmark of the not-very-loyal opposition."

Have a look at Frank Rich's column in the NY Times this morning:

"To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished."

By the way, I am not a conspiracy theorist and saw nothing "sinister" in McCain's remarks, just ironic. As the "winkie" intended to indicate, the piece was written as a humour piece, making a mischievous association between "red states" and Mao's "Little Red Book."

That said, thank you for being civil in your comments. We can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.

McCain spoke on the correct side, [I almost wrote, "right side"], of the torture issue and I was with everyone who thought his ammendment was a good one, but I came to believe that it was mostly political posturing to continually put him into the "war hero" spotlight as an election ploy. A bit of objective evidence, at least to my mind, is that after torture had become a hot political issue and it was known that Gonzales had worked to give legal justification to torture, so as to immunize torturers from this country, McCain voted to confirm him as Attorney General.

If I am not mistaken, after the torture ammendment became one more of the many laws we have against torture, McCain, who had played out his strategy publicly, did not object when Bush inserted a signing statement intending to nullify the ammendment.