John McCain's refusal to learn from history calls serious question to his leadership

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took

-- Sam Cooke, Wonderful World, 1959

It's easy to look at reasons not to vote for John McCain in a subjective matter: Iraq, the Supreme Court, the economy, and more. But there is one area where even objectively McCain's candidacy is considered dangerous.

Yes, he doesn't know much about the economy or geography or a science book. But what is disturbing is that he doesn't know history, or at least, is unwilling to learn from history.

Let's try one of those annoying analogy questions from the aptitude tests you took in high school:

Vietnam is to Iraq as the savings and loan crisis is to [BLANK].

McCain might have trouble with that, but the rest of us would say, "the financial crisis of 2008" though it may have a nicer title at some point.

It appears to someone who was a small child during Vietnam that the McCain (and Bush) drive for "victory" in Iraq is trying to make up for not having "victory" in Vietnam. Fighting the Iraq war is difficult enough, but fighting the ghosts of Vietnam makes it worse.

So what did McCain "learn" from Vietnam? Apparently, he learned that we have to stay until we achieve "victory." And in the minds of Republicans, Democrats don't want "victory."

What we have instead is a horrible quagmire.

A different kind of horrible quagmire is the current financial boondoggle. Now, McCain's career was "saved" by his "conversion" after his own serious involvement in the Keating Five scandal. The campaign offers up that McCain wasn't severely reprimanded, but when your judges are fellow Senators instead of say, someone who lost their life savings, justice isn't in the room.

McCain claims that he learned from the savings and loan scandal, hence his push for campaign finance reform. This is the "maverick" part of the story. But the crucial lesson of the S&L scandal, which is back in spades in 2008, is completely lost on McCain. As bold as the campaign finance reform seemed at the time, it didn't address the deregulation atrocities true during the S&L scandal, and made worse since then.

And McCain's buddy, economic adviser and possible future Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm, was the champion of gutting the laws that made this massive bailout possible.

John McCain may not know that if you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. The American people are tired of fighting the Vietnam ghosts of the 1960s and 1970s and the financial ghosts of the 1980s. They want someone who looking forward, but also someone who knows where we've been. And that person isn't John McCain.