Adelman? What about Ledeen?

The prospect of a McCain presidency is too awful even for Ken “Cakewalk in Iraq” Adelman to contemplate:

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

It bears mentioning that no one should draw much joy from the endorsement of someone who was pissing his shorts to invade Iraq; in the event of an Obama victory, Adelman would quickly return his face to the glue-lined paper bag, from which he’s drawn sufficient breath to argue that a less “incompetent” administration would have run a better war. The correct point, of course, is that a more competent administration wouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place. Still, as a measure of how objectively awful the Sarah Palin pick has been for McCain, this is one of the more useful, albeit obscure, bits of data.