Thompson, McCain, and the Other Seavey

Remember, for one week, perhaps ending today, I’ve been rooting for Fred Thompson — as is Sgt. Mark Seavey, who is probably a distant relative of mine since he hails from Maine, while my father, like many Seaveys, hails from New Hampshire. Sgt. Seavey is a hawkish American Legion official, Afghan war vet, and anti-John-Murtha activist, and thanks to Michelle Malkin’s praise of him is one of the very few Google hits for “Seavey” to come in above me, along with an antenna-making company and an Iditarod champion. (I’ve only noticed one other “Todd Seavey” online, president of a Maine timber company — Seaveys hate evildoers and nature, obviously.) I can’t locate Sgt. Seavey’s blog despite a lot of Googling, but there’s one out there somewhere.

No sooner did I switch my allegiances from an antiwar candidate to the hawkish Thompson last week (all the while just trying to pick the viable candidate whose economic views I like most) than I got an approving e-mail from Sgt. Seavey.

To make a long story short, though, I’m a foreign policy agnostic myself (and speaking of short: I promise you that each time I revisit an issue on this blog, I will at least try to keep it briefer than the previous time I talked about it — and indeed, after the impending Super Duper Tuesday on Feb. 5, I’ll do more frequent, shorter posts in general).

Because of this agnosticism, when all is said and done, I may well have gone Bush > Paul > Thompson > McCain > Libertarian Party candidate (and thus hawk-dove-hawk-hawk-dove [?]) in my prez-candidate allegiances over the past four years (with accelerating switches during the primaries), depending on how things play out. Let none say I’m careening chaotically, since I’m simply motivated by other issues.

And that does not for a moment mean that I take lightly the service performed by Sgt. Seavey and others like him, I should say — do not mistake complexity for indifference, please (there are several other hot-button issues on which I have no strong position, actually, including abortion, the death penalty, some aspects of immigration, the anarchist/minarchist divide [well, that one's a hot-button issue in my milieu, anyway], gay marriage, some security/policing controversies, various environmental issues, and the social effects of religion — but if I just called myself a moderate because of this uncertainty, you might find me boring [I'm also torn about the use of the label "moderate," in fact]).

In any case, if it’s late enough on January 19 for the results from South Carolina to be fairly clear, I am in all likelihood officially a (very) reluctant McCain supporter as you read this, so: more tomorrow [CORRECTION: later, that same day...] on how I can live with myself. (My ex-girlfriend Koli, by contrast, sees McCain as a worst-case scenario, as noted on her own new blog — and in this Year of Ambivalence, who am I to say she’s wrong? Please read her stuff.)