After a 5-year losing streak on Iraq and an 8-year catastrophe on the economy and foreign policy, one would think Sen. McCain would learn from his party’s abysmal violation of public trust and conduct himself with some propriety.

McCain’s most important task as the Republican Party nominee is to convince the American people that despite his party’s arrogance, ignorance, bad judgment, and corruption, and his own political leanings, he will be someone the American people can count on to correct the terrible mistakes of this Administration. At a time when Americans are united only in their anxiety and fear over the future, and in need of a leader to bind them into some vaguely cohesive national consistuency, Sen. McCain plays the dirtiest, most reprehensible kind of gutter politics.

Bankrupt of a single original idea to end the war in Iraq--other than regurgitating President Bush’s trope about keeping our courage and resolve and winning with honor, McCain accuses Barack Obama of near treason for having the courage and resolve to declare victory and bring the troops home.

Nearly seven years after September 11th, McCain, a senior senator with instant access to the President from 2001 to now, declared this week, like some wide-eyed ingénue just recently arrived to Washington, that he knows how to catch Osama Bin Ladin. Why did he keep this critically important information to himself for seven years? If he had actively campaigned for his plan to catch Bin Ladin when it mattered, it would be admirable. But intellectual and moral impotence during a war of choice -- by his party and his leader -- that has resulted in suffering to countless Iraqi and American lives, and belated boasting about what should have been, makes one nothing but a trash talker.

Mr. McCain’s recent attacks of Mr. Obama, questioning his patriotism, his judgement, and his love for the troops, and accusing him of vanity, deceit, and political expediency are unseemly by any definition.

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, (Mirare Press, 2007 ) a novel about American foreign policy inspired by Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Her forthcoming novel Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' USA is scheduled for a Fall '08 release, also by Mirare Press.