Watch as McCain talks out of both sides of his mouth

Republican presidential nominee John McCain's "Service to America" speech in Annapolis was a schizophrenic's joyride.
McCain slid from describing his screw-up college years into an appreciation that life is supreme with irony, and then a Kennedy-esque admission, "My accomplishments are more a testament to my country, the land of opportunity, than they are to me. In America, everything is possible."
Bravo, Senator!
He followed up with a few celebratory lines regarding the virtues of discipline, and praised the Naval Academy's "honor code that simply assumed your fidelity to its principles."
Excellent words curiously offered from someone who has actively participated in undoing our nation's founding principles, namely national sovereignty and freedom of speech.
That is the tough part about dealing with McCain, a genuine hero who sacrificed as a patriot.
And then like so many in the generation before him, has subsequently fought to undermine those very structures he sought to defend.
What confounds now is a candidate that skips across the philosophical lines and back so quickly that he appears to be standing on both sides at once.
McCain cited "that dominant individualism" of frontier historian Frederick Turner, and "that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom"; and then - BAM - switched his stance and popped the listener, bemoaning how "many Americans are indifferent to or cynical about the virtues that our country claims ... attributable to the dislocations economic change causes ... to the experience of Americans who have, through no fault of their own, been left behind as others profit as they never have before."
What?
How does a race of dominant individuals fall into such moroseness?
McCain: "In part, it is in reaction to government's mistakes and incompetence, and to the selfishness of some public figures who seek to shine the luster of their public reputations at the expense of the public good."
Now who might that describe, Senator?
The tennis match continues, volley back to the right:
"Self-reliance -- not foisting our responsibilities off on others -- is the ethic that made America great ... and to some people, the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."
Great line and true, followed by the perplexity of McCain's description of citizenship, a subsuming of the very individual that made the country great, into causes "greater than yourself."
The senator's definition of citizenship includes "anywhere Americans come together to govern their lives" and is defined "by countless acts of love, kindness and courage that have no witness or heraldry and are especially commendable because they are unrecorded."
This is the same sort of Leftist exhortation given us recently by Michelle Obama when she urged listeners not to go into profitable pursuits like "corporate law or hedge-fund management."
Why doesn't the senator's definition of citizenship include starting great companies, building great industries, or getting filthy, stinking rich and in doing so, creating new opportunities through thousands of other new jobs?
Again, McCain: "Success, wealth and celebrity gained and kept for private interest is a small thing. But sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured. All lives are a struggle against selfishness."
That is a heartbreaking.
It seems McCain does not comprehend, or has forgotten, that the Pilgrims, the Irish, the Koreans and every other willing traveler to this country did so out of selfishness.
A great civil war was waged in part to confirm individual liberties for all Americans, and the frontiersmen, industrialists, the scientists, artists, and common laborers of this nation have all been pursuing their own self-interests since.
Whether the candidate blathers on about "Change," spins fanciful yarns about sniper fire, or sanctimoniously admonishes, there will be a core truth attached to whoever next enters the White House: If a politician can lecture you on self-sacrifice, he or she thinks it makes them immune from having to explain why they keep putting their hand into your pocket.

Patrick Conrad is a physician in Niceville, Fla., and considers himself a libertarian secessionist. You can write him at wickedgrin@cox.net or through his Web site, www.doctorsforfreedom.com.