Just caught McCain on CNN on the giant flatscreen in the Washington Independent newsroom. (Seriously, check us out.) It occurred to me the other day that McCain’s campaign doesn’t have any overarching narrative. The closest that he comes to bothering with one are these placards that his partisans hold up. HONOR, they read.

Yglesias has gotten at this with his valuable explorations of McCain’s imperial cast of mind. Holding up the HONOR placard, with no attempt at exploration, really says a lot about McCain. The important thing about his campaign is its emphasis on — let’s see if I can put this in value-neutral terms — the retributive power that a society committed to military values can wield. For all his windy and cynical jingoism, it turns out that McCain is actually a Prussian. He’s the Prussian President The Prussians Have Been Waiting For!

Myself, I’ll take the advice of Murphy’s Law and back the candidate who thinks America Rules.