My friend Matt Welch appeared on Bill Moyers to talk about John McCain. Video and Transcript.

MATT WELCH: John McCain has an ideology that’s little appreciated and little understood by the press. He receives more adoring press probably than any Republican that I can think of in my lifetime, or certainly the last 20 years. And by the time you’re done reciting all of the marvelous things in his biography and talk about how much fun it was on the Straight Talk Express, there’s not a whole lot of time to talk about where he came up with his ideas about what the government should or should not do.

His ideas about what the government should do are basically, he wants to restore your faith and my faith and Mickey’s faith in the idea of America being a shining city on the hill. He wants to restore our faith in governing institutions, in the federal government, in other words, and use the federal government as a sort of blunt instrument to go after anything that makes us cynical about those institutions and the greatness of America. It’s a sort of national greatness conservatism which has a kind of militaristic component, let’s say, in which we are all supposed to sort of sacrifice ourselves to the greater cause, the higher power of American nationalism.

Now, go buy Matt’s book: McCain: The Myth of a Maverick