Why is McCain so irresponsible?   Because he is spewing lies (and see here).   But that is only half the reason McCain is so irresponsible.   The other half of the reason is that McCain is failing to deal with multi-front crises faced by the United States.   We are a nation in decay, according to a forecast prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies. This report will be full of bad news for the United States.  How bad are things getting?:

In the period leading up to 2025, the U.S. “will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time,” said [Thomas Fingar, deputy director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence], according to a transcript of his remarks released by the office (download PDF).

The “overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic and arguably cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace, with the partial exception of military,” Fingar said . . . .

The next president will receive a particularly bleak warning about climate change. By 2025, “it is not a good time to live in the Southwest because it runs out of water and looks like the Dust Bowl.

And speaking of retreat, consider this thoughtful comment by Adam Greenfield of Speedbird:

Mainstream Americans, by contrast, where they were once called to dream and to believe that their best days as a community still lay ahead, are now at war with the future. And this is one war situation that is definitely not developing necessarily to their advantage . . . I’m frequently enough asked about the comparative technical backwardness of the US, often in so many words. In such circumstances I invariably trot out Mimi Ito’s relativist line about “alternatively technologized modernities,” and the idea that different places, different polities arrive at – have to arrive at – divergent understandings about which technologies are appropriate for their given time and place. And I strongly believe that it’s a correct line..but it’s no longer true. What’s going on in the US isn’t, it’s clear to me, a measured and equally valid selection from the sheaf of available technosocial possibilities, but symptomatic, however subtly, of a headlong flight from contemporaneity.