CNN has projected that John McCain now has enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination for president. Mike Huckabee is not on CNN conceding to John McCain.

Huckabee has class. He has some evolutionary problems, but he’s a nice guy. Our astronomer friend may disagree (Huckabee = very very very bad guy), but I think he’s a nice guy. His appearance on Saturday Night Live was very funny.

But we’re officially up against McCain.

I have major concerns about McCain, and you should too. Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, longtime Speaker of the House, once said, “All politics is local,” and Illinois is feeling terribly the effects of the Two Trillion Dollar War. Bob Herbert really drives that home today in the New York Times:

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

McCain said we could be there 100 years, and he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. That’s a plan for horrible disaster.

McCain is a nice guy. Huckabee is a nice guy. Their policies would tear us apart.

Remember this number?

$9,370,442,189,107.39

That’s our National Debt. If you go to that page now, the number will be higher. That’s George Bush’s legacy. And here’s the price tag on Iraq right now:

The War in Iraq Costs

$499,777,068,876

Illinois has paid the following

The War in Iraq Costs

$27,062,363,778

That money is gone, and we’re not finished yet. McCain has a plan, after all. A Hundred-Year-Plan. We must learn patience, because, one day, 100 years or so down the road, we will finally know peace in Iraq.  Perhaps, too, the entire world will finally know peace.

America will be long gone, of course, probably bought out by Japan and China who currently own much of our national debt.

But there will be peace at last in Iraq.