Earlier this year a close friend of John McCain gave me fair warning: McCain was about to become much more conservative, and I would not like what was coming. He was right. I did not like McCain’s speech at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and I think his support of intelligent design is — sorry, John — just plain brainless. But it is not the supposedly new McCain that bothers me, it’s the old one: His incessant sword-rattling has gotten just plain rattling.