Senator John McCain, seeing his hopes fade away, has tried to move away from President Bush as quickly as he can, even issuing his own critique of the Bush Administration. From MSNBC and from John McCain:

In an interview Thursday with The Washington Times, McCain spoke of Bush in tones bordering on contempt, ticking off a litany of what he said were the president’s failures.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government — larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America — owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” McCain told the newspaper.

“We just let things get completely out of hand,” he said of the past eight years of Republican rule.

Friday, McCain extended the theme in an address at a campaign rally in Denver.

“We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: hoping for our luck to change at home and abroad,” he said. “We have to act. We need a new direction, and we have to fight for it.”

McCain’s comments seem very close to some of the blog postings here on this site that criticized President Bush, and that had strong rebuttals from some who now strongly support, strangely enough, John McCain. And the Democratic ticket jumped on McCain for his attempt to get away from President Bush, with Joe Biden mocking the attempt.

“John McCain is now attacking the Bush budget and Bush fiscal policies, which he voted for, I might add,” Biden said at a rally in Charleston, W.Va. “Folks, this is as crazy as, you know, Butch Cassidy attacking the Sundance Kid. I mean, that’s a team.”

Yes McCain and Bush have morphed into McBush, and McCain knows what the result will be because of it. But I would like to hear from the conservatives out there. Is the McCain criticism of Bush valid?