John McCain prepped the battlefield in his recent speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and Lee Cary of American Thinker gets down to the nitty-gritty of how McCain owns the issues.

McCain spent his first 300-plus words disclaiming an image that the MSM will eventually try to tag him with: an old, trigger-happy, fighter pilot. Far from trigger-happy - he knows the horror of war.

Then he obliquely juxtaposed his self-descriptive label of realistic idealist with an implied one of naïve idealist to be applied later to whoever becomes his opponent. Why did he not apply the label to both Democrat candidates now? Because he’ll make the realistic versus naïve comparison directly if Obama is the nominee, and indirectly if it’s Clinton, for whom he has more respect. Premature to make it now.

Assume that Obama is the nominee, as is likely. Merely labeling him a naïve idealist won’t be enough. McCain will have to do what President Bush has not done well. He’ll need to make a more compelling case for not withdrawing from Iraq too soon. In this speech he took an articulate step in that direction by linking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with “the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”

Cary takes apart the Democratic attacks point by point - read it here. (Thanks to Conservative Belle for the tip!)

Next, Jonn Lilyea fisks a former Naval Academy classmate and fellow POW of John McCain’s who is now a peace and justice activist with Veterans for Peace (and hence, opposes McCain for President).

Mr. Butler begins by telling us what a piss-poor student and cadet John McCain was. I’m sure he wasn’t the first and as an ROTC instructor, I can tell you he wasn’t the last. The worst story he could recite was the time McCain took Butler, an underclassman, off of the campus grounds to a bar seven miles away and wouldn’t let Butler have a beer. GASP!

The smackdown is a thing of beauty. Read.

Finally, Guy Benson at Townhall analyzes the recent Democrat attacks, and finds them sorely lacking in substance:

The Democrats have offered a few recent glimpses at their initial plan of attack against John McCain, and the clumsy, off-the-mark contents of their general election playbook should be encouraging to Republicans.

Well, it’s not like the Democrats have ever let facts and reality stop them from flinging poo-they assume voters are too ignorant to know the difference. They may just be in for a surprise in November.