elfs | Wednesday's Brain: All McCain, All The Time (Reply)

Does George Bush Think John McCain Was Tortured?: In one of the more powerful argument currently making its way through the blogosphere, Andrew Sullivan asks and answers that important question this way:
In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. ...

In the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.
As the sign says, Read It All.
Yglesias is charitable: "McCain is an unprincipled sellout": Matthew Yglesias takes the positive view. Brooks has lost his McCain-colored sunglasses. McCain has become a typical hack politician doing typical hack politician stuff, and putting personal ambition ahead of his personal principles. Brooks will still vote McCain because McCain better serves Brooks's own ideology, but the idea that McCain is a "maverick" is simply no longer tenable.
Hilzoy: "McCain is an automaton propped up by his staff.": Hilzoy reads Brooks's defense of McCain's recent turn to Rovian tactics, and finds them risible. Brooks's column contains no agency: "McCain hasn't been able... McCain and his advisors have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment," and calls Brooks out:
Compelled? No choice? I don't think so. For one thing, there are lots of ways in which McCain could campaign without lying or impugning his opponent's patriotism. Some of them might even win. If McCain's advisors can't think of a single one of them, that shows only their limited imaginations.
Hilzoy spells out that if cirumstances were that bad, then McCain's choice is between honor and ambition, between decency and moral squalor, and McCain has chosen the latter.

Barack Obama's speech yesterday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars highlighted McCain's choice:
I have never suggested that Senator McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America's national interest. Now, it's time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.
I'm waiting for John McCain to do just that.