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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-04-30

McCain: Soaring In Much The Same Way That Rocks Don't

I have a very good, smart friend who was conservative long before I tilted to the Right, and he has not been in agreement with some of my hard criticisms of Sen. John McCain.

Until today.

This was after McCain appeared on Fox News Sunday. If you didn't see it, read the transcript--it is absolutely disturbing in its delusions and breathtaking in its arrogance.

A couple excerpts:

WALLACE: You were one of two Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts in 2001, one of three Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts two years later.

At that time, you said that they were fiscally reckless and that they skewed — they favored the rich. Now you say you would not allow the tax cuts to expire. Is that a flip-flop?

J. MCCAIN: No, because it would have the effect of a tax increase, and I don't support tax increases.

The fact is that in 2000 I had a proposal that restrained spending. I voted against those tax cuts because there was no restraint of spending, and spending lurched out of control completely.

If we had adopted my proposals for tax cuts, which were huge, we would be talking about further tax cuts today, not out of control and rampant spending in Washington.

Of course, in 2000 McCain's proposal had no chance of being enacted with the Congress and President in place at the time, and this proposal was only during the Presidential campaign, though in the seven years since that he has not managed to resurrect that proposal while operating with a majority [before he gave it away].

WALLACE: Another beef that conservatives have you, I don't have to tell you, is McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. They say it's an assault on free speech, especially by conservative advocates.

When you see candidates spending more money — or raising more money than ever, spending more money than ever, when you see soft money that's now banned from going to the parties instead going to these so-called 527s, which are even less accountable than the parties were, can you honestly say that McCain-Feingold is working?

J. MCCAIN: We've strengthened the parties. There's millions more small donors. We have taken soft money, which was rampant in Washington, out of the game. The 527s are a violation of the '74 law. The 527s are clearly illegal.

It's not a problem with law. It's a problem with the Federal Election Commission who will not enforce the law. So, yeah, we made significant progress, absolutely, and I'm proud of a lot of the results of this.

Well, actually, Senator, since the Court has not ordered any injunction against 527s, and the FEC is a body that has at least equal Republican representation at this time, they actually ARE legal and within the spirit of the law. And, by the way, since most Conservatives consider BCRA illegal in toto but SCOTUS disagrees, you're just out of luck on that argument.

And my favorite excerpt:

WALLACE: Senator, you talked about torture. Former CIA Director Tenet now says that the intelligence that they got from harsh interrogation techniques against some of these big Al Qaida types, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the intelligence they got from them using, reportedly, things like water-boarding, extreme temperatures, was more valuable than all the other CIA and FBI programs.

Were you wrong? I mean, this is the CIA, former CIA director, saying this. Were you wrong to limit what CIA interrogators could do?

J. MCCAIN: A man I admire more than anyone else, General Jack Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, battlefield commission, told me once — he said, "John, any intelligence information we might gain through the use of torture could never, ever counterbalance the image that it does — the damage that it does to our image in the world."

I agree with him. Look at the war in Algeria. Look, the fact is if you torture someone, they're going to tell you anything they think you want to know. It is an affront to everything we stand for and believe in.

It's interesting to me that every retired military officer, whether it be Colin Powell or whether it be former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — everybody who's been in war doesn't want to torture people and think that it's the wrong thing to do. And history shows that.

We cannot torture people and maintain our moral superiority in the world.

WALLACE: But when...

J. MCCAIN: And that's a fact.

WALLACE: But when George Tenet says...

J. MCCAIN: I don't care what George Tenet says. I know what's right. I know what's morally right as far as America's behavior.

WALLACE: But if I may, sir...

J. MCCAIN: Yes, sir.

WALLACE: ... when George Tenet says we saved live through some of these techniques...

J. MCCAIN: I don't accept it. I don't accept that fundamental thesis, because it's never worked throughout history.

And so again, I know this for a fact, and anyone who's had experience with this, I think, that's — well, the people I respect will tell you that if you inflect enough physical pain on someone, they will tell you anything they think you want to know in order to relieve that pain.
That's just a fundamental fact. And we've gotten a huge amount of misinformation as well as other information from these techniques.

I don't even know what to say about this one. Luckily, Andy McCarthy has pretty well taken this apart.

"Moral superiority". . . How'd that moral superiority feel in the VietCong concentration camp, Senator?

I've said it before: John McCain's history, as much as it makes him a hero, also makes him pathologically incapable of being Commander-in-Chief in a time of war.
Posted by: Michael / 4/30/2007 01:06:00 AM

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