John McCain is evil

From The Washington Post, a bit of good news (although for them it must be tragic):

Sen. John McCain's bid to position himself as the natural heir to President Bush as a wartime commander in chief and to court conservative leaders in advance of his likely 2008 presidential campaign has threatened to run aground in recent days, as the two men clash over how to detain and try terrorism suspects.

For months, McCain has been wooing Bush's donors, hiring his former advisers and standing by him in the Iraq debate. But the fragile rapprochement between two men who were once bitter rivals for the presidency is facing a sharp new test over McCain's rejection of Bush's pleas to let the administration interpret the Geneva Conventions as it sees fit.

The impasse, which has preoccupied Congress this month, is likely to be settled within a few days but could remain hanging when lawmakers adjourn in a few days. Either way, it is likely to carry a long echo -- especially if the senator from Arizona forces Bush to back down.

Substantively, the legislative battle will shape what limits the administration will face on its anti-terrorism policies in the final two years of Bush's term. Politically, McCain's willingness once again to confront Bush raises questions about how he will position himself toward the Republican Party's conservative base, which he has aggressively cultivated over the past year as he pursues the presidency.

In a reprise of criticism showered on McCain during his 2000 campaign, some prominent conservatives are branding him a disloyal Republican and an unreliable conservative because of his assertiveness on the detainee issue.

The senator's actions "are blocking our ability to gain from terrorist captives the vital information we need," said a front-page editorial Saturday in the Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., the largest newspaper in the state with the first presidential primary. Conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh said Friday that opposition to Bush's approach "is going to go down as the event that will result in us getting hit again, and if we do, and if McCain, et al. , prevail, I can tell you where fingers are going to be pointed."

If anyone needed proof that John McCain lives in an inside-the-beltway media bubble this is it. McCain is so accustomed to playing for the Washington press corps that he has forgotten that it is the people who will stand in judgment of him.McCain has developed a political strategy which maximizes his political power. By putting together a crew of liberal Republican sycophants who will vote in lockstep with him he has managed to hijack the Senate. By taking his block of votes and siding alternately with the Republican majority then the Democrat minority he is able to us the Senates requirement to have a 60 vote majority to overcome the filibuster to make himself the “key man” in any legislative dispute.

This makes him the darling of the mainstream media elites because he often uses his power to thwart the Republican majority. He depends on the media to help him fool Arizona voters by heaping praise on him and keeping attention focused on how pivotal his role in the Senate is.

In this case he has seriously miscalculated. We have just passed the anniversary of September 11th and we are in the final two months before an election during wartime. The average voter is paying attention. This means that they are not just skimming the headlines with 10% of their mind while the rest is focused on the pressing matter of which video they are going to rent on their way home from work.

People are paying attention to the fact that there are about 1 billion Muslims in the world. We are told that only about 10% are “militant”. This means that there only 100 million willing to pick up an AK or strap on a suicide belt and murder as many of us as they can.

During the Second World War did the combined militaries of the German Reich and the Japanese Empire have as many as 100 million men under arms? Did all the combatant nations on both sides have that many men under arms?

However distracted the American people are they are not dumb. They know that the fact that there has not been a terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 is no accident. They know that an important part of our effort to protect American lives, both at home and on the battlefield, is the ability to extract information from captured terrorists.

The American people know that captured terrorists will often not yield their secrets in response to gentle persuasion. While the average American will say that he/she does not want us to use out-and-out torture, let them believe that a dirty bomb or canister of nerve gas is hidden somewhere near their child’s school and someone we’ve just captured knows exactly where and they will start personally heating up pokers and breaking out the pliers and blowtorch.

Senator McCain forgot this. The voters will remind him in 2008 when he finds his presidential ambitions wrecked and possibly his Senate seat as well.

While I'm at it there is something else I would like to draw your attention to as well:

McCain's defiance of the administration could prove particularly troublesome in South Carolina, the early-primary state where Bush's hard-hitting attacks in 2000 killed McCain's momentum and put the Texas governor on the road to the White House. Yet McCain's most outspoken ally in the detainee dispute is the state's senior senator, freshman Republican Lindsey O. Graham, who spent years as a military lawyer.

In a telephone interview from South Carolina yesterday, Graham said: "What I hear is, people respect the commitment of the president to the [CIA interrogation] program, and they respect my commitment and Senator McCain's commitment to the troops."

It is very difficult to find a quote from Lindsey Graham in which he discusses his position on any issue without relating it to what Senator McCain believes. I remember when Tony Snow was interviewing him about his “gang of 14” betrayal on judicial appointments. Snow kept asking him why he would do what he had done when there were enough Republican votes to pull the trigger on the “nuclear option” and Graham’s answer kept referring to the fact that John McCain wanted to preserve the filibuster for judicial appointments.

I wonder if the people of South Carolina knew that when they sent Graham to the Senate he would be representing John McCain rather than the people of South Carolina. I can only hope that when he stands for reelection the people of SC remind him that his job was to be South Carolina’s voice in Washington, not John McCain’s lickspittle.