McCain gives up on the White House

From The Washington Post:

A Senate committee rebuffed the personal entreaties of President Bush yesterday, rejecting his proposed strategies for interrogating and trying enemy combatants and approving alternative legislation that he has strenuously opposed.

The bipartisan vote sets up a legislative showdown on an issue that GOP strategists had hoped would unite their party and serve as a cudgel against Democrats in the Nov. 7 elections. Instead, Bush and congressional Republican leaders are at loggerheads with a dissident group led by Sen. John McCain (R), who says the president's approach would jeopardize the safety of U.S. troops and intelligence operatives.

Despite heavy lobbying by Bush, who visited the Capitol yesterday, and Vice President Cheney, who was there Tuesday, McCain and his allies held fast. Even former secretary of state Colin L. Powell weighed in on McCain's side.

Moments after the Armed Services Committee voted 15 to 9 to endorse McCain's alternative bill, the Arizona senator lashed out at CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who had also lobbied lawmakers personally.

McCain told reporters that Hayden wants Congress to give the CIA a virtually free hand to treat detainees as it wishes so that he and his agents will be immunized against accusations of unlawful conduct. "He's trying to protect his reputation at the risk of America's reputation," McCain said. The senator noted that other nations would be more likely to abuse U.S. captives if Americans appeared to sanction such conduct.

Perhaps evil lunitic John McCain is so disconnected from reality that he doesn't realize that American soldiers who are captured by the jihadist barbarians can already expect to have their mutilated bodies discovered in some alley or garbage dump.

The American people want captured terrorists questioned by whatever means are necessary to extract the needed information. If that means lopping three or four fingers off with a bolt cutter and burning one of their eyes out with a cigar as a way of saying hello then fine. Just don't show us pictures of it (well I'd like to see the pictures, but I'm speaking for the average American here).

This will sink McCain's chances of becoming president, and we should all be grateful for that. No one who prefers the comfort of Islamofascist savages over the lives of American citizens will ever sit in the Oval Office.