I hate to quibble with this post on Saint John McCain by Ben Adler since I agree with his conclusions. Ben explores the bizarre phenomenon in which gullible pundits refuse to believe their lying eyes and convince themselves that McCain is more than the sum of his very hard right wing record. He writes:
I cringe every time I see a liberal engage in this thinking. As Matt has convincingly argued before, “integrity,” in the sense of standing on principle, is the most overrated virtue in politics. It doesn’t matter whether a politician is secretly pro-choice or anti-choice; what matters is how he or she votes. McCain’s record on reproductive freedom is reprehensible. This defense of McCain also contradicts the Weisberg/Chait argument, which is that he doesn’t really mean half of what he says or does. That McCain seems to somehow get everyone to see what they want to see in him is more than a bit maddening to those of us who, while we appreciate the issues on which he is better than most Republicans (as Cohen points out, he is currently leading the fight against torture), do not want to see another right-wing president.
But here’s the problem, McCain is not leading the fight against torture. Rather, he is leading the fight to suspend habeas corpus and to redefine war crimes as a grave breach of common Article 3, providing enhanced protection to torturers and stripping it from the tortured. McCain is leading the fight for what amounts to a don’t ask don’t tell approach to torture, which is the exact opposite of leading the fight against torture. We should be clear about this.
