Tag: mccain

The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.

“On June 16, 2015, the United States Senate voted 78-21 to adopt an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 that reaffirmed the prohibition on torture by limiting interrogation techniques to those in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual does not include waterboarding or other forms of enhanced interrogation. The law requires the field manual to be updated to ensure it ‘complies with the legal obligations of the United States and reflects current, evidence-based, best practices for interrogation that are designed to elicit reliable and voluntary statements and do not involve the use or threat of force.’ Furthermore, the law requires any revisions to the field manual be made available to the public 30 days prior to the date the revisions take effect.

Senator John McCain (R), Arizona and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, doubles down on his "I'll see Trump in court" language. This is definitely where the rubber meets the road. Will McCain actually hold the line, or will he fall into line when they either a) resume torturing without regard to the law or b) just revise the Field Manual to include whatever forms of torture they prefer? I'm guessing there will be a thirty day public comment period for which the announcement of said comment period and the contents of the text to be commented on is classified or otherwise disallowed from release to the public. Later, when the practice of torture inevitably leaks in a politically damaging way, various members of Congress and media sources will reveal that, oh, yeah, we knew about and sat on that for months. Didn't seem important what with all those Hillary emails and the Twitter. And so the republic burns.

Today’s GOP: Futile and Bizarre

This urge among conservatives to refight the 2008 election is as futile as it is bizarre, premised as it is on the existence of a secret video or document from Obama’s “hidden” past that will expose the moderate Democrat as the hardcore left-wing radical they already believe him to be. But as [FOXnews contributor Brian] Kilmeade pointed out, Obama’s actual policy record – the only thing that actually matters – provides no proof of that alleged radicalism. Thus conservatives are put in the paradoxical situation of relying more and more heavily on “secret” videos and documents from Obama’s past that become less relevant with each passing day of the Obama presidency.

But, but, but: Obama was never vetted. That’s the most important thing.

It’s as though the GOP collectively ignored just how fierce that Democratic primary in the run-up to the 2008 elections was. And, frankly, one of the wages of their epic epistemic closure is just that: inattention to just what it is The Democrat gets up to day to day.
So let’s recap: Anything and everything worth using against candidate Obama was used against candidate Obama back in 2008. Now, they’re always certain they’ve got the super-secret powder-keg that McCain either didn’t know about or wouldn’t use; mostly these arrive in the form of hyping years-old video that, in this case as in almost every case, is and was easily available on YouTube. Predictably, the dread Librul Media is somehow convinced to hyperventilate about each of these and “report” on the countdown to the latest nothing-burger’s release. Drudge is, after all, still the Village’s assignment editor.

But, as Media Matters sagely points out: Even if GOP operatives had found the super-duper evidence that in some past speech Obama admitted that he hates the whites, wants to take their guns, and plans to turn ‘Merica into a socialist dreamworld that would make Castro blush, how could that possibly be more important and/or relevant than four years of governing that shows trends towards absolutely none of these things. Quite the opposite, actually. Even in the most fevered of swamps, that’s one hell of a Bill Ayers plan; get Obama elected, govern center-right for four years (to better court the full fury of his original and most passionate base, apparently). Then, upon achieving some narrowly figured reelection, blow the doors off and reveal the super-secret socialist masterpiece of a plan that will pass a still uniformly intransigent Congress, uh, some way or other. Genius!

Sharia law, here we come. It’s what Reverend Wright has been preaching all along, I tells ya.

Today’s GOP: Futile and Bizarre

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means. […]

As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.

John McCain, The Washington Post, May 12, 2011

Good thing this guy never ran for President. Would’ve been a tough out against all Democratic comers.

h/t: kohenari

(via politicalprof)

Not Equal to the Challenge

John McCain, 2008: We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers [of climate change] are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.
John McCain, 2010: It’s an inexact science.
Ezra Klein, 2011: I take that as an exact answer to McCain’s original question: No, our government is not equal to the challenge.
Lemkin: The moment people are even one one hundredth as irrationally terrified of carbon emissions as they are of dread “radiation” (regardless of source, quantity, exposure, time, distance, shielding, or any other mitigating factor: sweet merciful Flying Spaghetti Monster, it’s RADIATION!!!!!) then we’ll be getting somewhere on the issue. Until then: Al Gore is fat. It snowed today. And etc… The fact is: carbon emissions (and the associated other outputs of fossil fuel use) have a real, daily, and quantifiable health impact upon us all over and above the impacts on the broader global environment. That’s a collective impact that is almost certainly immeasurably greater in terms of real damage to lives, lifespan, and property than that of all nuclear accidents everywhere and forever combined. But, hey: Charlie Sheen everyone!

Agin it afore I was fer it. Now agin it. Agin.

McCain, 1999: Ethanol subsidies should be phased out…we don’t need ethanol subsidies. It doesn’t help anybody.
McCain, 2003: Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality.
McCain, 2008: I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects
McCain, 2011: Ethanol is a joke [and government programs promoting the corn-derived fuel are wasting money].

He’s a bitter man now, who can barely tolerate the fact that he lost to Barack Obama. But he lost for an obvious reason: his campaign proved him to be puerile and feckless, a politician who panicked when the heat was on during the financial collapse, a trigger-happy gambler who chose an incompetent for his vice president. He has made quite a show ever since of demonstrating his petulance and lack of grace.

Joe Klein reflects on the fall from grace of one John McCain.
It’s both strong stuff and true, but the sad part is that he was always like this, it’s just that he was the MSM’s particular darling because he would sit there with them on Bullshit One and tickle their own bottomless fonts of self-importance for as long as they could stand it. Now that he’s through with national politics, and knows it, he (apparently) isn’t bothering anymore. And so blow-back against Saint John McCain (finally) begins. Keep on tapping, Tashtego.

PAM McCain II: Electric Boogaloo

10-2006 McCain: “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it,” McCain said in October 2006 to an audience of Iowa State University students.
Early 2010 McCain: [Gates told the Armed Services Committee, “I fully support the president’s decision.”] In response, McCain declared himself “disappointed” in the testimony. “At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” he said bluntly, before describing it as “imperfect but effective.”
11-30-2010 McCain: In all due respect, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not directly in charge of the troops. The Secretary of Defense is a political appointee who’s never been in the military. And the president, obviously, has had no background or experience in the military whatsoever. […] I’m paying attention to the commandant of the Marine Corps.
Lemkin: Good to know who we’re going to for military policy, this week, anyway. What happens when the commandant comes around? For all of Obama’s minor flaws, it’s good to remember that putting up with Movin’ Them Goalposts, McFlipflopper McCain would have been utterly unbearable.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

…the McCain phenomenon has always baffled me. Even back in the glory days of the Straight Talk Express he seemed like a consummate phony to me, sucking up to reporters not because he was being unusually candid, but because it seemed like a good strategy to beat a well-financed guy who was running ahead of him. He’s always been nasty, he’s always been hot tempered, he’s always looked out for number one, and he’s always been willing to take whatever position was convenient at the time.

Yep. The media enjoyed the perception of total access, and thus created the myth of the maverick. As David Foster Wallace showed us (but whose text no longer appears to be online), the truth of “Bullshit 1” was always out there, they just refused to mention it. Too busy talking about Al Gore being told to wear un-American four button suits while discovering the Love Canal and then lying about these and other entirely media-created falsehoods.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

South of the Border

Very fine piece on the foolishness of our current immigration debate:

Two days earlier, Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”

In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.

South of the Border

That was surreal. Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.

Maybe I shouldn’t be president, but [McCain] definitely shouldn’t be.

Barack Obama, as reported by Jonathan Alter, reacting to the pre-election meeting with Hank Paulson, McCain, various members of Congress, and then-president Bush