Month: March 2008

It Can Wait

by digby

This seems like a very odd day to make this statement:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey vowed anew Thursday to crack down on crooked politicians and public officials, dismissing critics who accuse the Justice Department of letting partisan loyalties interfere with corruption cases.

[…]

“It’s often in the interest of someone to charge politicization whenever a prominent public figure is investigated or prosecuted,” Mukasey said during a noontime speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “I find it notable that they make these accusations in the media, rather than before a court.”

Tell it to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

This guy has turned out to be far worse than even I imagined, smoothly continuing the Bush Justice Department’s primary mission which was partisan prosecutions. Spitzer’s investigation stinks to high heaven.

They need to stay out of the corruption prosecution business until a new president is sworn in. Their credibility on the matter is just a tad frayed.

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Hope For Justice

by dday

Activism and relentless focus from progressives and a few journalists have yielded fruit. Don Siegelman is free pending appeal.

Former Gov. Don Siegelman will be released from prison, after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him an appeal bond, the lead prosecutor in the case said.

Acting U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin said he received a courtesy call from the court today. “He’s going to be released,” Franklin said.

He said he was disappointed but said, “The 11th Circuit has the discretion to do that and I respect that.”

…I just got off the phone with Hiram Eastland, one of Siegelman’s lawyers, who said that today the appeals court had issued a “straightforward” four-page order simply finding that there were, indeed, “substantial questions” raised by Siegelman’s appeal. The ruling overruled the controversial finding by the district judge in the case, which had sent Siegelman immediately to prison after his conviction.

The House Judiciary Committee was already seeking Siegelman’s temporary release to testify before them, and now that he will be released, I expect that hearing will take place.

The Siegelman case is maybe the clearest case of Bush’s Justice Department misconduct, and Karl Rove is right in the middle of all of it. Rove had better give Gold Bars Luskin a call – time for some more billable hours.

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Return On Success

by dday

So Bush today scolded the nattering nabobs of negativism on Iraq and claimed that the country is making good progress toward political reconciliation.

As if on cue, news came out that two Americans had been killed in rocket attacks inside the Green Zone, the city of Baghdad is under a weekend curfew, per MSNBC all Green Zone personnel has been told to stay inside fortified areas, and the Iraqi Army may have “faltered” in Basra:

Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.

With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.

Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias — who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade — would not stop at mere insurrection.

Or, as Bush would put it, “good progress”.

It’s time more than ever for leading Democrats to speak up on the war. The country is in flames.

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Ever Tried

by digby

Chris Hayes at The Nation writes about The Responsible Plan:

In the face of this official indifference to public opinion, it is tempting to succumb to despair. The antiwar strategy, after all, has not been static. In the run-up to the war, organizers managed to pull together the largest simultaneous worldwide demonstrations in history. That didn’t work. Then the antiwar movement channeled much of its energy into electoral politics, helping to elect Democratic majorities in both houses. That hasn’t worked either. So we find ourselves in the situation of Beckett’s protagonist in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Although the electoral strategy has not yet borne fruit, it is still the most viable option, barring a draft or a radical turn in public opinion that would once again bring people en masse into the streets. (There are, of course, parallel strategies to be pursued. Passing a ban on mercenaries in Iraq would make the occupation untenable.) The question, then, becomes how to create the electoral conditions that maximize the power and representation of the majority who want the war ended. The antiwar caucus doesn’t have enough votes to override a delusional President or enough members willing to bear the political risk of cutting off funding for the war. The solution to this impasse is, in the words of Congressional candidate Darcy Burner, to elect “more and better Democrats”–Democrats who have publicly committed to pursuing a legislative strategy to end the war. […]
As an organizer working on the Responsible Plan stressed to me, it is an explicitly legislative road map, to be pursued by Congress with or without a President committed to withdrawal. Among other actions the plan calls for war funding to be brought into the normal budgetary process, as opposed to the ersatz emergency supplementals, which detach the cost of the war from the rest of the nation’s discretionary spending. The plan also highlights more than a dozen bills that have already been introduced, like HR 2247, the Montgomery GI Bill for Life Act of 2007, which the signatories would support if elected.

I hear that more than 40 challengers have signed on now. The mainstream press is starting to pay attention. Perhaps Democrats really can change the conversation on national security and start talking sense instead of reacting to right wing gasbag calumny. Make the hawks react to us for a change.

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Make Them Do It

by digby

Authors Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater) have written an important article about ending the war. The central thrust of the piece is that we should be using this prolonged primary to leverage the two candidates against each other on the issue instead of joining in the fun and games of primary politics.

There is no question that the Bush administration has proven impervious to public pressure. That’s why it’s time for the anti-war movement to change tactics. We should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders. Many argue otherwise. They say that if we want to end the war, we should simply pick a candidate who is not John McCain and help them win: We’ll sort out the details after the Republicans are evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Some of the most prominent anti-war voices–from MoveOn.org to the magazine we write for, The Nation–have gone this route, throwing their weight behind the Obama campaign. This is a serious strategic mistake. It is during a hotly contested campaign that anti-war forces have the power to actually sway U. S. policy. As soon as we pick sides, we relegate ourselves to mere cheerleaders. And when it comes to Iraq, there is little to cheer. Look past the rhetoric and it becomes clear that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has a real plan to end the occupation. They could, however, be forced to change their positions–thanks to the unique dynamics of the prolonged primary battle. Despite the calls for Clinton to withdraw in the name of “unity,” it is the very fact that Clinton and Obama are still fighting it out, fiercely vying for votes, that presents the anti-war movement with its best pressure point. And our pressure is badly needed.

I agree with this, although sadly, I think it’s probably too late for the netroots. I had hoped all along that we would work together as a movement, leveraging our issues in the primary when we had the attention of the candidates. As Klein and Scahill put it: be players not cheerleaders.

You know how these things work. They move left in the primary to get the nomination — and then rush to the center in the general. If you’re a liberal, you need to get your candidate to position himself as close to you as possible before they do that so they don’t wind up being Joe Lieberman when the whole thing is said and done. And during the primaries, when candidates still care about what you think, you can play them off against each other to get there. It sets the terms of the debate and creates a mandate that otherwise will likely end up being “finessed” once they have to compete with a conservative.

The netroots chose not to do that and it seems to me we are way too invested in our chosen candidates to try to leverage our support now. But Klein and Scahill, both very fine writers and thinkers, believe it’s still possible for the anti-war movement to affect how these candidates deal with Iraq and if that’s the case then it may be worth a try. We’ve got an eternity before the next primary and just about every insult has been hurled and every paean has been written. Perhaps we could set aside our differences long enough to try to encourage our congresspeople to sign on to The Responsible Plan and make sure the Democratic presidential candidates don’t waffle on Iraq when the heat is on?

I’ve written this before and I’m sure I’ll do it again:

President Franklin Roosevelt recognized that his ability to push New Deal legislation through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protesters. He once told a group of activists who sought his support for legislation, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.”

We don’t help our cause or our candidates by failing to “make them do it.” It’s our end of the deal.

H/T Lambert
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Constitutional Concern Trolls

by digby

I’ve been enjoying all the deep concern and hand wringing that Republican gasbags and pundits are expressing over the Democratic primary. It’s always so nice of them to give advice and try to help us out. I’m sure they have our best interests at heart.

But I must confess that I’m actually a little stunned by this one:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Justice Department official John Yoo blasts the Democratic party for its “undemocratic” system of superdelegates:

“This delegate dissonance wasn’t anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary America to go on. All but one of America’s first state constitutions gave state assemblies the power to choose the governor. James Madison commented that this structure allowed legislatures to turn governors into ‘little more than ciphers.'”

Could somebody please tell me again how the electoral college is democratic, because back in 2000 something weird happened and I got all confused.

Without even commenting on the ludicrousness of Yoo a) worrying about the Democratic party’s nominating process and b) worrying about the constitution, it’s obvious that what Yoo conceives as the framers’ vision was an elected dictatorship. He just has no respect for any other office. He’s so obsessed with the fear that executives will be “turned into ciphers” that you have to wonder just what kind of psychological issues this guy has. (After all, there’s the indefinite imprisonment and torture thing too …)

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Cosmological Flyboy

by digby

Neal Gabler has a fascinating article today in the NY Times about the relationship between St. McCain and his Hannah Montana fanboys in the press. I think he really gets to the nub of the mutual fascination — and outlines how McCain manages to fool a good number of Americans into thinking he is really a closet liberal despite being a raving wingnut:

Mr. McCain’s joviality and seeming honesty with the press in 2000 constituted a very effective scheme indeed, until it came time to woo actual Republican voters. As Time’s Jay Carney once put it, “You get the sense you’re being manipulated by candor, rather than manipulated by subterfuge and deception, but it is a strategy.”What makes 2008 different — and why I think Mr. McCain can be called the first postmodernist presidential candidate — is his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press and, more important, his willingness, even eagerness, to let the press in on his own machinations of them. On the bus, Mr. McCain openly talks about his press gambits. According to Mr. Lizza, Mr. McCain proudly brandished an index card with a “gotcha” quote from Mitt Romney that the senator had given Tim Russert of “Meet the Press,” a journalist few would expect to need help in finding candidates’ gaffes. In exposing his two-way relationship with the press this way, he reveals the absurdity of the political process as a big game. He also reveals his own gleeful cynicism about it. This sort of disdain might be called a liberal view, if not politically then culturally. The notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic is a staple of “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Real Time With Bill Maher” and other liberal exemplars, though they, of course, implicate the press in the idiocy. Mr. McCain’s sense of irony makes him their spiritual kin — a cosmological liberal — which may be why conservatives distrust him and liberals like Jon Stewart seem to revere him. They are reacting to something deeper than politics. They are reacting to his vision of how the world operates and to his attitude about it, something it is easy to suspect he acquired while a prisoner of war.Though Mr. McCain can be the most self-deprecating of candidates (yet another reason the news media love him), his vision of the process also betrays an obvious superiority — one the mainstream political news media, a group of liberal cosmologists, have long shared. If in the past he flattered the press by posing as its friend, he is now flattering it by posing as its conspirator, a secret sharer of its cynicism. He is the guy who “gets it.” He sees what the press sees. Michael Scherer, a blogger for Time, called him the “coolest kid in school.

This is the problem. The macho “maverick” is the coolest kid in school and all the breathless media villagers are thrilled to be in his orbit. It’s why they are always telling us that his panders don’t mean anything. Everybody knows that cool guys think crazy preachers like Falwell and Hagee are losers. It’s a show for the rubes. Just like democracy.

It’s the same thing that fueled their sophomoric coverage of the earnest Big Bore Al Gore and the green tea swilling ponce, John Kerry. Those flaccid wimps took themselves waay too seriously, with all their dull planning documents and long winded speeches about mortgages and lock boxes and such. JJ the Maverick knows it’s all bullshit — just like they do. Only the half-wit public thinks that stuff matters. In one ear and out the other.

Obama is cool, but not in the proper ironic, post modern way the press loves so much. His call to hope and change is probably going to give McCain and his fanboys a lot of laughs down the road. Look at all the silly hippies. And even if he were a cynic and a ironist, which he isn’t, Obama is stuck with the liberal party and they are, like, totally uncool with all their useless blabbering about icky women’s issues and goo-goo anti-war crap and talk about poor people. Talk about a bunch of bringdowns.

This relationship between the press and McCain is lethal. They’re already subject to GOP narratives about the faggy, mommy party and having their awesome maverick actually in the race is a perfect opportunity to show their cool, manly bonafides. They’ll be on the straight talk express no matter what crazy bullshit McCain spews out. Because they know he really doesn’t mean it. He’s a cool guy, just like them, and they don’t mean anything they say either.

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Sensible Centrist Crisis Manufacturing

by dday

This is a dumb article.

Presidential hopefuls are mum on Medicare and Social Security woes

With the presidential campaign going full tilt, a new government report on a big national problem is usually followed by volleys of rhetoric from the candidates. But on Tuesday, when the annual report on the precarious state of Medicare and Social Security came out, the reaction was not exactly deafening.

The two programs on which millions of elderly Americans depend are apparently just too hot to handle — especially since any realistic solution is likely to involve a politically unpalatable mix of higher taxes and lower benefits.

Apparently, the candidates aren’t worshipping at the High Broderist altar of entitlement reform quite enough for the refined tastes of media elites. It’s an easy issue to demagogue (“They’re going to run out of money!”) but nobody wants to tell the truth about it.

The trustee’s report on Medicare and Social Security showed the programs “running out of money” at the same time in the future as the year before. In other words there’s no financial deterioration in these programs, and they have massive trust funds to cover the distant possibility that expenditures will outpace receipts.

Medicare is a problem, but it’s a symptom of the much larger problem of soaring costs in health care. And both Democratic candidates have extremely detailed programs to deal with that in a comprehensive way. So “being mum about Medicare” apparently means “having a plan to fix health care including Medicare.”

Social Security is most assuredly NOT a problem. As Paul Krugman notes, statistically speaking the program is in better shape in 2008 than it is in 1993. This doesn’t compute because we’ve been fed this line, and are continuing to be fed this line, that the baby boomers are all retiring and the entitlement system is a minute away from collapse. This has become hardened conventional wisdom that “everybody knows,” and so when the Secretary of the Treasury comes out and claims that government benefit programs are in trouble, everyone nods sagely. Happens to be untrue, and you’ll never guess the reason why: undocumented immigrants.

(L)ast year the trustees estimated that Social Security had an overall 75-year deficit of 1.95% of taxable payroll. This year it’s 1.70%. That’s a pretty substantial improvement. What caused it? […]

In previous reports, the other-immigrant population was projected using assumed annual numbers of net other immigrants with a static age-sex distribution. For this year’s report, the annual numbers of net other immigrants are projected by explicitly modeling other immigrants and other emigrants separately.

Translation: instead of just pulling a net number out of a hat, the trustees built a model that estimated the actual demographic characteristics of both immigrants and emigrants. And guess what?

• Illegal immigrants tend to skew young. This benefits the system.

• Young people have more children than older people. This benefits the system.

• Some illegal immigrants pay taxes for a few years and then leave. This benefits the system.

Bottom line: “This year’s report results in […] a substantial increase in the number of working-age individuals contributing payroll taxes, but a relatively smaller increase in the number of retirement-age individuals receiving benefits in the latter half of the long-range period.” Give or take a bit, it turns out that this shores up the Social Security system to the tune of around $13 billion per year. Thanks, illegal immigrants!

This is one of those issues where the “sensible realist” proposal is actually radically skewed to suit the needs of the “drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub” crowd. Entitlements are mostly fine. Health care itself is in crisis and needs major cost control reform, but Medicare and Social Security are successful government programs. That’s why they must be demonized as “on the verge of collapse” by conservatives who must never allow the perspective that government can work to enter the mainstream, and a lazy media elite goes ahead and believes them.

I’m assuming that most people reading this kind of already know all this, but it’s good fodder for your conversations with those who don’t.

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Fit McCain for Leg Irons

by dday

John McCain is a fugitive from justice. He spoke at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council as a man on the lam. With every passing day, every fill-up of diesel for the Straight Talk Express, every sandwich, every long-distance phone call to a lobbyist friend, he is further breaking the campaign finance laws. He has overspent federal limits while remaining in the public system for the primaries. And the netroots is doing something about it.

Yesterday afternoon, FDL’s Jane Hamsher filed a complaint with the FEC charging John McCain with violations of campaign finance law for spending beyond limits imposed by his decision to take public financing.

McCain has claimed he is backing off that decision, and justifies it with the fact that he never received any of that public money. However, the law clearly states that he is bound by those limits if he uses the promise of those funds in order to secure campaign loans — something he absolutely did.

I signed on to this early, and I would have tried to make a citizen’s arrest in LA today if I had been awake earlier (this is why I’m not a cop). You can sign on to the complaint as well here. The full text is here (PDF). This is a great action by the netroots.

Book ’em, Dan-o!

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National Greatness

by digby

Howie at DWT points me to this fascinating column in the Financial Times about John McCain which ties in with something I wrote the other day (and many times before) about American “exceptionalism” and imperialism. I said that the liberal argument, informed as it is by our allegedly traitorous belief that America is capable of making mistakes, actually makes our foreign policy stronger — or at least more rational. The problem is that the rabid hawks are experts at catapulting the calumny from the sidelines, making it very difficult to act more rationally.

One can’t help but remember this plaintive wail from Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam:

“Well, they would impeach a president that would run out, wouldn’t they? …I haven’t got the nerve to do it, and I don’t see any other way out of it,” Johnson said.

“It doesn’t make sense to do it,” Russell said. “It’s one of these things where heads I win, tails you lose.”

In those days there were plenty of hawks in the Democratic party and plenty of Doves in the GOP, so it wasn’t a partisan thing — and he was probably right. He would have been screwed no matter what he did. Being a politician, he was not all that hard pressed to decide whether it was more important to get his signature civil rights legislation signed or risk being impeached (or at least rendered politically impotent) for surrendering to the commies. Such is the stranglehhold the wingnuts have on national security. It’s tough for any Democratic president to go against that militarist American grain, even harder for one who has not worn the uniform or who doesn’t have a lot of national security cred.

Expect President Obama to get a lot of resistence from the Pentagon and the Republicans on foreign policy. They went all in on imperial adventurism a long time ago and they aren’t likely to back off now. (This is where a nice fat national mandate comes in handy.)

President McCain, however, can be expected to blaze new trails of American hubris. He is a “national greatness conservative” which can be described as a lethal combination of neoconservatism and Kissingerian realism (in McCains case, with the temperament of Frank Sinatra on too much coffee and nicotine.)

Mark Danner explains in this fine article about the War on Terror how those two philosophies came together on Iraq:

One can argue long and hard about the roots of the Iraq War, but in the end one must tease out a set of realist compulsions (centrally concerned with the restoration of American credibility and American deterrent power) and idealist aspirations (shaped around the so-called Democratic Domino effect). The realist case was well summarized, once again, by Henry Kissinger, who, when asked by a Bush speechwriter why he supported the Iraq War, replied: “Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” In the conflict with radical Islam, he went on, “They want to humiliate us and we have to humiliate them.” The Iraq war was essential in order to make the point that “we’re not going to live in the world that they want for us.”

Ron Suskind, in his fine book The One Percent Doctrine, puts what is essentially the same point in “geostrategic” terms, reporting that, in meetings of the National Security Council in the months after the 9/11 attacks, the main concern “was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.”

Set alongside this was the “democratic tsunami” that was to follow the shock-and-awe triumph over Saddam. It would sweep through the Middle East from Iraq to Iran and thence to Syria and Palestine. (“The road to Jerusalem” — so ran the neoconservative gospel at the time — “runs through Baghdad.”)

That’s all worked out very well, hasn’t it? The entire world now sees that the US military is stretched to the limits by this occupation, our intelligence services couldn’t find water if they fell out of a boat and our leadership is a bunch of morons. And that doesn’t even begin to address the thing that all of us unserious DFH’s were pointing out back in 2002, which is that invading Iraq was a terrorist recruitment program — exactly the opposite of what Kissinger and his pals intended it to be. Thanks for making the country safer fellas.

It’s that weird combination of violent aggression and romantic self-righteousness that animates the NGCs, and makes them worse than either the realists or the neocons alone. It’s the Bush foreign policy, which McCain is adopting wholesale and then adding to it his own psychotic spin. He’s not only a national greatness conservative, he’s also got some really bizarre — and dangerous — geopolitical obsessions. From the Financial Times article

Reflecting the neo-conservative programme of spreading democracy by force, Mr McCain declared in 2000: “I’d institute a policy that I call ‘rogue state rollback’. I would arm, train, equip, both from without and from within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments and install free and democratically elected governments.” Mr McCain advocates attacking Iran if necessary in order to prevent it developing nuclear weapons, and last year was filmed singing “Bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”.

Mr McCain suffers from more than the usual degree of US establishment hatred of Russia, coupled with a particular degree of sympathy for Georgia and the restoration of Georgian rule over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He advocates the expulsion of Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations and, like Mr Scheunemann, is a strong supporter of early Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine. Mr Scheunemann has accused even Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, of “appeasement” of Russia. Nato expansion exemplifies the potential of a McCain presidency. Apart from the threat of Russian reprisals, if the Georgians thought that in a war they could rely on US support, they might be tempted to start one. A McCain presidency would give them good reason to have faith in US support.

Mr McCain’s policies would not be so worrying were it not for his notorious quickness to fury in the face of perceived insults to himself or his country. Even Thad Cochran, a fellow Republican senator, has said: “I certainly know no other president since I’ve been here who’s had a temperament like that.”

For all his bellicosity, President George W. Bush has known how to deal cautiously and diplomatically with China and even Russia. Could we rely on Mr McCain to do the same?

No. His personality is undiplomatic and incautious and if the country gives this man power he will use it. Unlike most warriors who become politicians (as opposed to chickenhawks) he truly believes in the romantic glory of war and wants to use the military to project American greatness around the world.

Mr McCain exemplifies “Jacksonian nationalism” – after Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century Indian-fighter and president – and the Scots-Irish military tradition from which both men sprung. As Mr McCain’s superb courage in North Vietnamese captivity and his honourable opposition to torture by US forces demonstrate, he also possesses the virtues of that tradition. Then again, some of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century were caused by brave, honourable men with a passionate sense of national mission.

Jackson was certainly a National Greatness kind of guy:

Andrew Jackson, from Tennessee, was a forceful proponent of Indian removal. In 1814 he commanded the U.S. military forces that defeated a faction of the Creek nation. In their defeat, the Creeks lost 22 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama. The U.S. acquired more land in 1818 when, spurred in part by the motivation to punish the Seminoles for their practice of harboring fugitive slaves, Jackson’s troops invaded Spanish Florida.

From 1814 to 1824, Jackson was instrumental in negotiating nine out of eleven treaties which divested the southern tribes of their eastern lands in exchange for lands in the west. The tribes agreed to the treaties for strategic reasons. They wanted to appease the government in the hopes of retaining some of their land, and they wanted to protect themselves from white harassment.

Jackson also, by the way, burned every Seminole village he came across in Florida killing everything in his wake. You see, he needed to “let them know that we were not going to live in the world that they wanted for us.” The dominoes of democracy all fell the right way and today we have Disney World, thus proving that Bush and McCain are geniuses.

The FT article indicates that Europeans are seriously concerned that the US is going to cement its reputation as a rogue superpower by electing McCain. That should be out primary concern above all else in November. Electing McCain will definitely make this country less safe as the rest of the world comes to realize that they are going to have to band together to contain us. Even our allies are skeptical of our motives and a powerful country always breeds suspicion. But there has now been enough distance from 9/11, and Iraq has been such an epic cock-up, that there can be no more question: if the American people validate this policy again, we will have told the world “bring it on.” I don’t think that makes us stronger or safer, do you?

(And btw, McCain doesn’t really oppose torture. He just says he does and gets a great deal of acclaim for his “maverick” position as usual, while helping to pass legislation that makes it legal. His teflon is industrial strength.)

Update:

Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war.

–Sen. John McCain, March 26, 2008
Uh huh.