The Great Fall - Updated
The Republican base seems to be having a hard time warming up to their presumptive nominee. McCan's made a few moves against the wishes of the base, and particularly during the 2000 campaign, he did the unpardonable by calling out the religious right for the nutjobs they are, but he's spent the last seven years doing all he could to suck up to the base in any number of ways, and yesterday he picked another opportunity to do just that.
The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Wednesday afternoon to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects.
Senate Republicans generally opposed the bill, but several of them also did not want to cast a vote that could be construed as supporting torture, and so were relying on President Bush to make good on a threat to veto legislation limiting C.I.A. interrogation techniques.
So what did the man who spent time being tortured in a Veit Cong prison camp, who was a lone voice of sanity in the Republican debates when his opponents were blustering about doubling Guantanamo and letting Jack Bauer be their role model for "aggressive interrogation techniques", who has spoken out repeatedly about the use of these torture methods, do when he was offered the chance to vote to ban them?
Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.
Yep. After gathering to himself all of the moderate and independent-minded conservatives looking for a break from the power-happy administration of the Bush years and a return to the possibly mythical days when Republicans didn't just talk about morals but actually possessed some, the might "maverick" fell in line with his Republican colleagues and voted against banning waterboarding.
Way to stand on principle.
Update:
What John Cole says. Anybody really surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to what McCain has been doing over the last seven years.
