~ Political interlude ~

Do not be alarmed P Clubbers - the light-hearted, clippity-cloppity, breying-'n'-neighing fun will return shorty. We now present:

~ Some dull political commentary ~

In response to a reader's comment:

...the essence of Obama's campaign needs to be "John McCain will do anything to get elected."

-snip-

This is short. And it's easy to remember. And it counters McCain's own branding of himself as a Maverick.

Josh Marshall wonders,

"why this point hasn't been hit harder or hasn't caught on more even irrespective of the campaign. Because here you've got a guy who's literally abandoned everything he supposedly used to believe in, all to be president. There really is nothing he wouldn't do."

As if taking a cue, Andrew Sullivan unleashes a ferociously good take down of McCain on almost exactly that tack. Here are a few choice parts, but you'd do well to read the rest.

"In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar? According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

- snip-

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

-snip-

[T]he actual techniques used on McCain, and the lies they were designed to legitimize, are a matter of historical record. And the government of the United States now practices the very same techniques...

-snip-

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

These are the prices people pay for power.

So where's the Obama surrogate, or the Ad for that matter, hitting this point?

- Mr. Ed