Anti-Torture=Pro-Terrorist, GOP Attacks McCain on the One Good Thing He's About
Let me paraphrase the narrator Marlow at the end of Conrad's Heart of Darkness:
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie Sen. John McCain, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it he appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies McCain—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It McCain makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.
And yet even I was appalled by this recent e-mail blast from GOPUSA, a whore-mongering site for the Republicans filled with what Conrad would call papier-mache Mephistopheleses, whose subject line carried this message: "McCain Refuses To Yield On Pro-Terrorist Amendment." The email directs you to this piece from (irony alert!) the Center for Individual Freedom in favor of torturing anyone the government deems a terrorist.
I'm not above making fun of McCain, who is legislatively a piece of shit for all the reasons former Federal Election Commission chief Brad Smith outlines in this recent Reason piece and more. But calling the former POW McCain–who reportedly can't even raise his arms above his shoulders or keep his second wife Cindy from scarfing prescription drugs at charity functions like Kitty Dukakis around cans of Sterno–pro-terrorist because he wants to keep the US from being truly horrible when it comes to torture is just insane.
Back to Marlow in Heart of Darkness, reading Kurtz's big report:
It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes [at GOPUSA and CFIR]!'
It's a rare day that wouldn't be better spent reading Heart of Darkness.