Nick Kristof hearts John McCain

The World’s Worst Panderer
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions, there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering.

What sets Senator McCain apart isn’t so much his physical courage in Vietnam; many of his fellow prisoners also showed immense bravery under torture. But the United States Congress tends to be a courage-free zone, so Mr. McCain’s orneriness toward Republican primary voters makes him a lionheart in the political world.

It’s a pleasure to see candidates who don’t just throw red meat to the crowds but try to offer vegetarian options.

Consider torture. There was nary a vote in the Republican primary to be gained by opposing the waterboarding of swarthy Muslim men accused of terrorism. But Mr. McCain led the battle against Dick Cheney on torture, even though it cost him donations, votes and endorsements.

Even more than his time as a prisoner in Hanoi, that marked Mr. McCain’s most heroic moment. He risked his political career to protect Muslim terror suspects who constitute the most despised and voiceless people in America.

(Continued here. TM note: One of Kristof's readers had an entirely different take. Since there is no permalink, I had to post the entire comment:)

I generally admire Mr. Kristof’s column, but when he misses, he misses by a mile!

John McCain is my Senator, and while I supported him and contributed to his 2000 campaign , I couldn’t diagree more with Mr. Kristof’s assessment.

To my way of thinking, there has been nothing quite as bizarre this campaign season as John McCain successfully painting Mitt Romney as two-faced. As inauthentic. Coming from a guy who should have renamed the Straight Talk Express the Forked-Tongue Magical Mystery Tour ages ago, this was quite a feat.

To say John-Boy has a “truthiness” problem is the understatement of the century.

One of McCain’s biggest Pinocchio performances is in claiming his opposition to the Rumsfeld war policy. He has increasingly talked about having been the only one to voice opposition to Rumsfeld’s method of prosecuting the war.

While McCain maintains he was a voice in the wilderness, his true “voice” on the topic was about as forceful as an American Idol contestant with laryngitis.

McCain never spoke on the floor of the Senate demanding more troops. McCain never introduced legislation nor even a Resolution requesting an increase in troop strength. McCain never once organized his colleagues as a counter weight to what was obviously a lethally flawed strategy.

What McCain the Braveheart did was occasionally go on “Meet The Press” and “Hardball” and barely whisper that we might need more troops on the ground. He did nothing that might offend the militarists in the GOP, lest he be punished for it in his Presidential campaign.

Now that McCain has gone so far as to rewrite history and start declare in his stump speech that he was ‘the only one to publicly call for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation”, the national press has called him on it.

It’s hard to figure out why journalists would start acting like…uh…journalists now since this is a claim McCain made in Fort Myers Florida on Jan. 26, and then again during the GOP debate at the Reagan Presidential Library.

When confronted with the fact that McCain never publicly called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, but instead said that ‘it is up to the President to decide who is in his Cabinet”, Wednesday the McCain campaign basically said, “Okay, you caught us”.

McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, admitted McCain never called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal.

Let’s face it. The whole raison d’etre of the McCain campaign is that he is the only one willing to stand up to the political winds based on his unshakeable “principles”.

But, a closer examination puts him on the same playing field as the ridiculous Bill Clinton, who recently tried to sell his opposition to the Iraq war from the beginning. Only Bill had been a big supporter of the war, to the degree he wrote an op-ed in the UK Guardian supporting Tony Blair’s decision to join the invasion.

The McCain Truthiness Report Card:

1. McCain used to be pragmatic regarding a woman’s right to choose. He once likened outlawing abortion as effective as outlawing alcohol or prostitutes. Always was a demand, always would be. The only sensible approach was via education. He ridiculed the prospect of imprisoning doctors and their patients for “breaking the law”.

Then came his hard-right conversion. Now he wants to outlaw Roe vs. Wade.

2. McCain used to have a fairly enlightened Barry Goldwater-styled approach to gays in society. He mentioned that they should be treated equally. He mentioned “fairness” when talking about long-term gay partners not being able to visit their loved ones in hospital rooms because of “family only” rules. He spoke of long-term gay partners being at a disadvantage in probate courts dealing with issues of wills, when having to battle long-lost relatives ready to cash in because of distant familial ties.

Then came his hard-right conversion. Then he became the face of the anti-gay initiative on Arizona’s ballot in 2006, the only such initiative in the country to ever go down to defeat.

But, have no fear. The Arizona GOP is working hard to place another anti-gay initiative on the ballot for November. Now that they have lost the evil specter of Hillary Clinton to motivate their base, there’s always the hate-bigotry card to fall back on.

3. McCain used to have one of the most compassionate approaches to the illegal alien issue.

Then came his hard right conversion, and he went all Big Wall.

4. McCain used to be the sensible vote against the use of torture. He winced at the term “enhanced interrogation”, knowing that it was the Nazi’s who created that Orwellian-speak via the Gestapo’s use of “Verschärfte Vernehmung” (translation - “enhanced interrogation”)

Then came his hard right conversion. This week McCain voted against banning torture.

5. McCain used to have a realistic view of the dangers of religious extremists, from “Louis Farrakhan to Jerry Falwell” as he put it. Of course, this was in 2000 when he was way in front of the curve of recognizing religious extremists for the danger they are.

When Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson declared 9-11 was not the result of 18 loons with box cutters acting out, but God’s retribution for “liberals, gays, abortionist, secularists, the ACLU and People For The American Way”, McCain was proven right that the American Taliban was just as nutty as the Afghan version.

Then came his hard right conversion, and he went to Falwell, genuflected and kissed his ring.

There is little more amusing, in a very disturbing way, of McCain getting away with the whole “straight-shooter” charade. And it’s hard not to feel just a bit sorry for Mitt Romney for having been presented as “two-faced” by the McCain campaign.

— Posted by filmex